The Widening Gyre: The Great War and the Remaking of Europe

[Curby]

Better or worse?

Click to shrink...

Oops. I meant to put the word "better" here, but apparently it got lost somewhere! Thank you for catching this.

 

[Bisexual-Mart]

I just want to know how Mary Pickford is doing ITTL.

 

[QueenOfRoses]

This post about Bryan is reminding me how the tradition he works in just doesn't exist anymore. The mainline Protestant churches in America are declining (although they are still around, I've gone to an Episcopalian church occasionally), religious politics in the western world is almost entirely the province of the right. No one gave an anti-war speech for Iraq in the same way and same rhetoric he did. It's a fascinating thing how it just withered away after the Second World War.

 

[Curby]

The First Act of the National Tragedy: France, 1914-1918

No more pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigue, no more socialist plots and mutinous, disloyal soldiers. Neither treason nor its fascimile: war, and nothing but war, waged with the bitterness of war and waged with the entire will of the French Nation...

-George Clemenceau

The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful.

-Barbusse, Le Feu​

Introduction

Of all the belligerent powers, it is France in which the broadest front of society endorsed the call to arms. Morale was not always high, but the conviction that France must be defended against German aggression induced the French people to docility and complaisance for the first three years of the war. Compared to Germany, Russia, and even Britain, it took significantly longer for robust opposition to crystallize. This might also be explained by the initial dominance of the reform faction of French socialists, the weakness of revolutionary syndicalists, and the inclusion of all of the mainstream parties in the coalition governments of the war's first half. Above all, however, it was the conviction that the war was a defensive struggle against reactionary and expansionist german autocracy that convinced the French worker to enter into a temporary social truce with the state and employer.

The Army

Politics in the period from 1914-1917 were defined by a struggle between parliament and the military to establish control over strategy. The charismatic general Joseph Joffre had built up immense political capital with the "Miracle of 1914", and it took until the disaster at Verdun for the civilian government to finally acquire the support needed to sack him. He was replaced by Ferdinand Foch, who had also distinguished himself in the battles of 1914. The immense casualties suffered by the French military over the previous three years precluded him from launching an offensive until he was certain it would succeed. Although Foch's caution came in for a great deal of scrutiny by the nationalist war press, he found broad support among the political left and in the center. Eventually, he marshaled his forces for an assault in northern Flanders at the end of 1917, one of the first clearcut victories of the French Army. This bought him the political capital necessary to weather the storms of 1918 for some time, until it was clear he had to be replaced to ensure order in the army.

The French Army was one of the largest in Europe. As a percentage of the population, the 5.4 million men mobilized at the height of the war represented the highest total of any of the belligerents. By all accounts, at the conflict's beginning this massive citizen-conscript army was loyal, tenacious, and steadfast in its defense of the Patrie. The French soldier fought to defend their land from German invasion. Desertion was frowned upon by not just the officers, but the lowest ranks of infantry. Even those who felt the traditional justifications for the war wither away nonetheless believed they were obligated to continue the fight for their comrades-in-arms. As the war progressed, this form of manly camaraderie increasingly displaced traditional patriotism in the common soldier's understanding of why they continued to fight, but it (mostly) continued to function as an effective motivator.

It is remarkable that the French Army continued to fight for a full half-decade in the face of the immense casualties it sustained and the miserable conditions at the front. The French soldier was poorly supplied with basic necessities compared to their counterparts, and the extensive trench system of the Central Powers often boasted amenities which were unheard of among the Entente. Supply issues slowly improved up to 1918 as logistics systems grew more robust, but then started to collapse again as the French state found itself increasingly unable to pay for the war. Additionally, discipline in the French Army tended to be quite harsh, even by historical standards; even before the 1918 mutinies, proportionally more soldiers were executed in court-marshals than in any of the other national forces save Italy's.

While the state of the German Army inspired envy, that of the British bred resentment. French soldiers frequently complained in letters and diaries about their material conditions. Frequently, these gripes targeted not just the government, but also the entirety of the civilian interior, whom French soldiers suspected were "living it up" at their expense. Late in the war, as lurid tales of war profiteering grew more common, French soldiers started referring to themselves as "Les Trahis" - the Betrayed ones.

The Battle of Verdun marked a permanent shift in the Army's psyche. The crushing loss at Fort Souville followed by the vain attempts to retake it cost over 500,000 casualties. It embedded in the French soldier an enduring feeling of impotence, particularly after the stunning success of the British counterattack in December. Soldiers coped with the trauma of Verdun in different ways: many displaced blame onto the government or the civilians in the rear, while others adopted an attitude of weary resignation. The new Chief of Staff, Ferdinand Foch, chose to respect the state of the army by keeping it largely on the defensive throughout 1917. His use of small, simultaneous offensives along multiple sectors of the front frequently found success in throwing the German lines into chaos, but did not have a real chance to force a strategic breakthrough. The successful Ypres - Veurne offensive at the end of the year played a crucial role in shoring up morale, which had teetered precariously since Verdun.

There was another reason Foch paused any plans for large-scale, strategic operations: The battles of 1916 had dangerously depleted French manpower, particularly in the officer corps. The classes of '15 and '16 - 18 and 19 year old boys - had been called up in 1916 and then decimated in the year's fighting. Without fresh manpower and new officers, another failed offensive operation would leave the French army liable to break if the Germans found the resources to launch another Verdun.

This was a matter that needed a political rather than a military solution. The government responded by vastly increasing its use of both colonial and female labor in munition plans. While some colonial troops were shipped to the front, at the time there was a belief that the colonial conscripts would not defend France with the same fervor as the white citizen-soldier. Instead, throughout 1917 and 1918, French industrial workers were shipped to the front. Many of these were skilled machinists and welders whose labor could only be replaced with the use of several unskilled hands.

The sudden influx of older, literate working-class socialists into the army marked another important turning point. Thus far, the discontent of the French soldier had been formulated in terms that were personal and particular rather than political. Requests went out for more supplies, for a pause from fighting, but not for a redistribution of power or an end to the war. Predominantly from rural backgrounds, the soldiery of 1914-1916 were loyal to the French state, even as they found their conditions of life increasingly unbearable. The presence of class-conscious socialist workers began to change this.

In fact, the first of the industrial workers sent to replenish French manpower were chosen precisely because of their participation in workplace agitation. In a decision that is now infamous for its shortsightedness, the government asked employers to devise lists of workers it believed were most likely to engage in labor protest, and used these as a basis for its programme to replenish manpower. Most of these individuals did not even have to be drafted, as they were already technically mobilized, having been sent home in late 1914 to ensure sufficient labor was present in the big munitions factories. The government believed that by sending these men to the front, they were eliminating the potential for future strikes and labor unrest: needless to say, they did not cure the problem in the factories, but they did exacerbate one which was beginning to brew in the army.

This being said, the receptivity of the common soldier to international socialism was still fairly low in 1917. While some of the older and more hardened infantry conscripts were attracted to their proselytizing, soldiers much more frequently wrote in condemnation of socialism than in favor of it (though this might in part be influenced by the wartime censorship regime). Matters began to change in 1918, a year that once again saw the French Army take the offensive with disastrous results. Worsening conditions at the homefront also had an effect on the soldiers, who had always imagined that they would be returning home to a life much like the one they had left. However, much more immediately tangible was the reduction in supplies. These were actually quite modest by historical standards, but declining food rations and orders to ration shells and even bullets outraged many French soldiers.

The army made great efforts to replenish its manpower, but most of the men who participated in the 1918 Lille offensive had also fought at Verdun. Considering the trauma they had endured, the grim consent they gave to the offensive is remarkable. The recapture of Lille within 10 days led a temporary wave of euphoria to wash over the army, with many soldiers intensely hoping that might be on the verge of the long-desired percee (or breakthrough) of German lines. For a week, they assaulted the German forces in Tourcoiing without requiring encouragement from the officers. By the time the Germans retreated to Belgium, it was clear that no breakthrough was to be achieved, but most of the French soldiers nonetheless concluded that they had achieved "victory" by reaching the Belgian border. The ignorance which the French officer class kept the soldiers in about broader strategic aims meant that few were aware that the intention was to push across all of Belgium. The punishing casualties already suffered and desperate supply situation meant that the army was scarcely prepared to accomplish this. Compounding matters, the news of the Italian collapse soon reached the front, further damaging French morale.

Against the advice of most junior, non-commissioned officers, the army high command chose to press forward with the offensive. Despite the growing spread of revolutionary sentiment in the army, this mutiny did not occur immediately, but only after several days of fighting. It is significant that much of this occurred in Belgium, not on French soil. Soldiers who were content to defend their own country were much more skeptical toward fighting in another.

On the whole, the mutiny was a remarkably peaceful affair. Soldiers did not kill their officers unless provoked. Typically, they took up positions at the rear of the front lines, holding demonstrations to air their concerns and setting up the so-called "Mutineers camps". In many ways, these actions resembled a peaceful strike more than an armed rebellion. The officers who were injured or killed had typically confronted the soldiers and insisted that they would be punished if they did not return to the front.

At the suggestion of socialist soldiers, the mutineers organized themselves into councils which elected delegates to represent their interests. However, the chaos at the front prevented them from meeting in any organized fashion. The demands of the soldiers did not differ much by division or regiment, though. They called for improved conditions at the front, the beginning of peace negotiations, and the end of offensive operations. One representative letter reads:

"When the time came for us all to continue the attack on German soldiers in Belgium, we decided to demand our rights and the rights of our countrymen in the following things:

1. Peace and the end of the butchery.
2. Food, which is currently shameful.
3. The end of the injustices and outrages.
4. Peace to feed our wives, children, and to be able to give bread to those that are starving.

We demand peace, peace."

Some contemplated marching on Paris if their demands were unmet, but most opposed doing so before the government had been given some time to respond. With their victory in Lille, many soldiers believed that an acceptable peace could now be achieved. Even as the influence of socialist firebrands grew, most earnestly believed that their government could still be negotiated and bargained with. The vast majority of soldiers approved of the change in high command, and hoped that Petain would represent their interests. Limited German counterattacks in August actually led many of the mutineers to temporarily disband their camps, which made the repression which was to follow easier.

Petain had loyal men from the territorial army (composed of those too old to serve at the front) head to different mutineer camps with their officers. The soldiers were presented with the option of either disbanding their camps and continuing to fight in defense of French territory or being transferred to a different portion of the front. Vast majorities of mutineers chose the former option. There were some incidents of violence between the "Fathers and Sons", but most were hesitant to fire on their countrymen.

With the camps disbanded, Petain now set about finding the "trouble-makers". This was made much easier by the existence of the councils; around 80% of those arrested in connection with the mutinies were elected delegates from the councils. 12,482 soldiers in all were tried in connection with the mutinies, 2,314 sentenced to death, and 967 actually shot. The crackdown on the mutineers was motivated by the mistaken conviction that it was set off by socialist agitators. In fact, though the agitators were important to organizing the revolt once it had already begun, there is little evidence that they planned it in advance.

The memory of the mutinies did not disappear from the army following the arrest of the council delegates. Most of the soldiers believed that they had accomplished something significant through the revolt; after all, large offensive operations were put on hold for the remainder of 1918, and the supply situation started to improve as industry ramped up the production of front essentials. Even as morale improved, soldiers internalized an important lesson about the efficacy of strike action, a development that contributed greatly to the rise of the so-called "Soldier's Syndicalism".

Economic Mobilization and Changing Conditions at the Homefront

In France, homefront conditions were determined largely by geographical location. Firstly, there were the vast swathes of Rural France which fared relatively well throughout the war. Secondly, there are the urban areas in which the standard of living stagnated during the first three years before beginning to decline in the war's second phase. Finally, there are the conquered territories in which French civilians were subject to brutal treatment by the German occupiers.

In France's rural hinterlands, the conscription of young men emptied the fields, creating worries about domestic agricultural production. The success of rural communities in both 1914 and thereafter in maintaining steady yields of crops attests to their deep resilience and self-organizing capacities. French peasants and agricultural workers would be rewarded by a steady rise in grain prices that enriched farmers and left many better off even late into 1919. They would remain the most unswervingly pro-war segment of the French population, and without their consistent support it likely would have been impossible for the nation to remain in the conflict for a full half-decade.

In urban areas, the rising price of grain was at first tempered by improved wages and welfare payments. The participation of socialist ministers in coalition governments gave skilled workers and the laboring poor an important advocate which frequently interceded on their behalf. Industrial conditions actually improved throughout the first three years of the war as the state took a more active hand in production. In the war's second phase, the fate of workers and the petite-bourgeoisie fluctuated more drastically, with the latter facing a more precipitous decline of their living standards from war-time inflation but with both groups in desperate straits by the war's final year.

In occupied northeastern France, civilians faced the harshest trials. Germans had seized some of France's wealthiest and most productive territories, which they proceeded to plunder. Domestic industries were stripped of their capital goods and French laborers were treated little differently than slaves by the occupying forces. The use of violence and repression to maintain order were pervasive, with French civilians frequently facing execution for failures to meet production quotas. Successive waves of the sick, indigent, and elderly were expelled to France proper, where citizens frequently treated their needy compatriots more as burdens than victims.

French industrial mobilization began at the end of 1914. Although the government had prepared large stocks of ammunition, artillery, and small arms, it did not anticipate a war lasting over a few months, and had no formal blueprint for creating a military economy. Chronic shortages of shells at the front compelled the state to begin organizing one at the end of the year. They quickly discovered there were severe bottlenecks of both manpower and raw materials. The former resulted from the draft, which removed millions of men from the workforce with little discrimination on an industry-by-industry basis. The only truly protected sector was transportation. Even armaments factories had only 40% of their prewar employees in December 1914, a number only slightly higher than the manufacturing-sector average of 36%.

In January, the French government released 450,000 men from the army to return to the factories. They would remain "mobilized", which meant in practice that they were prohibited from striking or joining a union. By July, most of the war-critical manufacturing industries such as chemicals and metallurgy saw their labor numbers recover to above 70% of prewar levels. By 1916, this would rise to 85%. Although the diversion of men from the army provided a temporary fix, the colossal losses suffered at Verdun and Lille ensured that manpower would remain a critical issue for the French economy throughout the war.

The shortage of raw materials resulted principally from the loss of the twelve northeastern departments to the German invasion, which were responsible jointly for over 50% of iron and coal production and over 80% of steel production. These were also some of the most agriculturally productive lands in France, and together they probably represented around 20% of French GDP. Their removal from the national economy created a supply shock as enterprises dependent on raw materials from the northeast were forced to slow down production.

Somewhat ironically, the loss of these provinces was exacerbated by the end of the trade with Germany, Austria-hungary, and Belgium, which together provided around a third of prewar imports. To secure the critical resources needed by its burgeoning armaments industry, France hoped in the long-term to increase untapped domestic production through financial incentives, but in the nearer-term it searched for new import partners and readily found them in Britain and America. The trade deficit ballooned as import orders from America more than tripled.

France's war economy was, like that of all the other belligerent powers, managed through a mixture of private market incentives and an expanding state apparatus. Compared to most of the other combatants, France placed a far greater emphasis on private initiative, with the government coordinating prices but playing no decisive role in the organization of the war economy. Some degree of cartelization occurred, but to a much lesser extent than in Germany or Italy. The leading firm in a given "group" was given power to distribute government orders among different companies under its aegis, but the groupings themselves were much more fine-grained than elsewhere, especially since they were divided into twelve different regions before being further subdivided by good type. The persistence of small industry throughout the war would have an enduring impact on French industrial structure.

Like Britain, the French state initially had solid financial credibility, particularly among its domestic population. Although they ran a deficit of over 40% of their GDP, France was not obliged to substantially raise interest rates in the war's first few years. The need to maintain the Franc's exchange rate and secure foreign currencies weighed more heavily on the government. Initially, this did not present acute problems because of the immense holdings of foreign securities among French capitalists, which the government simply purchased with gold before monetizing them for currency (typically American dollars). Until 1916, this reduced the need to rely on credit to prop up the exchange rate. Also helpful to French finances were the tens of millions in loans extended by Britain at low interest rates.

The robustness of French war finance in the conflict's first phase should not lead us to underestimate the degree to which financial mobilization reshaped the economy. Early on, the government monopolized capital markets, preventing the issuing of new stock without a license. While allowing for private initiative in industrial production, the state determined which industries would have access to capital and which would be deprived of it: enterprises which were not critical to the war effort were forced to rely on their savings, and as the war dragged on their share of the national economy plummeted. By 1918, the construction, consumer goods, and intermediate sectors all produced fewer than 50% of the goods they did in 1913.

Compared to Britain, Italy, and even Germany, French industrial mobilization placed a more severe tax on the rest of the economy. This is partially due to the tendency to convert existing plant to war production rather than invest in new capital goods, a pattern set by the emergency situation of 1914 but which was never substantially changed. More severe manpower shortages than elsewhere also meant that many highly profitable civilian industries simply did not have access to the requisite workers. The sharp contraction of France's national GDP (45% by 1918) is comparable only to Austria's in its severity. There is a case that the French economy never really recovered from the strain that war placed on it - even today, it is one of the poorest nations in Europe.

As the war dragged on, finances grew significantly tighter. Britain's growing army and its stupendous material needs drove up the prices of crucial American goods, forcing France to lean further on American loans to secure dollars, especially once most foreign securities had been monetized. Meanwhile, the battlefield defeats of 1916 led to a loss of confidence in the Entente in American capital markets, driving up the interest rates on loans and weakening the Franc. France's financial position was only salvaged by its ability to rely on patriotic domestic borrowers.

The French War economy also began facing problems. A wave of labor unrest in 1917 led to a gradual decline in productivity. The increased use of unskilled labor further reduced productivity and cut into the profitability of the armaments industries, which started demanding more money for their orders. With demand for armaments continuing to skyrocket while production stagnated, the annual rate of inflation rose from 12.5% to 26% within a single year. With this uncompensated for by a similar rise in wages, household consumption and the standard of living of workers in urban areas declined sharply.

The need to reduce inflation and keep standards of living steady led the Painleve government to institute price controls and a war profits tax in July 1917, but both proved ineffective. The state still did not have the accounting apparatus to effectively implement the latter, and rampant evasion crippled the attempt to cap the prices of housing and food. By August, domestic borrowers in France were beginning to show more tentativeness toward new bond issues, raising the prospect that without a "bailout" from Britain, France would simply be unable to afford to fight the war without resorting to more inflationary measures.

Seeing little other option, at the end of the year the government made a decision to modestly scale back war production to give itself more fiscal flexibility. In effect, France chose to prioritize dealing with domestic discontent at the homefront over ensuring its army the proper supply of munitions. This could not have come at a worse time. 1918 would be a year of mammoth campaigns, and the reduction of food rations and imposition of shell quotas had a devastating impact on troop morale.

The retrenchment in supply orders actually caused the economy to shrink further in 1918, but war austerity, in combination with a hike in welfare payments, did halt the decline in living standards and temporarily slow the growth of inflation. These policies would come under attack from the Republican minister Georges Clemenceau, who savaged the Painleve Government for abandoning the army and refusing to fully mobilize the French nation. Once in power, Clemeanceau abandoned both fiscal and industrial restraint, using all the means at his disposal to increase war production and discipline labor; he would stretch the French economy to its breaking point if it was necessary to win the war.

Politics, Protest, and the Antiwar Movement

At the war's outset, the main parties of France entered into a coalition government to ensure broad public legitimacy. There were some fears that Jean Jaures' revisionist-Marxist SFIO would refuse to support the war, especially after a right-wing nationalist made an attempt on his life. Jaures was an antimilitarist by temperament, and he tried his utmost to prevent the war. Once it began, however, he felt compelled by the national mood, his own patriotic convictions, and the pro-war stance of France's largest labor union to join the new coalition government.

The second Viviani government included all of France's main parties. These were the Republican Federation (FR), the Republican, Radical, and Radical-Socialist Party (PRRRS), the Independent Radicals (RI), the Democratic-Republican Alliance (AD), and the French Section of the Workers' Internationale (SFIO). The center of gravity in parliament, as well as the party with the most seats, was the PRRRS. This was actually not a single political party but a union of the social-liberal radicals and the social-democratic Republican Socialists. To their right were two centrist parties, the RI and AD. Both of these were distinguished by a mixture of anticlericalism, anti-socialism, and economic liberalism, with the AD somewhat more open to alliances with the right.

Finally, there was the centre-right Republican Federation, which could trace its lineage back to the progressive orleanists of the 19th century. They too, were economic liberals, but they were much less hostile to the church: many of them were opponents of Dreyfus and most opposed the 1905 law instituting a separation between church and state. Their support was overwhelmingly drawn from the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie.

Over the first six months of the war, France cycled through a number of cabinets as parliamentarians successively lost confidence in the competence of different leaders. There was grave concern about the growing influence of the military. Eventually, Aristide Briand, a Republican-Socialist, was given reins over a new government which lasted until the disaster at Lille. His resignation was followed by a short period in which the conservatives, tepidly supported by the two centrist parties, gained ascendancy. The socialist ministers quit this new government of their own accord; Ribot was something of a bete noir, and Jaures would face an outright revolt of his party's left if they participated in the coalition. Nonetheless, Jaures himself made clear that he, along with the vast majority of the party, still supported the war.

It is likely that no government could have survived Verdun, but Ribot's was particularly vulnerable because of the charge that it was acting to protect the conservative French chief of staff, Joseph Joffre. The sudden power vacuum and industrial unrest at the beginning of 1917 temporarily paralyzed the French parliament. George Clemenceau and Joseph Caillaux (of the PRRRS) both made a bid for the Prime Minister's position, advocating diametrically opposite paths forward. Clemenceau argued for a more full mobilization of the French nation, forceful repression of labor dissent, and to refuse to enter into any peace talks that would not guarantee French control of all German territory along the Rhine's west bank. To those who believed the war had been a mistake, it was Caillaux who looked to be a prophetic voice. Although the subject of countless scandals which tarnished his reputation, his advocacy for a compromise peace in which France regained Alsace-Lorraine in return for concessions elsewhere appealed to many. In the end, the feud between Clemenceau and Caillaux temporarily damaged the credibility of both politicians, and parliament turned to the mild-mannered mathematician Paul Painleve to form a new centre-left government.

The Painleve government confronted multiple crises, the most immediate of which was growing strikes in textile and armaments factories. Until 1917, French labor had been relatively quiescent. This was not too much of a surprise, given the reformist and patriotic leadership of the CGT, France's largest union. Owing to the structure of the French economy, organized labor tended to have less power in France than in Italy, Britain, or Germany. A very high percentage of skilled laborers were considered "independent workers", and the small size of many enterprises made it harder to create the networks needed for a robust union movement. At the start of the war, the CGT had under 100,000 members. This number increased exponentially over the following half-decade, but never reached comparable levels to British or German unions.

The workers in France's armaments and textiles industry can be classed into four categories. Firstly, there were those male French citizens who were either too old or too young to be mobilized. This group was frequently involved in strike action, but also moderate politically. Secondly, there were the mobilized workers who had been called back to the front, overwhelmingly left-wing socialists affiliated with the PSI. However, these same workers were tentative to initiate industrial action because they (legitimately) feared it might result in them being sent back to the front. Thirdly, there were French women, almost all unskilled, who began entering the labor force in greater numbers in 1916. Most unaffiliated with any union, the women workers were the most active group in the wartime labor struggle. Lastly, there were the workers from the colonies who began to arrive in 1917. Largely unskilled, they faced systematically worse conditions than the French working class. Their relative lack of participation in labor action can be mostly explained by pervasive French racism and workplace segregation, which undermined worker solidarity across ethnic lines.

The strikes of 1917 occurred in three waves, each of them led by women and joined by undrafted male workers, with varying degrees of support from the mobilized trade unionists. The first began in textile mills in France and the Loire valley, and eventually spread to a few armament plants in the area. There were some scattered calls for peace, but on the whole the strikes were focused on poor workplace conditions and inadequate wages. The upwards of 40,000 women who participated in the industrial action coordinated their activities mostly through word of mouth.Painleave's government chose a policy of arbitration and concessions, and by the end of the month most of the strikes had fizzled out.

A significantly larger strike wave began in July, when workers in several steel and dye plants in the Rhone valley walked out in demand for shorter hours, better wages, and the beginning of peace negotiations. These strikes featured a much larger male contingent, though they were still initiated by female laborers. This time, many of the mobilized workers also participated; they had already seen many of their comrades sent to the front, and they believed that they would likely be next regardless of what they did. Several shop stewards of the CGT, which had an anarchist faction despite its reformist leadership, led sympathy strikes in nearby French coal mines. The rapidity with which the strike spread to different industries alarmed Painleve's government, which was convinced of the need to take a harder line against the 115,000 striking workers. The CGT was ordered to close their doors to non-unionized and unrecognized labor organizations and to exert control over their own membership. Only partially successful in the latter, the government decided to employ soldiers and strikebreakers, typically colonial laborers, to bring an end to the unrest. Shortly thereafter, most of the material demands of the strikers were met, a move which was necessary to ensure continued participation of the socialists in the government.

Jaures' SFIO was, in fact, in the midst of an internal debate about whether to continue providing support for the Painleave cabinet. This debate began well before the July strikes, and it continued after them. A slim majority of the parliamentary delegation wanted the party to go back into the loyal opposition, and Jaures was himself divided on the matter. An antimilitarist by conviction, the victory of the Social Democratic left-centrists in Germany and the emergence of a pacifist worker's movement in revolutionary russia both buoyed his belief in the possibility of a peaceful solution to the war. Jaures began to place pressure on the Painleave government to investigate the possibility of a status quo peace. When the harshness of German terms became clear, Jaures own stance was temporarily hardened, as was his commitment to remain in the wartime government. Yet he retained some sympathy for his party's antiwar left.

The final wave of strike action occurred at the very end of the year. It began once again in the Loire Valley, but this time in munitions factories. It was far better organized then the action in January; although women did not join the CGT in the same numbers as men, they cultivated their own informal networks that proved remarkably effective at mobilizing for industrial action. The booming CGT, which gained upwards of 200,000 members in 1917, once again followed the lead of these women strikers. After 80,000 women walked out of munitions factories at the beginning of december, 35,000 CGT members joined them. Soon, the strikes had spread to other sectors of industry in Paris and the Loire Valley such as steel, glass, and chemicals. This time, the government acted much more swiftly to repress the strikes, fearful that they might spread to other regions. The abandonment of any pretense of arbitration led Jaures to finally quit Painleave's cabinet, after a secret internal vote which revealed the depth of discontent with the present government amongst socialist parliamentarians. With the loss of the socialists, Painleave was forced to reach out to either Ribot or Clemenceau; he was somewhat surprised when the conservatives were far more amenable to joining his government than the irascible but more ideologically akin Clemenceau.

This final wave of strikes were more politicized than the last few, and featured calls for an end to the war and a demobilization of the soldiers. However, most of those who demanded peace believed it would be on favorable terms. The protestors called for "Peace and Alsace-Lorrane", a combination that proved impossible to achieve. Most would have been horrified by the harsh German proposals that involved war reparations and the cession of French territory.

There were some groups which were organizing a more radical peace campaign. In the SFIO, a left-wing led by Ludovic-Oscar Frossard and Jean Longuet rallied early parliamentary opposition to the war. The refusal of the Socialists to send delegates to the 1915 Geneva Conference alienated many left-wing workers, anarchists, and intellectuals, who together formed the Council for International Peace. At first this organization was composed principally of syndicalist metalworkers, but it slowly attracted members from the growing teachers unions, led by the radical pacifist Fernand Loriot. Tensions between syndicalists and socialists threatened to tear apart the organization from its beginning, and in 1916 around half of the syndicalists left it to form an independent group.

The second conference of socialists, held in Zurich in May 1917, featured a delegation from the Council for International Peace, which also acted as non-official observers for the SFIO. It grew steadily throughout 1917, and was involved in the planning of the strike action in the Rhone Valley. The order for the CGT to close their doors to non-unionized organizations was directed in part at the growing collaboration of radical shop stewards with the Council.

Jaures managed to keep hold over the SFIO through carefully following the thread of majority opinion. By quitting the government at the end of 1917, he was in effect capitulating to an emerging pacifist center in the party. This center was not in favor of peace on any terms, but as the costs and length of the war steadily mounted, it grew more fervent in its denunciation of the government.

Fearing that a further deterioration of living conditions would cause a collapse of homefront morale, Painleave's government determined to make an effort to placate the working masses. Military austerity was implemented and welfare payments and other forms of income assistance gradually increased through 1918. Until the July mutiny, worker's protest was relatively mild. But the mass revolt of the army set off a political tinderbox on the home front. The Council for Peace immediately called for a strike in the construction, education, and metallurgic sectors, while the CGT found many of its workers striking without authorization from even regional authorities. "Strike until Armistice" was the slogan of the day. Women came out of their own accord. Over 84,000 of the 124,000 Parisian workers in munitions factories were on strike, and much of the Loire Valley armaments industry was paralyzed.

In the Socialist Party, an emergency meeting was called in which the party voted to endorse a manifesto calling for peace. The radicalism of this document was even more remarkable when one takes into account the fact that Frossard, Longuet, and other left-wing parliamentarians were absent, as they were participating in the Trenton conference. Jaures himself appears to have come to the conclusion that the war had to end. Without endorsing a general strike, the party offered support for the efforts of the antiwar protestors, and called on them to continue until the government signaled a willingness to make peace or until France was endangered by a German offensive. In this way, the party tried to thread the pacifist needle between revolutionary defeatism and inaction.

In Paris, there was only one man who stood as a credible alternative to the present government. Only Clemenceau had consistently refused to join the wartime coalitions, instead acting as an acerbic critic of Vivani, Briand, Ribot, and now Painleve. In late July, he gave a series of speeches which electrified parliament, rallied patriotic sentiment, and positioned himself as the sole savior of the French nation. In despair of the crisis engulfing France, the liberal parliamentarians handed over the reins of the nation to the cantankerous radical. He staffed his cabinet with politicians of such little prominence that they would be forced to rely on him, and he instructed the ministry of justice to eliminate the internal enemy.

The wave of repression that followed was severe and sustained. Charges were brought against Caillaux, Jaures, Loriot, Frossard, and Longuet. Political strikes were crushed, while a velvet glove was offered to those who would cease industrial unrest in return for wage increases and an English weekend (i.e, a Saturday rest). The leadership of the CGT was placed under pre-emptive house arrest, and a new law passed giving Clemenceau temporary enhanced powers to prosecute "Treasonous speech".

Clemenceau sacked Ferdinand Foch, who had now more than burned through the political capital he had won with the Flanders offensive of 1917, and replaced him with Philippe Petain, a popular general who advocated a defensive strategy. To placate the left, he elevated Robert Nivelle to commander of the northeast front, by now the largest concentration of French soldiers. He also instructed the war ministry to investigate what would need to be accomplished to make the French Army more like the British one - that is, equipped with more artillery pieces, shells, tanks, and grenades. A massive expansion of Renault's tank production facilities was planned, along with a new set of targeted taxes on the middle-class to incentivize domestic borrowing and fund the war effort.

In September, the Germans prepared another offensive in the Somme. The successful French resistance and counterattack seemed to vindicate Clemencau's leadership. The long awaited German assault had been stymied. In Paris, Bordeaux, and Lyon, patriotic crowds gathered to cheer the "savior of the republic". The publication of the drastic German war aims and subsequent French victory in the Somme led to a second popular mobilization. For the first time in years, the army found itself once again declining recruits, who often found their way to barracks and army bases even though there was little public information available on their location.

Clemenceau quickly put his political capital to use. A new punitive tax was levied on savings intended to direct the excess money in the economy into government bonds. With the submarine threat beginning to recede, new import orders were placed for wheat and grain. A institute of military research was created, with the goal of devising a new version of the Renault tank that would guarantee French battlefield technological supremacy for years to come. The quick and efficient implementation of these measures attest to the remarkable resilience of the French state in the face of crisis. "The Nation will be defended" became the catchphrase of the day. With France fighting for its very survival, protest and dissent were treated as threats to the continued existence of the nation. Yet the dissenters, overwhelmingly drawn from the working-class and urban petite-bourgeoisie, were also a part of the patrie. They remained steadfast in their private opposition to the continuation of the war, even as its public expression became treason. In determining to win the war at any cost, Clemenceau symbolically expelled half of France's citizens from the national community. In doing so, he had signed the death warrant of the French Nation.

 

[PrognosticHannya]

I'm excited to see what ends up happening with Clemenceau!

 

[The Laurent]

Hmm, I bet that Clemenceau pulls it off! I mean, what an inspiring slogan!

"The Nation will be defended!"

Surely this all works out for him.

 

[Curby]

Hmm, I bet that Clemenceau pulls it off! I mean, what an inspiring slogan!

"The Nation will be defended!"

Surely this all works out for him.

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I mean, the original line was "The Nation will know it is being defended", which I didn't include here because I'm trying to maintain some historical plausibility.

 

[The Laurent]

I mean, the original line was "The Nation will know it is being defended", which I didn't include here because I'm trying to maintain some historical plausibility.

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Is this a reference?

 

[Curby]

Is this a reference?

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Yes! It is from a speech to the chamber of deputies in 1917.

 

[Lord Cheddar]

There is a case that the French economy never really recovered from the strain that war placed on it - even today, it is one of the poorest nations in Europe.​

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Well that's ominous.

Considering France's position, something very drastic followed by lots of bad luck must have happened.

 

[Pempelune]

Absolutely terrifying stuff!

 

[Questwolf]

Well that's ominous.

Considering France's position, something very drastic followed by lots of bad luck must have happened.

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who knows maybe the rest of Europe is just very rich. Seems unlikely but you never know!

 

[SirKaid]

Well that's ominous.

Considering France's position, something very drastic followed by lots of bad luck must have happened.

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Not necessarily. I mean, it's been thirty-five years since the Berlin Wall fell and there are still stark differences between the areas that used to be East and West Germany.

 

[Curby]

This is part of a series on the Global Great War which I will have wrapped up by the end of 1919. In this post, I cover India, China, and Japan from 1914-1918 - I'll probably add shorter entries for Turkey, British South Africa, French West Africa, and Persia in another entry before we get to 1919. I also want a more dedicated discussion of the colonial soldiers, but I think that will make more sense in a forthcoming update on the state of the armies.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Global Great War: India, China, Japan, 1914-1918.​

Overview

When most laymen think of the great war, images are conjured up of the trenches in France, the frigid campaigns in the Alps, and the brutal fighting in East Prussia, Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus. For some time, the sheer scale of the land battles in Europe have obscured the other theaters of the war, which have been treated as secondary to the main conflict. The dominance of the European front in historical memory can be explained at least partially by the much larger numbers of men and materiel dedicated to it. Unable to project its naval power, Germany could not meaningfully challenge Britain's hold over its colonial empire.

Yet the conventional, eurocentric understanding of the war frequently obscures more than it explains. In particular, it tends to occlude the fact that the Great War was understood by most of its participants as a conflict of two imperial blocs for control of colonies and global resources. German, Italian, and British elites all conceived of the war in this way. The German drive to build an eastern empire was at least in part a reaction to their frustrated global ambitions, which were thwarted by British naval power.

However, the most crucial flaw in the standard account of the war is its failure to fully reckon with its role in transforming the politics of the global periphery. By "global periphery", we mean both nations that were subject to direct colonial rule, such as India, Madagascar, and Indochina, and nominally independent semi-colonies exploited by global imperialism, such as China, Malaysia, Turkey, and Iran. The Great War forced the imperial powers to extract more wealth, manpower, and resources from their colonies while simultaneously weakening their relative power, setting off the growth of anti-imperialist, national liberation movements of a predominantly social-patriotic character. Though few of them had the same success as the European proletarian revolts of the First Era of Revolution (1917-1924), the unprecedented political mobilization in the global periphery laid the groundwork for the more victorious campaigns of the Second Revolutionary Period.

China and Japan

As the only industrialized imperialist power of the non-white world, Japan occupied a unique position within global capitalism. In East Asia, it had long been interested in carving out its own imperial domain, and achieved some success with the conquest and incorporation of Taiwan and Korea. Besides the limited size of its military forces and relatively low levels of wealth, the primary barriers to expansion were Britain and America, which both possessed daunting superiorities of industrial power and an interest in restraining Japanese strength in the Indo-Pacific. For some time, Japan had acted as Britain's catspaw against Russia, and its attempts to carve out economic concessions in Manchuria had consequently been begrudgingly tolerated by its European financier. America took a more consistently hostile line, and treated Japanese incursion into China as a threat to its "open-door" policy. The Honolulu Accords lowered the temperature somewhat, but also stoked British fears of Japanese-American dominance in the Pacific.

Distrustful of Japanese intentions, the British rebuffed an offer by the Japanese to track down and engage Germany's East Asia Squadron at the beginning of the war. Japan hoped to use the conflict between European powers to enlarge its colonial domain, and the British refusal stung harshly. A month later, in September, Japan issued an ultimatum to Germany to turn over Qingdao and its South Pacific islands or face a declaration of war. Shortly thereafter, Japan declared war on Germany and began the siege of Qingdao(1).

Within a year, Japan occupied all of Germany's South Pacific possessions, as well as Qingdao. After seizing the German concession, Japanese troops marched far inland into Shandong, taking control of the crucial Jinan-Qingdao railway line. Seeing little other option, Britain began to tentatively cooperate with Japan as an alliance partner. Then, in March, the Japanese foreign minister Hioki Eki delivered a list of twenty demands to Chinese President Yuan Shikai. Acceptance of them would have turned China into a de facto protectorate of Japan. Britain quickly rebuked the measure, and in a rare success of Anglo-American wartime diplomacy, convinced Bryan to present a unified front to the Japanese. Japan was forced to walk back the demands in Groups 4 and 5, which in practice meant that it gained little more than it already de facto possessed. The sudden Anglo-American cooperation bitterly reminded Japanese elites of the "Triple Intervention" of 1914, in which Russia, Germany, and France forced Japan to revise the harsh terms it imposed on China at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War. Once again, Japan felt that it was subjected to a different standard than the western powers(2).

Nonetheless, the demands formalized the loss of Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria and Shandong, leading to public protests that weakened Chinese President Yuan Shikai's already fragile government. China had thus far stayed out of the war, hoping that neutrality would be sufficient to stop a Japanese incursion from Qinghao deeper into the Shandong peninsula. Although Pro-German sentiment was widespread among the Chinese literary class, most believed that fighting a land war with Russia and Japan simultaneously would be an act of national suicide.

Following the issuing of the 20 demands, Britain contemplated a scheme for China to join the war on the side of the Entente. This would give them a seat at the table at a future peace conference, restrain Japanese expansionism, and provide China a pretense to build up an army that could act as a counterweight to Japan's ambitions. These plans were opposed by Japan, which threatened to make a separate peace if China joined the war as an Entente power. Then, in August, the Bryan administration approved a new issue of low interest loans to China which helped stabilize the government and finance the creation of an army. Without providing any explicit guarantee of Chinese territory, secretary of state Andrew Carnegie privately assured Beijing that America's interest was in the stability and integrity of the Chinese state. This substantially reduced the Chinese interest in joining the war, though it did sour American-Japanese relations, ending the ambiguity about Japan's foreign policy direction and placing it more firmly in the British camp(3).

For the next few years, Anglo-Japanese relations slowly recovered. In 1916, Japan joined the Treaty of London, committing itself to not signing a separate peace. The onset of the u-boat campaign in late 1917 sharply increased British dependency on Japanese naval power; at one point, more than twenty Japanese destroyers were present in the Mediterranean on convoy escort duty. Japan used its leverage to pressure Britain into the Portsmouth Agreement, in which it agreed that Qingdao would remain under Japanese control, sparking anti-british and anti-japanese riots in China(4).

At the time, the Chinese government was beginning to recover from several years of crisis. In 1916, Yuan Shikai attempted to declare himself monarch, but soon discovered he did not have the support of many of his own generals. In a short "national protection war", the loyal Beiyang army of Duan Qirui won several victories against the rebels, concentrated overwhelmingly in the south, but then retreated after the front in Yunnan deteriorated into a stalemate. In the wake of the retreat, Sun Yatsen declared a rival nationalist government in Guangzhou. Shortly after returning to Beiyang, Qirui overthrew the government of Shikai and declared an end to the experiment in monarchy. More American loans allowed him to build up his army once again, after which he proceeded to successfully topple Sun Yat-sen's constitutional protection government in the Southern Pacification War. This time, a military governor was appointed and the KMT driven back into the mountainous terrain of Yunnan(5).

Qirui's military dictatorship soon faced renewed warlordism in the outlying provinces. Nonetheless, his control over the center of the country was sufficiently secure to contemplate joining the Great War. With Russia knocked out, anti-british sentiment running rampant, and Italy looking liable to surrender, China began weighing its options for joining a war against Britain and Japan. Japanese accession to the Treaty of London scuttled the hopes of British neutrality in a Sino-Japanese war, but it seemed unlikely that Britain could contribute significant troops with its armies tied down in France and the Balkans. In August, secret talks began between China and Germany; the latter insisted that Qingdao be returned at the end of the war, but was willing to commit to ending Japanese privileges in Shandong and Manchuria if China joined the war. Even with these tantalizing rewards on offer, China was hardly in a place to fight Japan in a conventional military conflict, and Germany had little real assistance it could offer so long as it was blockaded by Britain. Consequently, Qurui resisted calls to join the war from the nationalist "June 10th" movement (named after the day the Portsmouth agreements were signed), and China remained neutral throughout 1918 despite growing tensions with Japan.

Throughout the course of Bryan's presidency, Sino-American relations steadily warmed. Clause 3 of the Trenton Resolution, prohibiting exploitative and neo-imperial trade practices, was aimed specifically at the unequal treaties. In August 1918, Duan Qirui traveled to America for a state dinner, where Bryan announced funding for a new iron and steel works complex in Shanxi. With the domestic economy sluggish and financiers increasingly hesitant about extending further loans to Britain and France, capital began migrating to Chinese markets. The Treaty of Washington formalized this state of affairs, giving American investors de facto privileged access in return for lowered American tariffs on Chinese goods. Britain and Japan could only look on with concern and consternation at these developments(6).

In Japan, a debate was raging in military circles about the next step in the war. Fears circulated that Duan Qurui was on the verge of building a strong, centralized state in China that could resist Japanese encroachment. While this was largely a fiction disproved by his tenuous control of over half of China's provinces, the steady growth of the disciplined and loyal Beiyang Army would make it much more costly for Japan to impose further concessions on China. There were other figures, principally civilian politicians, naval officials, and domestic reformers, who opposed a preemptive war. They argued that Britain would not support Japan in such an endeavor, and that it would likely harm its international prestige. It would also make it impossible for Japan to engage in a proposed pro-white Siberian expedition, and likely weaken its position at a peace conference.

The force of these arguments steadily wilted as the war effort of the Entente faltered. By the time Italy surrendered, most military leaders in Japan concluded that Britain and France would lose the war. And yet, British naval power meant that Japan could ill afford to alienate Britain and America, something which an incursion further into China would likely accomplish. Before the army could launch any fait accompli, the Haro Takashi government came to power, which quickly acted to restrain military adventurism. Takashi sent the Foreign Minister Uchida Kosai to the United States to negotiate a solution to the "Chinese Problem". The Japanese wanted recognition of the entirety of China as an area of "Special interest" to Japan, permanent limits on Chinese troop numbers, and the right to inspect and monitor the Chinese military. Bryan was willing to concede the former two demands if Japan in turn committed to not seek any further economic concessions in China. Uchida knew that such a proposal would be unacceptable to the Japanese military, which still viewed the war as an opportunity to expand its influence on the mainland.

The failure of negotiations with the Americans led the Japanese to Britain and Bonar Law's conservatives. Britain had been nearly as concerned with the expansion of the Chinese Army as Japan, and proved surprisingly receptive to Uchida's proposals. While they would not tolerate a Chinese protectorate over all of Japan, they were amenable to the notion of troop restrictions, so long as "peacekeeping powers" were shared between the two nations. The secret agreement reached on September 1918 gave British permission to a second Sino-Japanese war, so long as future economic concessions were kept to a line north of Shanghai, in the Jiansu, Shandong, Hebei, and Shanxi provinces. The matter of the Siberian intervention was no longer of real concern for Britain, which had given up on the prospect of reopening the Eastern front after the continued failure of white offensives. Of course, Britain would not join Japan in such a war, but it would do all it could to act as a friendly neutral. The subject of what might happen in the event that China formally joined the Central Powers was never discussed.

India

The jewel of Britain's empire contributed more to the war than many independent nations. Over 1 million soldiers fought outside the subcontinent, and over one million more worked overseas in critical war industries. In all, more than 2.4 million Indians served abroad, with the number actively fighting or working overseas increasing exponentially toward the end of the war. This enormous mobilization was only possible with the consent of the native Indian elite, who sincerely believed that the war was an opportunity to win the right of home-rule. It was thought that once Indian soldiers distinguished themselves fighting for the Empire, England would reward India with greater autonomy and rectify the humiliating conditions imposed on even educated Indians, who were treated as racial inferiors and second-class citizens. The repeated frustration of these aspirations would go a long way toward creating a unified Indian nation (7).

At the beginning of the war, the Indian National Congress was the primary site of native political self-organization in India. This institution was historically dominated by educated reformers and lacked a mass support base. Like the Irish Parliamentary Party, it was disposed to work within the imperial system to secure greater autonomy. An upswing of radicalism in the 1900s led to several confrontations between the moderate majority and radical leaders, who included Bal Gagandhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, and Bipin Chandra Pal. They were not able to win control over the Congress, and each was eventually either arrested or deported to outlying provinces, weakening the radical faction.

The half-decade of war placed tremendous stresses on both ordinary Indians and the Indian bureaucracy. India was forced to pay for the entire cost of its army, which required sharp tax hikes to counteract domestic inflation. The standard of living for those who lived in the areas under most direct British control suffered the most; this is where the colonial administration was most efficient at collecting taxes, and these were also the areas where domestic populations were most dependent on European civilian goods which became unavailable during the war.

The protest movements of the war's early years originated from outside of the INC. Germany, Turkey, and the radical Indian-Nationalist Ghadar Party organized a mutiny in mid-1915 which was only foiled by the extensive British intelligence network. The harsh repression that followed contributed to the rise of Tilak's home-rule leagues. Recently returned from exile in Mandalay, Tilak began organizing a mass protest movement to press for a formal commitment to Indian home rule. After Austen Chamberlain, the archconservative secretary of state for India, made several public comments which needlessly inflamed the protests, he was replaced by the somewhat more moderate Arthur Balfour. Hoping to mollify the protestors, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, proclaiming that India would be given "The chance to exercise an increased degree of self-government befitting its status as a great civilization." The ambiguity of the statement and its lack of a clear timetable quickly came in for criticism from many in the home-league movement, but it did temporarily slow the growth of protest and reassure many wavering moderates in the INC (8).

To many Indians, the following years demonstrated the duplicity of Balfour's promise. Living standards continued to deteriorate, and returning soldiers complained of ill treatment, racism, and miserable front conditions. Following the introduction of the draft in 1916, Britain faced chronic manpower shortages which it could only make up with colonial labor and soldiers. In late 1917 and 1918, there was a sharp hike in military conscription and an increased use of coercive means of labor mobilization; the presence of "penal provisions" to enforce labor contracts was condemned forcefully in a 1917 INC memorandum. There was also the issue of preserving Indian labor for Indian economic development. Ambica Charan Mazumdar, the moderate leader of the INC, demanded that emigration controls be instituted to halt the "Evacuation of skilled Indian workers". Yet this process only accelerated as Britain's factories were emptied to feed its conscript army. The social dislocation and economic disruption caused by the loss of labor contributed greatly to the rise of the INC's radical faction (9).

In 1918, the INC moderates hoped that a liberal-labor government would come to power in England to forge a compromise peace and set India on the path to home rule. Instead, a Tory landslide occurred, and with it, a new slate of harsh wartime laws suppressing dissent. With fears brewing of a second Ghadar mutiny, the leaders of the INC's radical faction were once again arrested, sparking protests in Bengal and Punjab that were bloodily suppressed in the so-called "May Massacres". This was the final straw for the moderate faction of the INC, who called an emergency meeting in which they endorsed the principles of the Trenton Resolution and called for India to be accorded self-rule and dominion status within the next five years, with "power over finance and the maintenance of domestic order" to be devolved in the next year. Motilal Nehru, a home-rule radical but not a republican, was elected the new president. Without calling for a complete break from Britain, he demanded that India be considered a ""progressive and autonomous nation with coequal rights amongst the other peoples of the earth" (10).

Yet for all of its newfound radicalism, the INC still had only a tenuous connection to the broad masses. Only Mahatma Ghandhi, one of the newly radicalized moderates, had anything approaching the following of Tilak. He organized a movement of mass noncooperation that eventually led to his arrest and imprisonment in late 1918. His failure to coordinate with the burgeoning and well-funded Ghadar movement was one of the key missteps in the campaign for home rule.

It would soon be corrected. Unbeknownst to most of the INC, the radical Lala Lajpat Rai had recently been smuggled back into India from his self-imposed exile in America; with the assistance of the German Embassy in San Francisco, compliant American officials, and local Indian independence activists, he boarded an ocean steamer to Calcutta under a false identity and disembarked without issue with several million pounds in his briefcase. Thereafter, he established links with the most prominent militants of both the Ghadar Party and the non-cooperation movement. The events which followed in the wake of his arrival would send reverberations that echoed far beyond British India.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Footnotes​

1. This is somewhat different from the course of events IOTL, where Britain requested that Japan protect British merchant shipping; with the Honolulu Accords, Anglo-Japanese relations have frayed somewhat, which means Japan makes the initial offer of assistance and is turned down. Seeing an opportunity to seize the German colonies, Japan declares war anyways, but is not technically an "entente power" until later in the war (unlike IOTL).

2. The seizure of the Jinan-Qingdao railway parallels events IOTL, with the difference that the action appears even more brazen to international observers since its a solely Japanese operation, rather than a Japanese-British one as IOTL. The "twenty demands" mirror the "twenty one" of OTL, though the scale of Anglo-American cooperation is a bit greater here; Britain's worries about America's position and the diplomacy that consequently occurs actually means that a more united front is presented here, despite better British-American relations IOTL. As a result, Japan has to walk back Group 4 of the demands as well as Group 5, leading to more Japanese resentment. (Group 4 state that no power besides Japan is permitted to acquire any additional concessions)

3. The scheme described in this paragraph did occur, as did the Japanese opposition to it. However, the Japanese opposition is somewhat more robust, as evidenced by the threat to make a separate peace. The events described later are unique to this timeline.

4. Japan also signed the Treaty of London IOTL, but did so a year earlier. Japan sends over twice as many destroyers to the Mediterranean ITTL because Britain is in much more desparate need of support without American assistance against the u-boat threat. As a result, Britain is even more dependent on Japan, which lets the latter wring more formal concessions from it before a peace conference.

5. These events involve the same characters as OTL, but follow a very different course. Butterflies from a slightly more stable Chinese government mean that Yuan Shikai attempts to declare himself monarch somewhat later; he now has the support of the Beiyang army of Duan Qirui, which means that he has much more success in the national protection war, even if no decisive victory is secured. As IOTL, though, Qirui and Shikai soon come to blows. Because of the relative success of the Beijing government in the national protection war, Qirui is able to raise another army and depose the KMT government in Guangzhou. In practice, this means China has a significantly stronger central state than in OTL and can act as more of a counterweight to Japan. Of course, this is speaking in relative terms; warlordism is still very much a problem.

6. All of this is completely novel to this timeline, and will have big downstream effects on the global economy and geopolitics.

7. ITTL, India faces significantly more social dislocation, impoverishment, inflation, and misery from the war. This is because Britain simply runs out of available manpower somewhere in early 1918 (because of its larger army and the lack of American reinforcements), and has to lean on the colonies and dominions to try to make it up; with the latter much more capable of refusing requests for increased troop mobilization, it is India that is forced to bear the brunt of the war. IOTL, around 1.2 million Indians served overseas, with around 550,000 engaged in combat operations; here, 2.4 million do, with a slightly higher share of laborers due to the needs of wartime industries and Britain's effort to depend less on American imports.

8. Roughly similar to OTL, with the exception that the Ghadar mutiny is moderately larger due to an easier time accessing American funds and the home-rule protests a bit more vigorous because the conservatives ITTL mishandle matters more severely than OTL's liberals.

9. These were matters that many INC members were frustrated with IOTL, but they did not become as politicized as they are here.

10. Most of this did not occur IOTL, but it parallels some events that occur later, from 1919-1920.

 

[PrognosticHannya]

Hell yes, this is the type of stuff I love! Despite the great potential for greater Sino-American cooperation, I'm most interested in whatever's going to happen in India.

 

[The Laurent]

@Curby , at the rate some things are going I'm wondering whether there'd be entire populations and groups of ex-British soldiers (either Indian or actual British (in the sense of born in England)) who turn to the side of the revolution and ultimately wind up being exiles, a very literal Lost Generation (TM) of people alienated from Britain and stuck in Europe by said alienation, etc, etc.

Since there's enough British soldiers on the mainland, more than OTL, that they'll either be the great enemy, another ally, or honestly probably both.

 

[Bisexual-Mart]

Motilil Nehru? I assume that's just Jawarhal Nehru going by a different name ITTL for reasons.

 

[QueenOfRoses]

the unprecedented political mobilization in the global periphery laid the groundwork for the more victorious campaigns of the Second Revolutionary Period.

Click to shrink...

👀
Very intrigued by this!

 

[LuxemburgLover69]

The Ghadar party having more prominence/a more tumultuous India in general really was the icing on the cake with this update. I can tell you have some neat ideas you want to implement, and I can't wait to read about those, and the revolutionary waves especially! Great update!

 

[Traveller76]

Motilil Nehru? I assume that's just Jawarhal Nehru going by a different name ITTL for reasons.

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It is jawarhal's father.

 

[Curby]

@Curby , at the rate some things are going I'm wondering whether there'd be entire populations and groups of ex-British soldiers (either Indian or actual British (in the sense of born in England)) who turn to the side of the revolution and ultimately wind up being exiles, a very literal Lost Generation (TM) of people alienated from Britain and stuck in Europe by said alienation, etc, etc.

Since there's enough British soldiers on the mainland, more than OTL, that they'll either be the great enemy, another ally, or honestly probably both.

Click to shrink...

When the revolution does come, much of Europe is going to be thrown into a temporary paralysis, with the consequence that even for those who do want to return "home", there's little means of actually doing so. And for a not insubstantial portion of the soldiers, there's either not going to be a "normal" life at the homefront to return to, or there simply won't be any real desire present to return to civilian life following five years of brutalizing conflict. The collective psychic trauma that the war represents is going to take much longer to amiolerate. But the wounds will heal, perhaps more fully than they have in our own world. My intention very much isn't to write a grimdark timeline, even if my priors on human perfectibility are a tad more skeptical than most people who share my political beliefs.

 

[The Laurent]

When the revolution does come, much of Europe is going to be thrown into a temporary paralysis, with the consequence that even for those who do want to return "home", there's little means of actually doing so. And for a not insubstantial portion of the soldiers, there's either not going to be a "normal" life at the homefront to return to, or there simply won't be any real desire present to return to civilian life following five years of brutalizing conflict. The collective psychic trauma that the war represents is going to take much longer to amiolerate. But the wounds will heal, perhaps more fully than they have in our own world. My intention very much isn't to write a grimdark timeline.

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Oh, I wasn't imagining it in an entirely negative sense. Heck, part of me was imagining, like, "Little Britains" and so on as displaced soldiers make a new life in France, Germany, etc, etc. That real "revolutionary exile" vibe, '48ers winding up in America, etc, etc.

 

[Bisexual-Mart]

So, with Jahwarhal Nehru's father more and more anti-British, I wonder if this changes the tone we see of the Indian independence movement. Perhaps, a more Communist-inspired British independence movement with the success of the revolutions in Europe.

 

[Shador]

So, with Jahwarhal Nehru's father more and more anti-British, I wonder if this changes the tone we see of the Indian independence movement. Perhaps, a more Communist-inspired British independence movement with the success of the revolutions in Europe.

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Like, communist in the sense of homegrown communist/socialists taking control of the movement with a broad base of support, or "communist" in the "our most likely source of international support are the commies so we better make the right mouth noises" with some true believers mixed in kind of sense?

 

[Curby]

An update on Russia below. In the interest of keeping this on the shorter side, I've skipped over a good deal of stuff that's going on in Soviet domestic politics, as well as some of the less important separatist rebellions. I do intend to cover these (especially the former), but I also would like to get the timeline to 1919, so I will likely push their coverage forward to the next year.

"To Secure this Beachhead of Worker's Power": The First Phase of the Russian Civil War​

From the Alternatehistory.com thread "PoD: Longer Russian Civil War(s)?"

I know most people on this forum don't think that the white forces had a real chance of succeeding in the Russian Civil War, but is there any way to at least get them to last into 1919? I'm interested in how a weaker Russia would effect the revolutionary period. Supply was obviously a pretty big issue for Kornilov's armies in Siberia - what if the Japanese launched the planned Vladivostok intervention and took over the Trans-Siberian railway?

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The Vladivostok intervention won't accomplish anything besides eventually putting Japan in a state of war with the Soviet Union. Unless they intend to push all the way to Central Siberia, there's no way to ensure that supplies get to the whites. There were a lot of red militias operating in the area, and they had control of most of the bigger towns east of the Urals. It's also awfully easy to sabotage a railway, particularly one as poorly constructed and with the freight limitations of the Trans-siberian one.

Honestly, the biggest thing you probably need to do is not have Kornilov suffer such a shattering defeat at Petrograd to open the war. The loss of some of the most battle-hardened white officers probably put them at a permanent strategic disadvantage. By the time he reached Moscow, he only had around half the troops he set out with, and didn't really have any means of raising more beyond conscripting peasants who would desert the army at the first chance.

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From what I've read, I think the larger issue is that the Germans were just not that interested in fighting the Reds? They managed to (barely) meet their population's food needs through the plunder of Romania and the food shipments from Ukraine, so they didn't have that much of a real interest in undermining the Soviets if it meant it would require diverting significant resources from the west. Even the white victory in the First Finnish Civil War was won much more due to the disorganization of the red militias than German aid, which was pretty meager.

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I read a pretty interesting timeline where a more successful Hetmanist coup in Ukraine leads to more German support for the summer campaign against the Ukranian Soviet republic, and the eventual rapprochement of Germany with the whites. It's definitely a bit of a Kaiserwank, but the latter bit actually seems pretty plausible to me; the British were barely funding the whites by the end of the year, so I could see them switching allegiances. I mean, they would probably have to agree to a Ukranian state, but would they really be so unwilling to bend on principle that they'd consign themselves to the rubbish-bin?

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I do think you probably need to get Britain to be more committed to the fight. Most historians actually think that Admiral Kolchak fought pretty skillfully with the resources he was given, but the British were just too focused on keeping France in the war until Germany exhausted itself and Ludendorff gave up some of his more insane war aims. Maybe if the war was going better for the entente, they'd provide more aid to the whites, but I also think there just was a pretty widespread impression that the cause was doomed? But perhaps if Kolchak and Kornilov were able to properly link up their two fronts, matters would have been different.

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Excerpt from Roger Baumann*, The Russian Civil War(s): A Non-Partisan Guide (Zurich: Axel Springer, 1981). ​

Following the proclamation of a Soviet Republic in November 1917, the Congress of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasant's Delegates was called to elect a new government. Bolshevik dominance in the large cities meant that they held a 275-seat plurality in the 680-member body. Not too far behind them were the SR's, who held a little over 200 seats, and the Mensheviks, with a bit under 150. These latter two parties were divided between a historically larger pro-war, pro-provisional government right and an anti-war, pro-soviet left. In the wake of the failed Kerensky coup, the right-wing delegates came under withering fire and were accused of aiding and abetting an attempt to impose military dictatorship upon Russia. At the behest of the Bolsheviks, a resolution was passed obligating all members of the Soviet to swear an oath to preserve the "Soviet character" of the new government and abandon cooperation with the Kadets and other bourgeois parties. A minority of right-wing Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries walked out of the Congress in protest, further emboldening the left.

The left SR's initially rejected the Bolshevik proposal for a left-wing socialist coalition, instead favoring a broad national unity government of all the socialist parties. They were outmaneuvered by Martov, who appeared on the verge of securing enough support among left-wing Mensheviks to form a government with his old rivals. Faced with the prospect of being iced out into the opposition, the left SR's chose to cooperate with Lenin, and later that week the Congress of Soviets appointed 55 Bolsheviks, 26 left SR's, 14 Mensheviks, and 5 Ukrainian socialists to the Soviet Executive Committee. This body was empowered to act as a legislature; it also chose the members of the crucial Council of People's Commissars (aka, sovnarkom) which was intended as a primarily executive body but also accumulated increasing legislative authority throughout the course of Russia's civil wars.

Officeholders of the First Council of People's Commissars

Position	Officeholder	Party
Chairman	Vladmir Lenin	Bolshevik
Head of Council-Administration	Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich	Bolshevik
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs	Maria Spiridinova	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissariat for Agriculture	Andrei Kolegaev	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissar of Military Affairs	Vladimir Karelin	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissar of Naval Affairs	Pavel Dybenko	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Labour	Julius Martov	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Trade and Industry	Leon Trotsky	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Education	Anatoloy Lunacharsky	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Food	Matvey Skobelev	Social-Democratic
People's Commisssariat for Internal Affairs	Alexei Rykov	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Justice	Prosh Proshyan	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissariat for Nationalities	Joseph Stalin	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs	Lev Kamenev	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Railways	Victor Nogin	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Finance	Vladimir Milyutin	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Social Welfare	Alexandra Kollantai	Bolshevik
People's Commissar for Local Self Government	Isaac Steinberg	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissar without Portfolio	Mark Natanson	Socialist-Revolutionary

The new government was formed shortly after Brusilov's victory in the Battle of Moscow. When news arrived of a cossack rising in the caucuses, it had to choose between directing Brusilov to pursue Kornilov's retreating army, or have him swing south to immediately confront the rebellion. Concerned about Ukraine's growing intransigence, the government decided to send the red relief army south, while Leon Trotsky was tasked with forming a new army to drive Kornilov out of Central Siberia.

Following the declaration of the Soviet epublic, the Ukranian Rada announced that it would not recognize its authority until it called a democratically elected national assembly. This demand was mostly a product of internal Ukrainian politics, which was divided between a minority of so-called "reconciliationists" and a larger grouping of centrist to left-wing nationalists. The former believed that some form of modus vivendi could be reached with the new Russian government, though there were internal disagreements concerning whether Ukraine would remain an independent socialist state in a Soviet confederacy or become an autonomous federal unit of a so-called "Soviet Union". The hardliners, more politically moderate and more closely connected with the burgeoning Ukrainian military, were unwilling to countenance any compromise and wished to push for full independence under German protection (perhaps a contradiction in terms, but not as they saw it). They hoped that the ultimatum issued to Russia would be refused, which would provide a pretext for declaring independence that the reconciliationists would accept.

Technically, advocacy for the return of the provisional assembly amounted to treason. However, a narrow majority of the Sovnarkom (mostly centrist bolsheviks and left-Mensheviks) supported placating the Ukrainians, and elections for the parliamentary body were held later that month. It was clear to everyone involved that this was a purely symbolic affair. After it met in Petrograd, red guards and left-sr politicians ramped up pressure on the institution until it dissolved itself, recognizing the Soviet as the only authority. Victor Chernov, the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, denounced the extra-parliamentary maneuvering in sharp terms, leading to his temporary arrest and detainment in Petrograd.

In Ukraine, the hardliners forced a measure through the Rada declaring independence several days before the parliament met. They did so, therefore, before they could have known of the threats levied against the centrist SR parliementarians. This led Vynnchenko's reconciliationists to walk out of the government. While in the opposition, he began advocating a policy of "Neither subjugation to Moscow or Berlin". In practice, he urged a detente with the Soviet government and negotiations which would permit Ukraine to exist as an independent socialist nation in a customs and defense union with Russia. Given the Petrograd government's dependence on the national-chauvinist Socialist-Revolutionaries, this was likely a vain dream more than a concrete political possibility.

The defection of the left-socialists dealt a fatal blow to Ukraine's democratic experiment. Gradually, the army chief of staff Symon Petliura assumed control over the functions of the Ukrainian state, and began expanding the army in preparation for an offensive into Kharkiv and the Donbas. The left-socialists were first marginalized and then repressed; many of them fled east, and joined the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in Kharkiv. Early victories for the newly formed Ukranian People's Army came in January, when it crossed the Perekop Isthmus and captured Crimea from Kaledin's battered Cossacks. Later that month, it also wrested control of several cities in the Donbas region from the Ukranian Soviet Republic. Shortly thereafter, Germany formally recognized Petliura's government, though Ludendorff was concerned with the strength of the Ukrainian People's Army, and secretly plotted to depose Petliura and replace him with a more compliant leader.

Symon Petliura, the de facto military dictator of the short-lived Ukranian People's Republic​

More sanguine news came from the Caucuses. In late 1917, Brusilov bested a cossack army on the Volga, then advanced and won a series of pitched battles north of Rostov, decimating Kaledin's cossacks through the skillful use of artillery fire. The remnants of Kaledin's forces fled south into the Caucasian Mountains, where they assumed defensive positions and regrouped with the officers of the Black Sea Admiral Alexander Kolchak. In February, Brusilov's attempt to advance further was halted at the Kuban when he encountered a force several times larger than he anticipated. British warships had evacuated loyalist Russians at the Romanian front to ports in the caucuses, where they formed the nucleus of Kolchak's growing 1st Volunteer Army.

In the east, Kornilov's National Salvation Army and Trotsky's newly raised 1st Red Army fought brutal, attritional battles in Kazan and Ufa. Kornilov acquitted himself well in this struggle, managing to inflict several times more casualties than he suffered as he slowly withdrew to defensive positions in the Ural Mountains. He also solidified his rear by gaining control of several small Siberian cities, including Zlatoust, Ekeratinberg, Tyumen, Omsk, and Novosibisk. This task was eased by the rebellion of the Orenburg Cossack Host, which temporarily disrupted Trotsky's logistics. With returning troops and irregular militias loyal to the old provisional government, the cossacks occupied the key cities of Saratov and Samara, forging a tenuous link between Kolchak's Caucasian Front and Kornilov's Central Siberian one.

In March, the Warsaw Treaty was signed and ratified, formalizing the loss of Russian territories in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics. The Soviet government also pledged to withdraw its troops from Finland and Ukraine, where civil wars were being waged between pro-Soviet red militias and pro-German national independence movements. These would turn out to be rather hollow promises; though a slim majority of the socialist-revolutionaries favored signing a peace, only Spiridinova advocated for adhering to the terms of the treaty, and she only treated this as a tactical, temporary measure. Arms and volunteers continued to flow to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

​

Approximate Lines of Control Two Weeks after the Treaty of Warsaw​

Lenin suffered a torrent of criticism from the party's left for signing a "humiliating" peace. This came predominantly from the regional party newspaper in Moscow, controlled by the defencist left-communist Nikolai Bukharin. Soon, both Bolshevik and left SR comissars on Sovnarkom joined in on the criticism, most prominently Leon Trotsky and Andrei Kolegaev. The defencists pushed for the immediate deployment of Brusilov's army to Ukraine to quickly crush the pro-German Petliura government and force a fait accompli upon the Central Powers. With the assistance of the left-wing Mensheviks, centrist Bolsheviks, and a faction of antiwar, proto-anarchist SR's around Maria Spiridonova, Lenin was able to resist these calls for escalation, but they only grew more fervent as victory after victory was won against the whites. They were bolstered by the German emigre communists, who overwhelmingly joined the pro-war, left-communist faction based in Moscow. Rosa Luxemburg accused Lenin of "Betraying the German worker" by making peace with the Kaiser.

Petliura had been forced into an almost equally humiliating treaty. In return for German protection, he was obliged to host Central Powers troops at Ukraine's own expense and allow these soldiers to administer the requisitioning of grain. Unsurprisingly, he was forced to contend with the accusation that he was a German puppet, which he tried to combat with the use of incendiary nationalist oratory. This is likely what prompted Ludendorff to give the go-ahead for the disastrous Hetmanist coup in early April, which aimed to place the pro-German cossack leader Pavlo Skoropadsky at the head of the Ukrainian state.

The ataman's cossacks did manage to successfully seize Kyiv on April 3d, but loyalist soldiers aided Petliura in escaping unharmed, allowing him to flee to Zhitomir. Theoretically, Austrian and German garrison soldiers stationed nearby could have taken the large town in a matter of days if the order was given, but, in an exceedingly rare incident, Ludendorff balked. He did not want to be forced to commit to an extensive military occupation in Ukraine when troops were already sorely needed for the western offensives. In the next few days, the vast majority of soldiers in the Ukranian National Army declared their loyalty to Petliura's government. With Kyiv surrounded, the Hetman surrendered without a drop of blood being shed.

In the resulting chaos, "volunteers" diverted from Brusilov's red army captured Chernihiv, the remainder of the Donbas, and advanced to the Dnieper river at several locations, while a British-supported expedition of white cossacks landed in Sevastopol, retaking the city almost bloodlessly. The kyiv fiasco, as it came to be called, was a disaster for Germany and Petliura alike. They still had to rely on one another - Petliura for protection, Germany for grain - but now their relationship was mired in suspicion and mistrust. Moreover, Petliura now governed over a much diminished territory, and the fighting required to retake the lost lands in the east would likely decimate crop yields.

Anti-Bolshevik forces were somewhat more successful elsewhere. Armed with British artillery, the 1st volunteer army fought a bloody offensive that retook Rostov in May, while Kornilov captured the town of Ufa west of the Urals. However, the logistical isolation of his army was causing increasing problems; supplies of bullets and artillery shells were both woefully inadequate. Kornilov hoped to move south from Ufa to Orenburg, where he could link up with Kolchak with the aid of irregular cossack battalions. Instead, he was halted on his march south by Trotsky's numerically superior 1st Red Army, and a counteroffensive forced him into another retreat.

In June, a pincer offensive from Trotsky and Brusilov broke the back of the Orenburg cossack rebellion, cutting off the fragile supply corridor from Kolchak to Kornilov. The latter now began the long march east along the trans-siberian railway, hoping to eventually reach the Pacific. The 1st Red Army followed in the wake of his scorched earth retreat, taking the cities of Tyumen, Omsk, and Novosibirsk in the next few months. For the residents of these towns, this period of time was widely remembered as a nightmarish ordeal; first Kornilov's soldiers looted and razed the towns, before the Red Army arrived to take what food and goods remained and execute individuals suspected of collaborating with the whites.

Over the same period, Petliura's army fought indecisive and attritional battles with Red Ukrainian militias near the Dnieper. After Germany warned Russia to evacuate the red volunteer brigades in Ukraine or face a renewed offensive in Belarus, Petliura was able to make additional progress, and took back Melitopol and Chernihiv in August. In September, Kolchak's 1st Volunteer Army attempted to drive north toward Voronezh; while initially successful, Brusilov and the red Ukrainian militias soon launched a flanking counteroffensive before Kolchak could secure his logistics, forcing him to engage in a fighting retreat deep into the caucuses. Eventually, he would be forced to evacuate his armies to the Crimea. The defeats inflicted on the white forces were hardly sanguinary for Petliura's government; with mistrust still running high between him and his German benefactor, he would be helpless before a concerted assault from either Trotsky or Brusilov's armies unless the Central Powers sent more troops.

Germany made clear that another assault on Ukraine from regular Soviet forces would mean the resumption of war. Secretly, a group of left-communists and SR's conspired to depose Lenin as chairman and launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They were buoyed by funds dispersed by British intelligence services and the failure of Central Powers offensives in the west. The plan was to call an emergency meeting of the Soviet executive committee after a sufficient number of Bolsheviks had been won over to their line, which would elect a new Bolshevik-Left SR Sovnarkom with Bukharin or Trotsky as the chair.

They had made the fatal mistake of underestimating Lenin's political acumen, who had received news of the plot weeks in advance. In September, he called an emergency party congress of the Bolsheviks and publicized the Entente financing of the "infantile leftist" faction. After the troublemakers were demoted and denounced, the executive committee of the Soviets was called into session. With their left-communist partners marginalized, it was hoped that the left SR's would continue their support for the coalition government. Instead, in an internal meeting they narrowly voted against participating in any government with Lenin, the consequence of long-brewing discontent with harsh grain requisitions and the persecution of peasants. At this point, many expected the august Bolshevik chairman to resign in defeat. Instead, his old rival Martov saved his government by rallying the majority of the left-wing Mensheviks to join a new coalition. "The tragedy of 1903 redeemed!" read the Internationalist press. The alliance between the centrist bolsheviks and left-mensheviks was a long time coming: they concurred on the key issues of war, nationalities, and grain, and had formed a de facto bloc in the Sovnarkom against the more bellicose left-communists and SR's.

Officeholders of the Second Council of People's Commissars​

Position	Officeholder	Party
Chairman	Vladmir Lenin	Bolshevik
Head of Council-Administration.	Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich	Bolshevik
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.	Adolph Joffe	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Agriculture	Vladimir Milyutin	Bolshevik
People's Commissar of Military Affairs	Joseph Stalin	Bolshevik
People's Commissar of Naval Affairs	Pavel Dybenko	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Labour	Julius Martov	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Trade and Industry	David Riazanov	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Education	Anatoly Lunacharsky	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Food	Matvey Skobelev	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs	Alexei Rykov	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Justice	Nikolai Kylenko	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Nationalities.	Sergo Ordzhonikidze	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs	Lev Kamenev	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Railways	Victor Nogin	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Finance	Yuri Lurin	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Social Welfare	Alexandra Kollantai	Bolshevik
People's Commissar for Local Self Government	Lev Karakhan	Social-Democratic

The first business of the new government was to negotiate an end to the explosive situation in Ukraine and the Baltics, where red insurgencies fed calls for Soviet intervention. In German-held Riga, a delegation comprised of Julius Martov, Leonid Krasine, Joseph Stalin, Alexei Rykov, and Lev Kamenev met with Gustave Stresemann and other German diplomats to hammer out a "grand bargain". The Soviets and Germans both wanted an end to the pervasive frontier violence, the former to permit the consolidation of the new revolutionary state, and the latter so that their efforts could be focused fully on the west. For each side, there was a real interest in securing a deal. At this point, Ludendorff would have preferred full Soviet control of eastern Ukraine if it meant an end to the fighting and more regular grain shipments to Germany. The matter of Kyiv, Crimea, and the territories west of the Dnieper were considerably more vexed; the Soviet diplomats demanded all the Ukrainian territory east of Rivne, which would have put them in position to invade Galicia if full-scale war was ever restarted. Ludendorff wanted to avoid doing anything that would unduly strengthen the Soviet state or reduce its dependency on Germany.

By necessity, the deal reached was a compromise. On the matter of Ukraine, Germany agreed to recognize Soviet sovereignty over all the lands east of the Dnieper, except for a narrow strip running from Kherson to the eastern side of the Perekop Isthmus on Crimea's northern border. After Petliura's government was toppled by a German offensive, the Soviets would provide logistical assistance to help dislodge the British-supported white army from Crimea, which would remain occupied by Germany. In return, Kyiv would be ceded to the Soviets, though it would be demilitarized. Rivne, Lutsk, and Ternopil would be incorporated into a semi-independent Polish state under German suzerainty, while the remainder of the lands would form a Western Ukrainian state under joint Austro-German protection. Further north, Germany would recognize Soviet control of Minsk in return for a small indemnity.

In the Baltics, the Soviets agreed to cease arming Estonian and Lithuanian rebels, and in return, Germany would cede the city of Narva and the port of Murmansk, taken earlier in the year by Finnish nationalists. In the south, the Germans agreed to recognize Soviet sovereignty over eastern Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, on the condition that they be given rights to at least 40% of the oil in Baku. With the British having recently seized the key oil-producing city, the overriding German concern was to make sure the rich oil fields did not remain in their enemy's hands.

The Soviets also agreed to an expansive plan of reparations, to be paid for primarily with food and minerals. The cession of the grain-rich lands of Ukraine was intended to enable the Soviets to make good this payment, which would be crucial if Germany was to feed its population and continue the war effort. This was the real "blood price" the Soviets were forced to pay in return for the cession of border territories.

The treaty provoked howls of protests amongst both the left-bolsheviks and the SR's, who accused Lenin of capitulating to German Imperialism. A clique in Moscow composed of Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, Franz Mehring, Karl Radek, Andrei Bubnov, and Vladimir Smirnov issued a protest in several local newspapers, prompting several of them to be charged with breaking party discipline and threatened with expulsion. No formal censure was made against the German emigres, but in various party outlets they were accused of a lack of gratitude; there was some truth to this, given the effort the revolutionary government expended to traffic propaganda (written principally by the red emigres) into Germany.

With Russia's food supply devastated by the civil war and an ongoing refugee crisis, there seemed to be little opportunity for actually meeting the treaty conditions without placing significantly more pressure on Russian and Ukrainian peasants. The left-bolsheviks had little ability to organize opposition to the treaty; the vast majority of urban workers were still loyal to Lenin's government. There was more resistance among the peasantry, who linked the more coercive grain requisition practices to the exit of the left SR's from the coalition. In the last two months of 1918, peasant unrest spread across Central Russia, presaging the next phase of the civil war.

The new Soviet state was still far from consolidated. While much of Central and East Siberia was under Soviet control, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Russia's arctic north were all outside its sovereignty. Additionally, Kyiv and East Ukraine was run by a semi-independent Ukranian Soviet Republic, which was doggedly resisting the requests for increased grain shipments. In the west, Hetman Pavlo Skorapidskyi's Ukrainian state, intended to be a buffer between Germany and Soviet Russia, was facing a fanatical national insurgency from the remnants of Petliura's army, who took to the woods before they could be captured by the Austro-German offensive intended to topple the nationalist government.

Further south, in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, authority was divided along ethnic and religious lines. A transcaucasian unity government was formed following the revolution, intended to maintain order and guard against the Turkish and White Russian threats. Its leaders were moderate Mensheviks and socialist-revolutionaries who pointedly refused to swear allegiance to the revolutionary government, but who also resisted calls to declare independence from it. They were a lesser participant in the Treaty of Warsaw, which forced them to cede western Armenia to Turkey. In the months thereafter, the tenuous cross-ethnic alliance disintegrated as Georgia and Azerbaijan declared war on Armenia, seeking to seize border territories. A more healthy Turkish state may have taken advantage of this situation, but it had its hands full preventing a British breakout from Adana. Instead, it was the British who capitalized on the conflict, marching north and invading Azerbaijan on the pretext of defending its Armenian "ally".

Shortly thereafter, Bolsheviks and left SR's overthrew the government in Baku, prompting a panicked Georgia to conclude an armistice with Armenia. When a force of around 2,000 British soldiers reached Baku, they were initially repelled by the numerically superior Caucasian Red Army, but they would return later in August with a 5,000 man army that successfully besieged and captured the city. Yet they soon faced a relentless assault from nationalist Azerbaijani militias that made many doubt whether the city was worth holding onto even with the tremendous oil yields it reaped. More worrying signs for the British emerged when a coalition of left-SR's, left-mensheviks, and Bolsheviks came to power in Georgia and Armenia following Kolchak's decision to evacuate his army to Crimea. And then, shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Riga, German troops began streaming into Sochi. The first German-Soviet joint military of the Great War was about to begin.

In the final few months of the year, organized white opposition forces outside of Crimea gradually disintegrated. Kornilov's army, having suffered countless defeats in battle, started to dissolve in the freezing Siberian winter. The remnants of the Orenburg cossack host were crushed with a mixture of terror, propaganda, and repression. Slowly, the eastern half of Russia was incorporated into the new state, though in practice these regions had considerable local autonomy.

Even with the military successes of 1918, the new Soviet government was in an extremely vulnerable position. It was dependent on German goodwill, which was now conditional on the payment of an enormous and domestically unpopular reparations bill. The treaty had not brought an end to the conflict in Central Asia, or, for that matter, the pervasive frontier violence in Finnish Karelia. By any account, the second Sovnarkom represented a much narrower splice of the country; without any SR ministers, it could not claim to speak for the peasantry. For now, the left-SR's remained loyal to the revolutionary project, but they felt increasingly alienated by the present government. Echoing 19th century narodnik revolutionaries, a minority began to speak of "Going into the country" to help the peasants coordinate opposition to grain seizures and state repression. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, such talk could only mean one thing: insurrection.