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

[Curby]

Building Socialism: The German Economy in 1920
​

Excerpts from German Industrialization: 1850-1940, Alexander Gerschenkron (Berlin: UB Press, 1966)

Introduction

The new socialist government in Germany faced immense economic challenges. Though there had been less destruction of capital assets than in Italy, France, or Russia, the war caused systematic distortions in the economy and near its end led to chronic underinvestment in consumer-oriented industries. The previous government also took out enormous loans from the middle-classes, and the new, socialist state had to decide whether it was going to honor these. In the hopes of preserving its alliance with the National-Social Association, the ruling Social-Democratic coalition initially avoided any talk of default.

A state of de facto industrial chaos existed during the first few months of 1920. To cement their control over the domestic economy, the social-democrats nationalized the big vertically-integrated corporations, including Siemens, Thyssen, Krupp, M.A.N., and AEG. The Kriegsgesellschaften were also nationalized, and continued to perform their previous service: organizing the procurement of raw-materials for the big corporations. With the business tycoons fleeing Germany or sitting in prisons, a battle for leadership of the commanding heights of the company commenced between the worker's councils and the trade unions. The old social-democratic leadership, clustered around Wels and Haase, favored the latter; though the unions were still under some level of suspicion by many socialist activists, most of their leadership were ousted in late 1919 by mid-level functionaries who had worked throughout the war to undermine their bosses. Reforms were passed democratizing the unions and attempting to win the workers over to their cause.

Nonetheless, in large sections of industry, most notably the chemical and electronic sectors, workers chose to elect trade union officials who were loyal to the council movement. As a consequence, a large number of unions effectively dissolved or were rendered powerless. A mixture of council and union delegates sat on the new Kriegsgesellschaften and the other planning boards of the national economy, which had been inherited from the wartime years. As a whole, these were in a fairly weak position due to mass purges of the reactionary officials and reduced state capacity.

The government confronted its first real economic crisis in the summer, when it became clear that many of the big, vertically-integrated corporations were no longer turning a profit. Prices began to deflate across the entire economy. Middle-class skepticism, bourgeois capital flight, and wartime chaos threatened to lead to a full-blown demand crisis. With a banking and financial sector still under construction, the government chose to conduct its first systematic socialization drive. A new provision in the constitution allowed for the expropriation of all industries with over 25 employees, and a series of decrees were passed incentivizing workers to "take up their historic duty". The quick socialization of vast sectors of the economy was tremendously disruptive, but it also introduced - in the form of greater worker incomes - a surge of consumer spending which propped up the big firms. It also, however, cut into the profitability of many of the industries, particularly smaller firms with higher levels of proportional labor costs. The crisis of demand turned into a crisis of investment, prompting the Council of People's Commissars to pass an emergency measure requiring a set level of profits in each firm to be reinvested.

Through the hectic months of civil war, trade with the socialist and social-democratic governments in Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Italy and the Netherlands provided crucial support for the national economy. Munitions factories in particular benefited from trade with Italy and Socialist France, while large quantities of coal continued to be sent to Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Russia was a crucial source of foodstuffs. By the end of 1920, Germany's total exports exceeded those of any year in the war, despite stagnating output in many major industries. The Socialist republic also became an important middleman for the trade of goods between the Soviet Union and the other socialist states in Europe: the dockworker's unions of Lubeck, Kiel, and Rostock grew wealthy enough to help pay for expansions of port facilities, even while Hamburg struggled under the weight of an Anglo-American embargo.

Enterprise Structure in the New Socialist Economy

By the time that Luxemburg's revolutionary government came to power in October 1920, the socialist economy had already begun an internal and self-directed process of differentiation. At least five major types of enterprise structure existed. Firstly, there were the massive, vertically-integrated corporations, the successors of Krupp, Thyssen, and other titans of heavy industries engaged in mass production. These were dominated by the trade unions and began to engage in a kind of syndical planning. They were concentrated in Silesia, the Ruhr Valley, and Northeastern Westphalia. Secondly, there were the large modern industries of the "second industrial revolution", which produced chemicals, electronics, pharmaceuticals, engines, and advanced machinery. In these, the worker's councils successfully seized power, and the firms slowly took on a more federated and decentralized structure. Some of them began to resemble trusts (in which profits were pooled and divided between independent firms) rather than unitary businesses. Technically speaking, these enterprises were still owned by the state, but they tended to be more resistant to centralized planning.

Thirdly, a form of confederal cooperativism, negotiated among many small and medium-sized collectivized firms, emerged in the old heartlands of the German industrial mittelstand. Before the war, Saxony, Baden-Wurttemberg, the Rhineland, and Southwestern Westphalia were home to numerous small businesses employing between 30 and 200 people. In these areas, the production process was frequently distributed between numerous actors, with the overall industrial landscape defined by relations of deep dependency due to the exchange of made-to-order assets. An unusually high proportion of industrial enterprises were dedicated to consumer goods (particularly textile) production. Heavy-industrial factories found a market niche through creating extremely specialized products and maintaining flexibility in production. In contrast to the vertically-integrated industries in Brandenburg, Silesia, and the Ruhr Valley, many elements of the production process were delegated to outside contracting agencies.

These small, decentralized industrial landscapes anticipated their socialist-confederal successors. During the Wilhelmine era, informal social networks and regional governments acted to coordinate the exchange of goods. In many cases, each individual business did not have a "competitor" in the market due to their degree of specialization. Trade associations frequently functioned as "specialization cartels" which eliminated production redundancies which might lead to overcapacity. As a consequence, market mechanisms already played a smaller part in price-setting than they did in traditional capitalism.

Over the summer and autumn, a wave of collectivization in the decentralized regions followed the socialization provisions. Saxony Wurttemberg-Baden, and the Rhineland had perhaps the densest network of interstitial institutions in all of Europe, and Stuttgart, Leipzig, and Chemnitz were strongholds of Luxemburgist RWF (Revolutionary Worker's Front) organizing. Most of the small specialized firms fell bloodlessly into the hands of the workers. Educated bureaucrats previously employed by trade associations were incorporated into subcommittees of regional councils, which became a vital center for extrafirm enterprise governance. The social networks that undergirded decentralized industrialization were quickly formalized through the regional councils, and small, worker-controlled businesses entered into "confederal agreements" with their counterparts. At first, these were simply formal acknowledgements of their de facto commitment to cooperation, but over the course of Luxemburg's government, they were recognized as a distinctive form of enterprise organization and accrued additional powers. These will be discussed more later; over time, the confederations became a key institution of the Central European economy, combining planning, worker's governance, as well as some internal market mechanisms.

The fourth form of enterprise was the consumer cooperative. These were particularly prominent in the sectors of food and banking. Cooperative savings banks and credit unions were already widespread before the war, particularly in the decentralized industrial regions with a high proportion of small and medium-sized firms. These institutions primarily served the local bourgeoisie; after the first socialization drive, they went on a capital strike, causing a temporary crisis of investment in the new confederal cooperatives until the Commissariat of Finance decreed the that the banks would be transferred into the hands of the regional councils. Eventually, these banks would serve as the basis for a regional public banking system, though they continued to be run on a quasi-cooperative basis, and prominent worker-stakeholders shared power with state governments. They gained a renewed prominence by 1921, when public finance became one of the "pillars" of economic planning.

In contrast to the credit unions, the food cooperatives were mostly a product of wartime exigencies, and tended to have a more proletarian and urban membership. The largest food cooperatives were not located in the decentralized regions of Saxony, Baden-Wurttemberg, or Thuringia, but in the large industrial cities of Berlin and Hamburg. In concert with the worker's councils, most of the coops were converted into public institutions during the first months of the civil war, with special privileges for members, while others chose to formally affiliate with the modern firms controlled by the worker's councils. Food cooperatives remained very popular after the revolution, and their presence multiplied throughout the rest of the country during 1920.

The remaining enterprises were remnant capitalist firms, typically employing under 25 workers. These were concentrated in the rural hinterlands of Germany, such as Pomerania, Posen, and East Prussia. They tended to be either agricultural or professional in character. Legal and consulting firms, mid-sized peasant holdings, and other small businesses in the service sector comprised most of the capitalist economy. The capitalist sector employed a sizable portion of workers, though it constituted a smaller share of the overall economy since the average business was poorer and less capital-intensive than their collectivized counterparts.

Almost all socialist politicians and activists viewed the capitalist sector as a potential reactionary fifth column. Though most of the urban firms went untouched during the first year of the socialist republic, the old agricultural sector came under immediate assault. A sweeping land reform broke up the estates of the Prussian Junkers and forced many mid-sized holdings to give up land. After she came into power, Luxemburg held off on immediate collectivization, instead opting to first weaken the agricultural sector through importing vast quantities of Russian grain. This was facilitated by the November Konigsberg agreements, in which Germany pledged to provide the Soviet Union with industrial secrets, engineering assistance, and specialized agricultural machinery in return for the right to purchase any grain surpluses over the next two years. The truly vast social upheaval that followed, in which plunging prices of foodstuffs prompted millions of agricultural laborers to stream into the cities, was memorably captured by Walter Ruttman's 1925 film, The Great Flight.

The Coming Upheaval

In 1921, on the eve of the first "Age of Socialist Construction", market relations were diminished but still intact. They still served an important role in coordinating exchange between different sectors of the economy. Ironically, the sweeping cartelization of the wartime years likely displaced market relations to a greater extent than any of the initial measures of the socialist government. Despite the relative weakness of markets as a disciplining force, the central government at first exercised little control over the direction of the national economy. Neither "democratically planned statism" nor Italian-style "mixed market socialism", the German economy was in the unique position of having both weak markets and a weak state.

At the commanding heights of the economy were the worker's representatives elected through trade union and council elections. These individuals possessed de facto control over the nation's largest firms. They jointly engaged in informal, non-institutionalized cooperative bargaining to make determinations about their own enterprises and to set the prices of key industrial goods. One scholar described this crystallizing economic structure as a "cooperative mixed economy coordinated through non-state networks of worker's representatives". The frequently secretive nature of these negotiations prompted fears of a new elite emerging, particularly among those anxious about the vast powers accumulated by the trade union bureaucrats in charge of German heavy industry. Upon assuming the chairmanship of the new government in October, Luxemburg vowed to "subordinate the economy to the worker-councils" and "subordinate the state to society". Thus began the first real drive toward the "democratic planning" of the economy.

In the first month of assuming power, the new government unilaterally defaulted on all wartime loans, created a unitary maximum income for all industries, introduced legislation to expand, empower, and reform the wartime planning boards, and passed a slate of new mandatory collectivization laws targeting urban service industries. This was merely a prelude to a vast and systematic reorganization of the key institutions of the German economy. Taken together, the initial decrees indicated that Luxemburg intended to make good on her promise to "annihilate the last vestiges of extractive-exploitative Wilhelmine capitalism, and begin the construction of the socialist economy." For the loyalist German mittelstand who had reluctantly consented to partake in the socialist experiment, the new direction of the government constituted an assault on its very existence.

The dizzying pace of socialist advance would only heighten in the coming years, and it would leave German society transformed beyond recognition. Even so, the 19th-century heritage of geographically dispersed, state-directed "late industrialization" would continue to shape the structure of the economy. The diverse regional industrial orders of Germany, a product of uneven and combined development, persisted throughout the process of socialist construction. Whether this has been a blessing or a curse is a matter of individual judgement: what some denounce as a "confused patchwork of excessively bureaucratized overlapping fiefdoms" others applaud as a "laboratory of plural and mutually supporting socialist industrial modernities."

 

[Curby]

Where Once We Fought Germans, Now We Slaughter Countrymen
The Second Act of the National Tragedy​

"Who shall we indict as those who betrayed France? The soldiers who fought for it, who bled and died for it? Or the politicians who tossed them into the abattoir for a dime, who now proclaim that the soldier of France is no longer French? My friends, I am fully aware that you will avenge this slander. You shall make France whole, you will put an end to this carnival of lies, and with your assistance, upon our native soil we shall build a new state for the working and toiling peoples of this nation!"

-Ludovich-Oscar Frossard

"And so what, that the army has been bolshevized, the nation spat upon, and Paris seized by a den of rogues? We select few shall remain loyal to the true France, the eternal France, which persists through all depredations that this brazen and fallen age may hurl at it. We will bear the cross, we will harden ourselves until we are alive to nothing besides the fate of the patrie, and when the time of judgement comes, we shall cleanse this nation of its filth and give it a new and glorious birth."

-Charles Maurras

"When a man has been fighting for so long, it is quite easy for him to forget what he is fighting for, or even to forget the person he was before he took up arms. One day, perhaps, the planned victory will come, France will be redeemed, and we shall all rejoice, but in truth it is better not to think of such things for now".

-Anonymous quote, soldier of the French White Army.

---

The first years of the French Civil War were not marked by great battles, heroic gestures, or feats of bold daring. This was a war which was fought by an exhausted, war-weary people, and which was propelled forward by its own immanent logic. The war was waged because it had to be - because of the fear of retaliation, because so much blood had already been spilled, because submission to the enemy was a failure of one's soldierly duty or masculine sense of honor. The war went on because the adversary had committed an unspeakable act of betrayal: Clemenceau had abandoned the soldiers, or alternatively, the soldiers had abandoned France.

What the thirty years war was for Germany, the soldier's decade was for France. For five years, the French nation rallied to repel the foreign invader in a desperate struggle of national defense. France never achieved the satisfaction of expelling the hereditary enemy from the homeland; when they left, the Germans did so of their own accord, abandoning the barren and stripped northeastern provinces and streaming away over the Vosges mountains.

By November, 1919, the French nation was thoroughly traumatized by the past half-decade of war. Most expected that the vast sacrifices which the state demanded would be recompensed in some form in the postwar era. Even those who had given up hope of a decisive victory still imagined that, after a just peace was signed, a new era of peace and prosperity would reign in Europe. Yet the fires of civic enmity ran hotter than anyone expected. The experience of the soldiers is the classic one, for at the crucial moment during the German mutiny, French troops refused to engage in an offensive to retake French territory, and instead turned their bayonets on their officers. This is the conventional beginning of the "Brother's War".

Yet in truth, innumerable actors spent years clearing the ground for the conflict, none more fervently than Clemenceau himself. By 1919, little daylight remained between the liberal radical and his authoritarian enemies across the Rhine. Not only the socialist domestic opposition, but also the soldiery became the target for the government's repression. Even as Clemenceau vowed to continue the fight, he privately spoke of the "rabble of troops" in less than flattering terms. Bolshevization at the front was attributed to the brutalizing effects of war. There were doubts that reintegration into civil society was really possible for most of the troops. Of course, this mindset went against all the patriotic myths of the good, loyal soldier, and it was rarely voiced by the official organs of government. Yet it was increasingly betrayed by newspapers and civilian correspondence. Cabinet members spoke privately about the need to surveil soldiers after they were demobilized, and the language of disease and infection came to dominate politics. In both the secret propaganda of the socialists and the official propaganda of the government, the political opposition was pictured as plague to be expunged from the body politic.

During the French Civil War, the thin line separating the state and the army finally dissolved. The soldier's state, of course, is the quintessential form of fascism, and the deeply pathological trajectory of the Legitimist government should warn us against drawing moral equivalences. Yet one cannot ignore that a similar translation of military prowess into political power took place in the Paris government, particularly in the later years of the war. The French Soldier's and Worker's Republic may have lacked the ethnocidal and antisemitic instincts of their right-wing opponents, but they compensated for this with a thoroughgoing disdain of the "peasant wreckers" and other "civilian fifth columns".

The initial distribution of territories between the two sides did not correspond in any systematic way to political loyalties. While the Loire and Rhone Valley were both strongholds of socialist sentiment, the vast rural territories in between these two regions were hostile to the socialist government, as were the northeastern regions. Attacks from farmer's militias loyal to the legitimist Clemenceau government fed a sense of paranoia in Paris. A similar pattern held in the south: it took extraordinary bloodletting and ongoing surveillance for the so-called "French National Army" to pacify the cities of Bordeaux and Marseille. The failure of either government to fully quell internal unrest contributed to chronic instability and the political ascent of the armies.

…Gender played a critical role in the popular understanding of the war. When the men of the first red militias arrived in Paris, they were struck by the parading women workers equipped with rifles and bayonets. A soldier remarked that he did not expect to find a "Lady's Commune", and the term quickly stuck. The phenomenon of the red soldier also seemed to defy traditional sociological categories - who was this figure? A peasant, a worker, a bourgeois? They roamed the city in drunken bands, until the womenfolk shamed them into remobilization. A not insignificant number of the female workers joined the fledgling red army. Off they went to confront the Whites; once the siege of Paris was broken, a second bacchanalia erupted.

In the white propaganda, pioneered by early theorists of fascism such as Charles Marraus, the Paris government was depicted as a hotbed of anarchy and confusion. This was a tableau-vivant which echoed the utopias of Plato and comedies of Aristophanes, in which the order of things was reversed and rowdy women were installed at the heights of power. The men were hyper-masculinized, depicted as victorian savages, brutalized by the war and lacking the intelligence required to rule. They were ready recipients for the Bolshevik infection. The Reds, too, engaged in a form of gender propaganda, though this was directed above all at the peasants and farmers, who had grown fat from the Great War and yet lacked the elan to do battle. Amidst the food troubles, they were a natural target. Newspapers, pamphlets, and posters unswervingly depicted them as scheming and effeminate gluttons who sought to undermine the new worker and soldier's state from within.

The First Year of War

The first revolutionary wave swept the proletarian cities and worker's suburbs of France with the same intensity as it did Central Europe. In the Rhone Valley, a hotbed of worker's councils and anarchism, two days of failed attempts to expel workers from the occupied factories led to a general demoralization of the police force. The activist Pierre Monatte, who had maintained ties with both the soldier's and worker's councils, broke out of prison and arrived on the streets of Lyon on the 8th. After a day of pitched battles, the police stood down, and the new revolutionary city government led by Monatte declared its loyalty to Paris. Similar events unfolded in the Loire Valley, Bordeaux, Macon and Dijon.

In Paris, events proceeded with greater rapidity. After Boris Souvarine, Jean Jaures, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard and other dissidents were freed from prison, a socialist republic was proclaimed. The police, terrified of the example of the Russian Revolution, refused to fire on the mostly female crowds, and did not make an attempt to arrest the ringleaders of the coup. Clemenceau fled the city before the crowds could target his government.

Jaures was an unlikely figure to lead a revolution. Before the war, he had been firmly aligned with the majority, reformist strand of French socialists. Although ideologically committed to internationalist pacifism, he also felt a sense of emotional attachment to the French nation, and had been instrumental in rallying the socialists to support the war. His arrest and the repression of the labor unions radicalized him, but most historians believe that his decision to declare a socialist republic was compelled by the force of circumstance and the revolutionary workers.

Jaures, who had spent years trying to corral his party, increasingly became a mere figurehead. His attempt to include more moderate figures in his cabinet, such as Leon Blum, was frustrated by the machinations of Frossard and Souvarine. A body of delegates appointed by the women's councils and union locals of Paris and the Loire Valley, known as the worker's congress, insisted on its veto power over cabinet appointees. The tens of thousands of radicalized soldiers converging on Paris successfully appealed for their own representatives to be able to sit on this body, which lent it a somewhat less ideological character.

Most historians now agree that the first few months of the war represented a crucial lost opportunity for the new socialist government. With Clemenceau's white armies encircled and lacking means of procuring supplies from the larger world, a quick march to the south may have extinguished the rival government and secured France for the revolutionaries. Yet the delegates of the soldier's councils continued to equivocate, worried that any large-scale movement of troops would lead to a diminished presence at the worker's congress. Frossard and Jaures were also worried about a potential British attack from the north, and believed that sending off the loyal soldiers might compromise their own position. As a consequence, the white army was able to gather its forces and march north into the Loire Valley. Here, panic set in, and the worker's congress hesitated to send its armies into open battle. Their instinct, formed by over a century of revolutionary practice, was to set up barricades and defenses in Paris. In retrospect, this was a needlessly cautious strategy, but there was little trusty intelligence on the relative weakness of the white forces at the time. After breaking into the Loire Valley, the white army managed to encircle Paris, but it was stopped time and again in the worker's suburbs. When a small group of red militias attacked the white army from the east, the siege dissolved.

Possessed of a new confidence, Frossard ordered the worker's militias to pursue the white army through the Loire Valley. After several successes, the larger red army finally consented to leave the city, and fought a vicious campaign towards Lyon against the retreating eastern flank of the whites, routing the officers in several pitched battles and allowing a stable corridor to be established with the syndicalists in Rhone. By June, the socialists controlled a mostly contiguous territory running from Lyon in the southeast up through Dijon, Troyes, and Reims, and stretching west to Nantes and La Rochelle. A large white salient still remained in the middle of the country, concentrated around the city of Bourges and the conservative, agricultural heartlands of Central France. The next campaign would attempt to eliminate this with flanking attacks from Lyon and Nantes.

At this point, we must briefly discuss the situation of the rival legitimist government to the south. Even before the outbreak of civil war, Clemeanceau's days as Prime Minister looked to be numbered. His decision to purge both the socialist and left-liberal opposition had strengthened his conservative critics, and widespread hatred of his policies of "war austerity" amongst even the loyalist middle-class alienated his core supporters. When he arrived in the sleepy town of Toulouse, his army was dominated by conservative officers displeased with Clemeanceau's decision to retain Nivelle the chief of staff. The northern expedition toward Paris was as much an attempt to salvage the reputation of the prime minister as it was an effort to quench the revolution before it could marshal its superior resources. Its ignominious failure and the arrival of the returning officers forced a change in Clemenceau's government. Reluctantly, he fired most of his ministers, replacing them with conservative catholics, monarchists, reactionaries, and army officials. The likes of Jean Plichon, Charles Maurras, Francois de la Rocque, and Noel Edouard did not always get along well with the liberal-radical Prime Minister. The proliferation of independent right-wing militias and the failure of many liberal parliamentarians to evacuate Paris further diminished Clemenceau's power. In a bid to retain some influence, Clemenceau proposed his old rival Petain as the chief of staff. At the time, both men were united by their distrust of the "sectarianism" of the catholics and monarchists. Still quite popular amongst the common soldiers, Petain was appointed chief of staff in mid-June and rallied the army for a "war of national salvation".

Petain's victories in the summer campaign gave Clemenceau's flagging political career a new lease on life. Faced with a numerically superior opponent, Petain chose to provoke his opponents into smaller battles that could be defeated piecemeal in territories dominated by the loyalist peasantry. He was assisted by the decision of the red government to launch many smaller attacks, which were frequently poorly coordinated, allowing him to defeat them in detail. While he was forced to trade land for time, including the key city of Bourges in August, the red army was exhausted by the fall, and their guns fell silent. An attempt by Petain to launch a counteroffensive in September was less successful; with the armament factories of the Loire Valley swinging back into production, he found himself outgunned by red artillery. To the horror of all the participants, the battles ended in the resumption of trench warfare along select sectors of the front.

In the year's final months, both the front itself and the two governments began to stabilize. Jaures accepted his role as a figurehead, and the troika of Frossard, Loriot, and Souvarine emerged as the true power behind the Paris government. They solidified their position with a campaign of sweeping collectivization and nationalization of the major war industries. Faced with little other option, they devolved a great degree of autonomy to the anarcho-syndicalists in the Rhone Valley, allowing them to form their own militia units and govern themselves as a de facto allied state. Administration was slowly re-established in the impoverished northeastern provinces previously occupied by Germany, and white guerillas painstakingly flushed out of Lorraine and Burgundy in a brutal conflict that likely killed more Frenchmen than the conventional battles of 1920. Conservative Brittany, cut off from the white government, still remained out of reach, and local authorities formally declared their neutrality in the conflict over the summer.

At least for now, Clemenceau faced a kinder fate than Jaures. He reached a modus vivendi of sorts with the conservative catholic opposition, and begrudgingly reversed a number of the anticlerical policies of the previous decades. His appointment of Petain had given him a crucial ally, though it was unclear how long this tenuous alliance could remain intact. Withe the assistance of Catholic and Reactionary militias, the whites completed their own bloody consolidation. With the help of the British, the worker's communes in the port cities of Marseille and Bordeaux were harshly suppressed, and the dock facilities opened to trade. At first, this was more a trickle than a torrent - most of the dockworkers who were not killed outright in the white massacres elected to leave the cities after they sabotaged vital port equipment.

Most of the fleeing workers made their way up to the Rhone Valley, though some fled into Italy and Alsace-Lorraine. The "Death of Marseilles" radidly became a touchstone of the French socialist imaginary. When news reached Paris of the white atrocities, there were another round of protests in the streets, and two dozen citizens accused of collaborating with the Clemenceau government were publicly lynched to the tune of the Marseillase. The red terror, which had quieted since the successful defense of Paris, started again in earnest. In a gesture of solidarity Lenin and Luxemburg temporarily halted the ongoing Konigsberg negotiations to jointly condemn the "war on the French proletariat", and expelled small diplomatic delegations from Britain.

In the final months of 1920, artillery shells, guns, and even a small number of landships began streaming into France. This freed up crucial industrial labor on both sides, which prompted them to institute a new draft to shore up their dwindling and exhausted armies. Yet this would not be an easy task: already, hundreds of thousands of refugees (white and red alike) had streamed into German Alsace-Lorraine and Spain, and rumors of a draft prompted another flight of young men and their families. Increasingly, France appeared to be a broken and shattered land - the battles south of the Loire Valley and partisan fighting in Burgundy and Lorraine had devastated agricultural production, and the army's de facto monopoly on rail transport made the task of food distribution extremely difficult. As 1921 dawned and France prepared for its seventh year of war, Frossard and Clemenceau pleaded with their allies for additional food imports, warning of the prospect of famine. All steeled themselves for the fresh horrors that the new year would bring.

 

[Curby]

The Second Revolution
The Seizure of State Power by the Revolutionary Worker's Front​

From a College-level History Textbook in Berlin, 1958

The German and the Soviet Revolutions bear several uncanny resemblances. A broad popular front of social forces ousted a reactionary monarch, opening the way to a year of contestation between different political factions. In the end, the most radical of them, representing the most advanced and class-conscious element of the proletariat, won power, and proceeded to restructure the basic institutions of the state. Conservative-liberal elements which supported the initial revolution now rose in revolt and protest, only to find themselves outmaneuvered by the new government, which managed to form alliances with sections of the population previously thought to be inimical to revolutionary socialism.

Recent historians have been eager to qualify this picture. They point out that the Revolutionary Worker's Front won power legally, in council and parliamentary elections; that the first revolution was a socialist and not a bourgeois one, and that, therefore, there is little sense in speaking of a "Second Revolution"; and finally, that the conquest of state power did not occasion a second round of civil war, and was, in fact, already a foregone conclusion given the nature of the German constitution. While it is necessary to avoid unduly assimilating the German revolution to the Soviet one, it is equally important to guard against treating the ascendancy of the Revolutionary Worker's Front (RAF) during the first half-decade of the DSR as a routine matter of electoral politics, something which several recent studies have come close to doing.

...The Revolutionary Worker's Front was formed as a clandestine organization in 1918, in the wake of the failure of the November uprising. It was coordinated by local activists with ties to both the council movement and the left-wing of the Trier caucus. There were more than a few sympathetic trade union officials and social-democratic party chapters that were involved as well. The RAF was initially employed to facilitate communications between the various branches of worker's councils; in this way, it became a form of social infrastructure. Over time, it also served as an outlet of propaganda and recruitment, acting to expand the council-movement and refine the ideology of revolutionary councilism (also known as Marxism-Luxemburgism). The spread of the movement to the traditionally conservative catholic workers of the Rhine-Ruhr area was likely the death knell of capitalism in Germany, even if for some time the Catholic Worker's League would constitute an independent though allied political formation.

During the November Revolution, the councils seized power in Berlin, Saxony, the Rhineland, Alsace-Lorraine, Baden-Wurttemberg, Bremen, Hamburg, and the Ruhr Valley. A situation of de facto dual power emerged after the councils arranged elections on December 15th 1919, during which the first All-German Congress of Soviets was formed. This body was dominated by representatives sympathetic to the RAF, but it co-existed with an unelected Council of People's Commissars which was divided evenly between descendants of the left-centrist social democrats, such as Kautsky, Wels, and Haase, and the RAF. Luxemburg, Jogiches, and Levi, the most prominent representatives of the centrist and right wings of the RAF, refused to carry out a split with the Social-Democratic Party, which had now been purged of the social-fascists of the wartime era. The consequence was a continued struggle for control of the party, as well as an ongoing war of position between the All-German Congress of Soviets and the centrist and right-wing social democrats, who formally acknowledged the place of the councils in the new system but wished to retain a place for more traditional bourgeois government structures.

Among the right-wing Social Democrats, led now by the revisionist Eduard Bernstein, the repeated mantra was "not yet". The workers may have seized power and overthrew Ludendorff, but they were not yet ready for the full practice of socialism. German industry, shattered by the war, was not yet prepared for the transition to worker's ownership and economic planning. In this manner, the right-wing Social Democrats embraced the revolution, which was necessary to "place the reins of political power in the more responsible stewardship of the worker", while denying its essential meaning. Hence the need for a parliament, for all the manifold institutions of bourgeois rule, to "complete the phase of capitalist development", which Bernstein and the revisionists insisted was necessary before any leap ahead into socialism. As for the left-centrists, the likes of Kautsky, Wels, Ledebour, and Haase, one must conclude that they believed in the revolution, but were frightened of what it might entail, and hence held on to the devices of bourgeois rule in the hopes that they would provide a more stable and painless transition.

The revolutionary workers of Germany did not concur in these assessments. The All-German Congress remained in session over the entirety of 1919, and sent the largest delegation of deputies to the constitutional convention, at which they won a preponderance of power. They won the right to determine the composition of the next Council of Commissars, thereby cementing the councils' position in the new state. This prompted the left-centrists to begin breaking more decisively with the party's right-wing, hoping to compete in the upcoming council elections, which were scheduled to occur simultaneously with parliementary ones in September. In areas where workers were still loyal to the trade union movement, left-centrists made some gains, but they still had little hope of challenging the hegemony of the RAF and its Catholic Allies.

These same organizations were busily preparing for parliamentary elections. In the hope of capturing the working-class vote of the defunct Catholic Centre Party, the Catholic Worker's League chose to campaign as an independent party. The RAF decided to nominally remain a single faction within the Social-Democratic Party, a move which was only possible because the reforms which decentralized the party in 1917 under the guidance of the Trier Caucus were put back in place at the insistence of the Luxemburgists, the councils, and most of the left-centrists. This produced the strange situation where the campaign of 1920 had more the spirit of a Social-Democratic civil war than a genuine contest between differing parties. The right, centre, and left fought vigorously for control of the party-list and for the right to nominate their preferred candidates in the single-member constituencies. Control of regional party chapters was vital for the latter task, a battle that the councilists narrowly won with the assistance of dozens of targeted strikes and industrial actions that cowed local party leaders. There were dozens of cases in which Social-Democrats ran against one another during the election when multiple nominees claimed to be the "rightful" candidate, typically to the advantage of whichever one had the support of the local party apparatus and worker-councils.

The RAF established its own headquarters in Berlin, and accumulated a host of local chapters and affiliates over 1920. It considered itself to be an association of the most revolutionary and class-conscious elements of German society rather than a traditional party. In certain respects, it still acted as one in 1920: its executive committee coordinated strategy, helped conduct campaigns, and delegated important tasks. However, its connection to the council movement and the Congress of Soviets meant that the activity of regional affiliates and chapters frequently leapt far ahead of the Executive Committee's dictates, producing confusion at times but also giving the RAF an extraordinary dynamism which the other parties lacked.

The RAF also conducted a campaign in Pomerania and East Prussia, seeking to win the support of landless agricultural laborers and other elements of the rural proletariat. These were the traditional heartlands of Prussian conservatism, and were now home to a terroristic insurgency of landowners who opposed the recent efforts at land reform. With their political machinery decimated by the revolution, there was a great void of power here, and the efforts to organize the agricultural proletariat, though halting and uneven, did bear fruit when RAF candidates carried more than a dozen rural districts in low-turnout elections.

As a whole, the campaign of 1920 occurred in an atmosphere of both extraordinary tension and heady proletarian optimism. Conspiracies proliferated of a coming British invasion of the northwestern coast that would force the country back onto a war footing, and the entire public square was given over to politics. Observers described it as a "permanent campaign", in which marches, rallies, and speeches constituted the main form of public entertainment. Both the mainstream social democrats and people's social union struggled to match this mood; in their rhetoric and their slogans, they lacked the sense of militancy and revolutionary elan that had swept the nation.

September 1920 People's Assembly Election
​

Party	Vote %	Seats (Proportional Party-list)	Seats (Single-member)	Seats (Total)
Social-Democratic Party (RAF)	65.7	99	135	234
Social-Democratic Party (Remainder)	65.7	105	85	190
People's Social Union	21.2	66	69	135
Catholic Workers League	8.9	28	20	48
National-Liberal Party (Disqualified by Court)	4.1	0	0	0

September 1920 Council Elections​

Party	% of Seats	All-German Congress Seats
Social-Democratic Party (RAF)	60.5	1210
Social-Democratic Party	18.1	280
People's Social Union	3.6	72
Catholic Workers League	17.5	350

September 1920 has been called the "Second Revolution" because it settled, after an initial period of uncertainty, that the revolutionary proletariat would take the leading role in the construction of the new socialist order. It determined that, far from reaching a resting point with the constitution of 1920, the revolution was still ongoing and would continue for some time. Few expected the RAF to emerge as the largest grouping in both parliament and the council elections. Even though it may not have won an absolute majority in the former body, it had secured unquestioned executive power through its crushing victory in the council elections. The rearguard efforts of the left-centrists had come too late. Now fearing being shut entirely out of power, the left-centrists and their one hundred parliamentary deputies agreed to participate in a coalition government with the left, giving the RAF control of parliament as well as the All-German Congress. Shortly thereafter, the Congress gathered to appoint a cabinet dominated by the RAF. The left-centrists did not make out too badly here: though they did not control the most vital commissariats, they achieved representation out of proportion to their performance in the council elections, setting them up as key power-brokers in the new government.

Officeholders of the Council of People's Commissars, Sept. 22, 1920
​

Commissariat	Officeholder	Party
Chairperson	Rosa Luxemburg	SDP (RAF)
Internal Affairs	Leo Jogiches	SDP (RAF)
Foreign Affairs	Paul Levi	SDP (RAF)
Justice	Clara Zetkin	SDP (RAF)
Education	Otto Ruhle	SDP (RAF)
Planning	Ernst Meyer	SDP (RAF)
Light Industry	Joseph Joos	KA
Heavy Industry	Otto Wels	SDP
Railways and Transport	Wilhelm Pieck	SDP (RAF)
Trade	Georg Ledebour	SDP
Finance	Hugo Haase	SDP
Labour	Vitus Heller	KA
Agriculture	Wilhelm Dittmann	SDP
Army	Ernst Thalmann	SDP (RAF)
Navy	Paul Frolich	SDP (RAF)
Communications	Theodor Liebknecht	SDP
Minority Affairs	Julian Marchlewski	SDP (RAF)
Health and Welfare	August Thalheimer	SDP (RAF)
Culture	Kurt Eisner	SDP (RAF)
Housing and Urban Life	Adolph Hoffman	SDP
Confederal Affairs	Viktor Adler	SDP

The right-wing Social Democrats, who had hoped to play some part in the coming government, now threatened a party split. The dissolution of the party was all but inevitable at this point, and this "threat" was welcomed by all involved as a reprieve to the year-long internal struggle. On September 21st, the right-wing delegation quit to form the "Free Socialist People's Party". Shortly thereafter, negotiations to maintain the unity of the Social Democratic Party broke down when the RAF made clear that it envisioned the left-centrists strictly as junior partners. Kautsky and Haase were willing to take on a subordinate role in the present government, but they hardly intended for this to be a permanent arrangement. On the 28th, they formed the "Party of Revolutionary Social Democracy", bringing an end to the SDP and formalizing the tripartite division.

Rosa Luxemburg, 1st Address as Chairperson to the German Congress of Soviets on Sept. 26, 1920.​

Last November, workers and soldiers smashed the old German regime. The Prussian saber's mania of world rule bled to death on the battlefields of France and Poland. The gang of bourgeois criminals who set off the present nightmare and drove all of Europe into a sea of blood has been shown the rope. The people - betrayed for a half-decade by their purported representatives - awoke at last from their slumber, roused by the class-conscious German worker. In November, the German proletariat rose up and threw off the shameful Hohenzollern yoke. Worker and soldier's councils were elected, and repeated blows were struck against the class rule of the bourgeoisie. International capital, the insatiable god Baal, into whose bloody maw millions upon millions of steaming human sacrifices are thrown, now lies stricken and prostrated before the combined power of the European Proletariat.

With the conclusion of the Great War, the bourgeois has forfeited its right of existence. From Amsterdam to Vladivostok, its class rule has been shattered! It is no longer capable of leading society out of the terrible collapse of civil and economic order which the imperialist orgy has left in its wake. Means of production have been destroyed on a monstrous scale. Tens of millions of able workers, the fruit of this new century, have been slaughtered. The leering misery of unemployment beckons those who return. Famine and disease still sap at the strength of our people. A new round of chaos engulfs Europe.

We are now confronted with the choice: either a resurrection of capitalism, new wars, and the imminent return of anarchy, or the abolition of capitalist exploitation and the beginning of the work of socialist construction. Out of the present yawning abyss and bloody confusion, there is no help, no escape, no rescue other than socialism. Only the revolution of the world proletariat can bring order to the present chaos, can bring work and bread for all, can end the reciprocal slaughter which threatens to turn the remainder of Europe into a graveyard of peoples.

We must complete the socialization of the means of production, end the wage system, and introduce the planned production and distribution of social wealth. In place of employers and wage slaves, free working comrades! In place of national chauvinism, comradely love! Labor as a positive and social duty of all! The final end of exploiters and exploited, and the taking-over of all the functions of government by the workers themselves, so that the rule of men may give way to the administration of things.

All power to the worker's councils! There can be no compromise with chauvinist and bourgeois elements as we establish a socialist order of society. Let us not pretend that the initial steps we have taken have built up the new society: the process of socialist transformation cannot be decreed by bureau, committee, union or parliament, nor engraved in a constitution. Not the rule of bureaucrats, whether they be those of the Prussian state or the old unions, but the rule of workers! Only the final subordination of the state and economy to the free collective organs of the working people will issue in the socialist order! In short: only the self-activity of the workers may liberate the working-class! Only in such a society may man recognize man. Only when we have built this new order shall the earth no more be stained by the present ignominy. Only then may it be said: this war was the last, this tragedy the final one that man has been asked to endure.

In this hour, can anyone doubt that socialism is the only salvation for humanity? The words of the Communist Manifesto flare across the globe, like a gleaming sign above the crumbling battlements of world-imperialism: Socialism or Barbarism!

 

[Curby]

1921: The Year of Equipoise​

The hectic whirlwind of events had kicked up such an immense quantity of blinding dust that it was impossible, I think, to have a balanced sense of one's surroundings. At last, in 1921, the storm appeared to subside, and we could all make out a little better the new world we were living in.

John Dewey, 1921

And what, then, will be the end result of the present upheaval across the world? I fear it will not be the inauguration of a new age of general peace, but the division of the world into mutually hostile and heavily armed camps, which, if they ever fall to war, will issue in a destruction more total and more vast than we may presently conceive of.

H.G. Wells, 1921

Overview

The dizzying pace of the proletarian advance in 1920 could not be continued indefinitely. While Britain was still mired in the defense of its colonies from upstart insurgents, America, the sleeping hegemon of the Atlantic, had at last roused from its long slumber and it now began to rearm in earnest. The Eastern Seas War provided a suitable enough pretext, even if in absolute terms only a minority of America's industrial and military capacity was dedicated to the defeat of Japan. At the insistence of the Atlanticist-inclined Elihu Root, some of the most advanced American military technology found its way to legitimist France and Britain. The "free nations of the world" would receive the assistance necessary to repulse the red advance.

Temporarily, the battle-lines between the emerging socialist superpowers of Eurasia and their capitalist opponents stabilized. The war of maneuver increasingly transformed into one of position. States turned inward, to their own affairs, and made efforts to rebuild from economic collapse and social upheaval. They also looked outward, to their ideological allies, looking to formalize alliances and conclude defense pacts. The crystallization of a Eurasian and Atlantic Bloc had already begun three years before the formal end of the First Revolutionary Era.

The year began with additional victories for the revolutionaries in Italy, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. In March, an uprising of Italian peasants erupted throughout Campania, and the Black and Red Army finally broke through white lines in southern Lazio. Simultaneously, red marines captured Brindisi in a daring amphibious assault and then marched onward to Taranto with only minimal opposition, causing havoc in the white rear. The mass desertion of the white army's junior officers soon followed. After some equivocating, the hard-right government in Naples evacuated to Sardinia in May as red forces were on the verge of capturing the city. Italy's revolutionary government established control over the entire peninsula during the next three months, flushing out and defeating remaining legitimist army units who refused to surrender. A continuing insurgency of irregular militias and clandestine paramilitaries in the south did, however, remain a thorn in the side of the new socialist government. Fortunately enough, most of Mussolini's fascist paramilitary fled to France to fight for a foreign nation, strengthening the position of Clemenceau's ultraconservative opponents.

The two social-democratic emergency ministries in Sweden and Denmark, meanwhile, continued to drift into the German sphere. In response to Lithuania's confederation with Poland, Germany began placing pressure on Denmark to close the straits to British shipping, which would prevent the movement of British arms and goods to the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda. In March, they finally caved, prompting Britain to send a contingent of marines to occupy the Danish possessions of Iceland and Greenland until it could offer credible guarantees that they would not be used as bases for a Red Armada. This had the effect of rallying public sentiment to the side of the Social-Democratic Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning, and drawing Denmark more closely into the German camp.

In Sweden, the Brantling ministry had already grown quite popular after passing an array of social welfare measures. Now, with German and Russian orders for Swedish imports surging, employment had begun to recover. Ahead of a snap election in 1921, the right-wing parties were accused of advocating an alliance with Britain which would upend Swedish trade and provoke a civil war. "Brantling or Chaos" was the slogan of the day, and it proved persuasive enough to convince many middle-class Swedes to either vote for their social-democratic class enemy or simply sit out the election altogether. Brantling won just under 50% of the vote and nearly half of the seats in Parliament, and an alliance with the centrist and increasingly anti-british Farmer's League secured a parliamentary majority. Over the summer, Brantling signed treaties of friendship with both Germany and Russia, granting them privileged access to Swedish goods in return for non-aggression pacts.

In the Netherlands, the besieged socialist coalition government (an alliance between left-centrist Social Democrats and left-radical council communists) managed to hold onto power despite a concerted assault from the Belgian-backed repatriated National Army. In the last few months of 1920, the legitimist Dutch government successfully occupied the small cities of Tilburg, Breda, Eindhoven, and Roosendal. The disorganized state of the red militias allowed them to breach Fortress Holland and seize Dordrecht at the close of the year, directly threatening the Rotterdam-Amsterdam corridor. To the northeast, in Groningen and Zwolle, town councils declared their loyalty to the legitimist government, threatening to cut off the Utrecht-Essen corridor that had previously served as the main conduit of German supply. This was completed in early January with the white victory at the battle of Arnheim.

It was in this situation that the German government, citing the threat to its own volunteers and massacres by the white forces, sent three divisions into the northeastern Netherlands. They occupied the main roads in the provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, and Gelderland, and in early April took back the city of Arnhem in a combined effort with their Dutch allies. Later that month, the long-planned white assault toward Leiden was repulsed, and now at risk of being encircled, tens of thousands of white soldiers abandoned their heavy equipment and retreated back toward the Breda-Tilburg-Eindhoven line. The siege of Eindhoven in October would bring an end to formal white resistance, though the Netherlands was to remain home of some of the most fierce white partisan fighting over the next few years.

The relatively swift advance of the revolutionaries in Italy and the Netherlands stood in stark contrast to the increasingly static affair of the French Civil War. The offensives of 1920 had exhausted the opposing armies, and now each side retrenched and assumed a defensive posture, settling down for a sustained period of recuperation and rebuilding. Offensives were irregular and small-scale. The spurt of American weapons to the French National Army granted it neither the manpower nor the morale necessary to resume large-scale assaults.

It was not only in France that opposing forces reached an equilibrium. The Greek offensive into Anatolia grew overextended before it could reach the capital of Ankara. Croatia's counteroffensive against Serbia, at first wildly successful, ground to a halt northwest of Belgrade. In Spain, Brazil, and the Southern Cone of South America, an ascendant left found itself evenly matched against the rapidly organizing forces of reaction, while Japan, now at war with America, halted their offensives in China to focus on fortifying the South Seas Islands and capturing the Philippines.

Internal Reform and Consolidation

Even as the front lines stabilized, the revolutionary states of Europe sought to consolidate the new political order. An unprecedented wave of social and legal reform began. Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union all adopted new constitutions. Sweden and Denmark became de facto republics. Socialization efforts picked up steam in the French Worker and Soldier's Republic and the Mezzegiorno. The fledgling Bulgarian Worker and Peasant's Republic, trapped between hostile capitalist states and still in the midst of a bitter civil war, began a purge of the political opposition. Latvian and Estonian Bolsheviks applied for admission into the Soviet Union after successfully overthrowing nationalist-bourgerois governments with the assistance of both German and Russian militias. Germany entered into a second period of revolutionary upheaval as the worker-council's secured their ascendancy and their allies in the executive branch worked to introduce comprehensive economic planning.

The reactionary and nationalist states also engaged in projects of nation-building, though these were made more difficult by their involvement in war. The social-populist Hungarian regime of Karolyi continued to hold out against Croatia, Czechia, and Romania, though the year brought renewed attritional fighting that steadily exhausted the large Hungarian Army. Pilsudski's Poland had thus far remained aloof from the battle for Hungary, and sought to assure its larger neighbors to the east and west of its friendly intentions. When a revolt of Bolsheviks in Lithuania was brutally crushed by the bourgeois successor regime of the Imperial German occupation, Poland launched an assault on Vilnius, ostensibly to protect Polish-language speakers in the area, who had been subject to discriminatory policies instituted by the nationalist prime minister Augustinas Voldemoras.

While Voldemoras urged for a war of national resistance against the Polish adversary, Aleksandras Stulginskis, Kazys Grinius, and Kipras Bielinis, on behalf of a coalition of social-democrats, agrarian centrists, and pragmatic nationalists, urged negotiations with the Poles, hoping to secure their protection against Soviet expansionism and German irredentist claims to Memelland. The loss of Vilnius in May provided them the necessary political support, and they ousted Voldemoras in a vote of no confidence. Shortly thereafter, Lithuania entered into negotiations with Poland. Pilsudski pressed for full confederation, to the chagrin of both the Polish nationalists at home and the Lithuanians. The latter, however, had little options for an "out" at this point, and acquiesced on June 14th, bringing Pilsudski one step closer to his dream of a Polish-led East European Intermarium.

In Italy, a National Congress of Council, Trade Union, and Peasants delegates met in July to determine the new form of the Italian state. The strength of the anarchist and left-socialist delegations ensured that there would be no return to Bourgeois Parliamentarianism. A council-republic was proclaimed with a significantly weaker executive authority than in either Russia or Germany. Catholic-socialist and anarchist factions banded together in an unlikely alliance to force through a federalist basic law, though given the avowedly "provisional" and "non-constitutional" character of these "guiding principles", this could be easily changed at a later date if the Marxists ever achieved absolute predominance.

Dutch victory in the Civil War also resulted in a Council Republic, though its institutional design differed profoundly from Italy's. The fanatical resistance of the Catholic and neo-Calvinist "Pillars" was still ongoing when the Netherlands adopted its basic law; socialist politicians concluded that a powerful, centralized unitary state would be required to consolidate the new order. Stringent bans were placed on all bourgeois and "non-proletarian" parties, and the executive was empowered. In contrast to Italy, where power was dispersed throughout a variety of proletarian organizations, in the Netherlands it was concentrated solely in the worker's councils. This was the most "pure" council-republic yet; several prominent members of the German RAF visited the Netherlands after it enshrined its new basic law, congratulating them on creating the most revolutionary polity on earth.

Red Diplomacy: The Third International

The city of Konigsberg was once a sleepy port on the Baltic, a university town known for its stellar academic pedigree and the likes of Kant, Hamann, and Goldbach. Like many other such cities, it had experienced a spurt of construction following an uptick in trade with Russia and Sweden, but its distance from the main centers of German industry put it at a comparative disadvantage to Lubeck and Danzig. It still retained a decidedly medieval and provincial character. With everything said, it was a rather odd place for Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg to meet for the first time since the German Revolution.

By all accounts, their talks in the Konigsberg palace were a quiet, lowkey affair. With much of Europe still aflame, they formalized the first ever treaty between two socialist states. The two leaders treated each other with genuine respect, but a certain distance and wariness could already be observed. Neither Lenin nor Luxemburg had forgotten the heady polemics of the past. From the very beginning of their relationship, they had been on opposite sides of the "party" and "nationality" issues. More recently, Luxemburg had penned a stinging critique of Lenin's decision to oust Martov's internationalists from the government; somewhat longer ago, she had conspired with Bukharin's left-communists to oust Lenin from Sovnarkom. Now, Luxemburg's victory in Germany had bolstered the position of those same left-communists, and with the assistance of their erstwhile ally Yakov Sverdlov, they increasingly hemmed in Lenin's room for maneuver.

The agreement the two socialist leaders reached was nonetheless epoch-making, and set the stage for the next few decades of German-Soviet relations. A permanent non-aggression pact was signed, the exchange of military and engineering secrets was agreed upon, and both sides promised to cooperate in armed interventions in Central and Eastern Europe. Tariffs would be slashed on most goods, creating something close to a free trade zone throughout a vast swathe of Eurasia. Russia would provide Germany with immense quantities of grain in return for an equally immense quantity of tractors and other agricultural equipment.

There was also the matter of a Third Internationale. At some point, the bourgeois counteroffensive was sure to arrive, and when it did, it was essential to have a new proletarian international to coordinate the policy of the revolutionary parties. The tragic impotence of the second internationale, its manifest incapacity to rally action against the Great War, would not be repeated. Lenin and Luxemburg agreed that this new body should possess significantly more power than its predecessor to discipline wayward parties and compel action from recalcitrant party leaders.

During the final day of the Konigsberg meeting, they attempted - in vain - to hammer out a program and schedule for the first congress of a Third Internationale. Lenin was pleased to have the congress be hosted in Berlin, but insisted that Luxemburg's party be given a share of delegates proportional to those it received in the recent worker-council elections, which would reduce its representation by a little more than a third. Luxemburg then insisted that, if this was the case, Kautsky and Haase's left-wing social democrats be permitted to attend, a suggestion that Lenin, who insisted on banning all "opportunist elements", did not take kindly. Then there was the matter of the Italians - they looked to be on the way to winning the Civil War, Luxemburg pointed out, and should probably be included in any such preliminary deliberations. Lenin welcomed the Italian delegation to the international proper, but wanted to ensure that the Gramscian-Bordigist faction currently ascendant was fully committed to purging its own reformist wing, and believed that they needn't be involved in planning out the first congress. After such disputes continued for some time, the two agreed to entrust the matter to a body of trusted delegates, as well as some additional figures who had distinguished themselves by their service to international socialism.

The planning commission for the Third Internationale first met in Konigsberg on February 3rd, 1921. Its members included Paul Levi, Clara Zetkin, Grigory Zinoviev, Inessa Armand, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and Emil Barth. Karl Radek, John Reed, and Leon Trotsky were placed on the commission as non-partisan figures. In reality, these individuals were hardly nonideological, but their political allegiances were less clear. Radek was distrusted and disdained by both Lenin and Luxemburg, but had nonetheless earned the grudging respect of each, certainly no mean feat.

At their first meeting, the delegates agreed that all parties which had participated actively in the revolutions of 1919 were to receive invitations - the Party of Revolutionary Social-Democracy would therefore be allowed to attend, as would the Bulgarian Agrarian Socialists. Additionally, the apportionment of delegates would be determined by relative population. In countries with more than one qualifying party, delegations would be proportioned based on their relative performance in council elections. Anarchist and syndicalist parties would be invited to the congress, where their ultimate status in the socialist movement would be decided. Other parties which aimed for the "revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" would be given seats, and, against the insistence of Levi and Zetkin, "social-patriotic parties" of the "oppressed national bourgeoisie of the colonial world" would also be permitted seats as observers.

The planning commission met again in late March to finalize preparations for the congress, including the sending of invitations, but was delayed by several developments. Firstly, the Italians had heard of the planned Congress, and now nearing victory in the Civil War, protested at their lack of inclusion. The Dutch soon did the same. Secondly, Berlin was no longer felt to be a suitable host city, as construction projects and the need to house migrants were making it difficult to find a proper venue. Finally, the increasing alignment of Social-Democratic Sweden and Denmark with Germany was casting into question the fundamental purpose of the New International. If it was meant to act as a forum for international cooperation between socialist states, then it would be absolutely crucial to include these two allied, albeit capitalist powers. If, however, it was to be a body composed of revolutionary parties, then the social democrats of Sweden and Denmark would be disqualified, however well they entrenched themselves in power. Lenin and Luxemburg clearly envisioned it serving both purposes, and hence the commission wavered on whether to invite these two parties.

These matters were resolved over the next few meetings. Italian and Dutch delegations were invited, bringing the total number of representatives on the commission to fifteen. It was agreed to pawn off the issue of the Swedish and Danish social-democrats to the congress itself, while inviting them as observer members for the time being. The Dutch convinced a somewhat skeptical commission to hold the First Congress in Amsterdam; in the end, its members could not resist the notion of convening this body within spitting distance of Britain, a hostile and provocative gesture that fit well with the prevailing mood during this high tide of proletarian internationalism.

The following parties were invited to the founding congress of the Third Internationale (those who did not attend are italicized):

Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine.

Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Byelorussia.

Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Estonia.

Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Latvia.

Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Finland

Revolutionary Worker's Front (Germany).

Party of Revolutionary Social Democracy (Germany).

Bulgarian Socialist Party (Narrow).

Bulgarian Party of Agrarian Socialists.

Dutch Social Democratic Worker's Party

Social Democratic Party of the Netherlands

Italian Socialist Party

Italian Syndicalist Union

Associated Italian Anarchists

Spanish Socialist Worker's Party

Elements of the Socialist Party of America

French Section of the Worker's International

Revolutionary Syndicalists of Argentina

Revolutionary Syndicalists of Brazil

Revolutionary Syndicalists and Socialists in Chile

Associated French Anarchists

Norwegian Labour Party

Social Democratic Party of Switzerland

Czech Social-Democratic Party

Social-Democratic Party of Romania

Revolutionary Shop Stewards of England

Serbian Social Democratic Party

Left-wing of the Social-Democrats of Hungary

Left-wing of the Belgian Labour Party

Left-wing of the Social-Democratic Party of Sweden

Left-wing of the Social-Democratic Party of Denmark

Centre of Social-Democratic Party of Sweden (Observers)

Centre of Social-Democratic Party of Denmark (Observers)

Indian National Congress (Observers)

The wide range of invited parties attests to the ballooning strength of the revolutionary left in the postwar era. The influence of reformist social-democrats had reached a nadir within their parties, pressurized by an active grassroots and the success of the revolutionary wave in seizing the Central European plain. Fearful of losing power outright, social-democratic centrists everywhere allied themselves to the insurgent left, confident in their ability to wring concessions from frightened bourgeois governments. Norwegian, Swiss, Czech, Serbian, Spanish and Romanian Social-Democratic parties were all invited to participate in the first congress, as were factions of the more reformist English, Belgian, Swedish, and Danish Social-Democratic movements. Finally, in line with the policy of Lenin and in recognition of a mutuality of interest, the Indian National Congress was invited as an observer party.

On September 21st, a little under two years since the First Revolutionary Era began, over 800 delegates gathered in the Beurs von Berlage (a former stock exchange) in Amsterdam. More than twenty countries were represented, including the ruling parties of seven sovereign states (Germany, Russia, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark). The first matter was to decide upon a name…

More than a few of the conflicts of the following week were anticipated in the two hours of debate that followed. Lenin and the leaders of the Ukrainian, Latvian, and Estonian Bolshevik parties moved for the new body to be called the "Communist International", a motion which was rejected by the overwhelming majority of non-bolshevik delegates. An equally large contingent opposed a motion from Georg Ledebour and Hugo Haase to name it the "Internationale of Revolutionary Social-Democrats", which was felt to emphasize too much the ties to the pre-war socialist movement. Emil Barth mooted the "World-wide Front of Revolutionary Marxists", a name which consciously echoed the Luxemburgist notion of a decentralized "worker's front". This was thought by most delegates to be too narrowly ideological, though it served as the basis for Gramsci's suggestion that they name themselves the "International Union of Revolutionary Marxist Parties".

The anarchists waged a campaign against this name, which they thought to be overly exclusive, and suggested the "International Union of Revolutionary Marxist Parties and Allied Movements", an amendment that an unusual alliance of Paul Levi, Georg Ledebour, and the ultra-left Bordigists campaigned against, warning of a "dilution" in the character of the new international. An attempt to force through Gramsci's resolution was barred, however, by the opposition of the Luxemburgist Revolutionary Worker's Front, which objected to the use of the "totalizing party-form" that they argued was irrevocably linked to bourgeois electoralism. The French Section of the Worker's International, who were eager to please their anarchist allies, also voiced their dissent. Radek proposed that they simply eliminate the word "party", thus becoming the "International Union of Revolutionary Marxists", a suggestion which the anarchists still voted against but which the rest of the delegates agreed to by a majority vote. Thus on September 23rd, at 14:00 Central European Time, the International Union of Revolutionary Marxists was formed.

The Qualifications Controversy

After determining upon a name, the First Congress of the International Union of Revolutionary Marxists (aka INTREVMAR) spent the remaining hours of its first day with the drafting and issuing of proclamations. The Second Internationale, Britain, America, reformist socialists, and international imperialism were duly condemned. A letter was completed imploring the workers of the world to rise in revolt, to make the present European Revolution into a Global one. This work proceeded with great pace and jubilation, for all were aware that in the next few days, consensus would have to be scraped together with far greater effort.

On September 24th, 1921, Lenin and Luxemburg both took the stage for the first time. Who would be allowed into the new International? This was the question which threatened to divide and implode the present gathering. In his opening address, Lenin railed for thirty minutes against the sorry presence of "opportunists" in the assembly, "hangers-on" who had "followed along the heroics of my comrades in the Revolutionary Worker's Front and among the ardent and true Communists Gramsci and Bordiga, but who would as surely have been lackeys of the bourgeoisie had the workers of Europe not fulfilled their historical destiny". Before determining precise conditions for which organizations would be permitted to join the new internationale, they must first expel those who presently do not belong, the sizable contingent of left-centrists who had gone over or allied themselves to the revolutionary camp, but who still showed a certain shyness.

Lenin's gambit placed Luxemburg in an impossible position: with the left-centrists removed, the Bolsheviks would take a dominant position at the conference, but she also could not speak in their defense while maintaining her good conscience, as she privately shared in Lenin's criticism. Her position was salvaged by the trio of Antonio Gramsci, Paul Levi, and the Bulgarian Socialist Dimitar Blagoev. They did not criticize the content of Lenin's proposal, but jointly argued that any such expulsion would have to be based on criteria explicitly formulated and approved by the Third International. Lenin's motion was thereafter rejected on ostensibly procedural grounds.

The gambit of the Bolshevik leader may have failed, but his position was strengthened, for the left-wing of Luxemburg's own Revolutionary Worker's Front broke ranks to vote with him, as did the Bordigists, Swiss left-radicals, Dutch council-communists, and a sizable minority of the French Socialists. Seeking to regain the initiative, Luxemburg herself spoke next, and proposed a list of "Five Conditions" for any party seeking to join the Third International:

1. Any organisation that seeks to join and remain within the Union of Revolutionary Marxists must embrace in both its daily practice and its platform the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is to be discussed not simply as a stock phrase to be learned by rote; it should be popularised by all the main organs of the organisation, and its achievement must be the proximate goal of activists and leaders alike.

2. Members of the Third International may adopt whatever organizational form best suits its particular circumstances, so long as they possess sufficient mechanisms of control and discipline to ensure that they adhere to its resolutions and guidelines.

3. All parties, collectives, worker's fronts, and other members of the Union of Revolutionary Marxists must include in their platforms clauses condemning the reformism and social-patriotism of the Second International.

4.No body shall be permitted to join the Third International which is opposed in letter or spirit to the revolutionary action of the world proletariat of the past two years.

5. Every party and organization which is part of the Third International must accept that its decisions are binding. The failure of the Second International to coordinate opposition to the Great War is attributable at least in part to its lack of governance structures with real power. The Third International is not simply a forum for socialist parties to resolve their differences but the highest democratic organ of the international proletariat, of which its individual parties, collectives, and organs are local chapters.

The conditions, initially set to be voted on as a totality, were disaggregated after it became clear that significant opposition existed to the first two but not the final three. The right-wing of the Congress, represented by the German Party of Revolutionary Social Democracy, the Dutch Social Democratic Worker's Party, and the Bulgarian Agrarian Socialists protested the inclusion of the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the first condition, and in suitably revisionist character, questioned the need for such a dictatorship given the manifest success of the revolutions and the broad social base which had coalesced behind them. They were joined by the anarchists, and though short of a majority, the threat of a split was sufficient to prompt an amendment to the condition clarifying that dictatorship of the proletariat referred not to an authoritarian pattern of rule, but instead to the formation of state institutions in which the proletariat would be guaranteed a preponderance of power.

The 2nd condition was opposed by the Bolshevik faction. They insisted that all bodies admitted to the Third International from capitalist powers be organized along more centralist lines, arguing that the experience of Russia demonstrated the need for parties with a well-developed center capable of acting in a vanguard role. The Bolshevik resolution which was put forward, however, did not call for a sweeping Leninist reorganization, but instead emphasized that the parties in the third international were to form executive committees composed of representatives of the most advanced section of the proletariat, which were to act as a vanguard for all other revolutionary forces. This clause's wording effectively split the difference between the Luxemburgist and Leninist conceptions of the party, hearkening back to Luxemburg's more vanguardist writings of the early 1910s, before the astounding organizational powers of the council-movement prompted her to adopt a more decentralized party structure that respected its autonomy. In a spirit of reconciliation, the Bolshevik proposal was presented as an amendment rather than a new resolution. The right-wing of the Revolutionary Worker's Front and the Italian Socialists voted for the measure, allowing it to narrowly pass.

The next major controversy came when Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of Revolutionary Social Democracy, introduced a resolution to ban all parties and organizations that did not consider themselves Marxist. This targeted the anarchists, syndicalists, and the Bulgarian Agrarians. After some hesitation, Luxemburg spoke in defense of the motion, shocking some participants given the prior tactical alliance of the RAF and anarchists on a number of issues. Marxist parties could continue to join united fronts with anarchists and syndicalists, Luxemburg conceded, but they did not belong in this new Marxist International. She was soon joined by Amadeo Bordiga, Pieter Troelstra, and the Scandinavian left. Antonio Gramsci, the representative of the predominant faction in the large Italian Socialist delegation, spoke against the resolution and advocated for the "broadest possible front" while revolutionary forces still had a chance to achieve additional successes. Ludovic-Oscar Frossard and Dimitri Blagoev, both members of Marxist parties in broad fronts with other revolutionary tendencies, rose to defend their allies and decried the "expulsion of loyal revolutionaries".

With the congress evenly divided, all eyes now turned to the Bolsheviks. Lenin was no friend to the anarchists, having ousted Nestor Mahkno from Ukraine and engaged in relentless polemic against anarchist currents of the Russian revolutionary movement. Along with Kautsky's Revolutionary Social Democracy, it was Lenin's Bolsheviks who were perhaps the most ideologically distant from the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. Yet with the exception of Mahkno and Malatesta's faction, none of the Italian and French anarchists had split following the vote for the first condition, which enshrined the dictatorship of the proletariat as a guiding principle of the new International. There were some hopes for reconciliation, and Lenin had earned a reputation as a pragmatist.

He was to sorely disappoint them. Lenin led the Bolshevik delegation in voting to approve Kautsky's resolution, thereby banning the anarchist and syndicalist sections from the Third International. In an attempt to maintain their loyalty, two additional measures were passed. The first granted sympathetic anarchists and syndicalists permanent observer status; the second created a coordinating body on which leading representatives of friendly non-marxist tendencies would sit, tasked with forging alliances between different revolutionary currents. Around half of the expelled anarchists and syndicalists, along with the Bulgarian Agrarian Socialists, agreed to participate in this venture.

The Nationality and Colonial Questions

On the 4th day of the conference, the size of the congress was diminished somewhat from the loss of the non-marxist delegates, though many remained as observers. With the main conditions for entry drafted, matters drifted to more theoretical concerns. A subcommittee had been formed to draft a resolution on the "national question", but it ended up deadlocked between Leninists, Austromarxists, and "Orthodox" Marxists. Eventually, it was determined to open up the debate to the main congress.

The question of nationalism and national minorities was tied to perhaps the most pressing issue of policy, the "colonial question". Followers of the Leninist line on nationality were most sanguine about the revolutionary potential of anti-colonial nationalisms, and hence most willing to work hand-in-hand with bourgeois revolutionaries in united fronts. The Orthodox Marxists were skeptical about appealing to repressed nationalisms, and insisted that the small socialist parties of the colonized peoples maintain their separation from their bourgeois counterparts. Struggles of national liberation could not be detached from the conquest of proletarian power.

Somewhere in the middle of these two tendencies were the Austromarxists, who favored the granting of special, national rights to minorities within existing states. Situated at the right-wing of the congress, they were unconvinced of Lenin's calls for a world revolution, but also tended to favor his more pragmatic policy of the United Front. As a whole, they preferred that the new international dedicate its efforts to the continuing European revolution, which fell closer to the policy of the Orthodox Marxists.

In the background of these debates was the question of IntRevMar's stance toward the bourgeois Indian revolution, which was presently occupying the British Empire. Ever since their arrival, the delegation from the INC had attracted a great amount of attention. Most of the delegates were aware that the initial revolutionary wave would have faced much stauncher opposition from the British were it not for the Indian revolt, but there was a persisting uneasiness with the clearly bourgeois character of the revolution.

Debate began when the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Anton Pannekoek took the stage. A resolute council-communist and ally of the left-wing of the RAF, Pannekoek delivered a scathing denunciation of the advocates for "national-bourgeois" socialism, comparing "the myth of the nation" to the "selfsame myth of the omnipotent god". Nationalism was merely a "bourgeois ideological phenomenon", and National-chauvinism was unacceptable in every variety. Anticolonial struggle which merely re-established bourgeois rule might, Pannokeok conceded, be "supported for strictly tactical reasons, to undermine global imperialism", but it would behoove all socialist parties to "assault the myth of the nation head-on, without hesitation or apprehension".

Pannekoek's speech received only muted applause. Leon Trotsky led the Leninist counterattack, accusing the Orthodox Marxists of "ignorance, at times obtuse and purposeful, of the true workings of world-imperialism". At a time "When the revolutionary upheaval inside India has permitted the greatest freedom of action for the European Proletariat", Trotsky declared, "How can it be said that the revolt of the oppressed nationalities bears no essential connexion to the task of Proletarian Revolution?". Far from being simply a "myth", nationality was an "enduring element of the ideological superstructure of bourgeois rule", and the liberation of the repressed nationalities was a "necessary condition for the transcendence of nationalism tout court". Trotsky's speech electrified the Congress; Hugo Haase, won over to the Leninist position, spoke in defense of the "right of bourgeois, democratic revolution against colonial rule", and advocated for the Third International to "support progressive forces everywhere which will undermine the despotism of world-imperialism". To the horror of the Orthodox-Marxists, additional Austro-Marxists and left-centrists defected to the Leninist camp, giving them an absolute majority. A resolution was passed committing the Third International to aiding anticolonial movements everywhere, provided they were dominated by "progressive sections" of the national-bourgeois who were willing to ally with nascent proletarian movements.

This did not settle the related question of national minorities. Here, the Austromarxists put up a more determined resistance to the Leninists, and Lenin himself was on much shakier ground, with his own Russian Bolshevik Party threatening an internal revolt over his insistence on adhering to a strict line. After several hours of debate, a non-committal resolution denouncing national oppression and committing the Third International to its elimination was passed.

The Political Question

Ironically, the success of the socialist revolutions had made the achievement of true internationalism much more difficult. With socialist states embedded across the Central European plain, the question naturally arose: who held true sovereignty over these new polities, the global worker's movement or their own, national ones? Already, these states had conducted diplomacy with one another. Yet insofar as they were meant to be mere sections of the global proletariat, should not such negotiation proceed first and foremost through the new Revolutionary International?

Such was the "political question". More straightforwardly than almost any other issue, it divided the Congress between left and right-wing factions. The latter held onto the notion of separate, socialist states coordinating in much the same manner as bourgeois ones, whereas the former, led on this issue by the brilliant theoretician Amadeo Bordiga, sought to transform the Third International into a body of world-wide governance. In Bordiga's vision, the international would not merely serve as a transnational coordinating body for parties, but would also regularly impose domestic policies on member-states. Surprisingly, delegates hailing from capitalist countries such as Switzerland, Chile, and Spain, who on the whole were of a more moderate cast, largely opposed this proposal on the grounds that they had no desire to interfere in the internal governance of the socialist states. They did insist on their right to review and participate in diplomacy, though, which was resisted by the Revolutionary Social Democrats and the right-wing of both the Italian and French delegations.

In the end, Bordiga's more utopian and internationalist proposals were tabled until a later date. A "federalization commission" would be formed to devise plans for the further integration of socialist states, but for the time being there was a need for a more practical, immediate solution to the political question. Karl Radek proposed a "Council of Revolutionary States" that would serve as both a diplomatic forum and an organ of the International's democratic power. Radek suggested that it be composed of a proportional share of delegates from the main congress, and that socialist nations be obliged to conduct formal diplomacy through the body. The internationalist spirit of this idea received sustained approbation from the delegates, though many of the entrenched parties of governance were nervous to surrender so much of their freedom of action to the new body. Against the protests of the minor delegations, an amendment was passed reducing the representation of non-governing parties on the council by 40%, ensuring the dominance of the Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Italian, and French.

The Concluding Session

The First Congress of the International of Revolutionary Marxists ended on September 28th. A 35-person executive committee was elected. Karl Radek, who had been the force behind some of the most savvy compromises between the disputatious factions of the international left, was made the chairman. Beside him, it was comprised of Eleven Bolsheviks, five Luxemburgists, three Gramscians, one Bordigist, two revolutionary German social-democrats, one Dutch council-communist, one Dutch left social-democrat, and nine members of various non-governing revolutionary marxist parties. Plans were made for an additional congress the following year, and for a meeting of the first Council of Revolutionary States in Hamburg. In a victory for the German delegation, it was decided that the headquarters of the new international would be constructed in Berlin.

At 18:45 CET, the newly-formed International Socialist Men's Choir took the stage. All commotion ceased, and the assembled delegates, for so long busy in the tasks of debate and deliberation, suddenly grew somber and quiet. The grand building, the former stock market of perhaps the first capitalist power, was now draped in red, filled to its brim with the representatives of international socialism. As the familiar hymn echoed through the main lobby, more than a few tears were shed. Kautsky and Lenin, the old centrist and the new firebrand, could be seen silently embracing. The INC delegation bowed their heads in reverence. At long last, the proletariat had risen to meet their historical destiny; the hour of revolution had come, and the new world was now being born.

White Diplomacy: The Second Round of Atlantic Meetings

Over the long 19th century, the Euroatlantic axis of world-capitalism had grown to stupendous proportions. The exchange of commodities and power of finance-capital linked together London, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janiero. Yet at the crucial moment, despite the density of commercial and financial connections, the American state did not act to buttress its Western European trading partners, instead opting for a policy of neutrality in the Great War. Such detachment was only possible because of the tremendous size of the internal American market, which permitted American diplomats an unparalleled freedom of maneuver. The Great Rapprochement during the final years of the long 19th century was halted and then reversed, until it appeared as if America was on the verge of joining the Germans in a crusade against the British Empire. This, of course, was not to be.

The diplomacy that led to the formation of the Atlantic Union and a tenuous Anglo-American alliance can only be understood through an examination of the internal forces remaking the British political economy. For much of Britain's history as a capitalist nation, commercial and financial capital was concentrated among large landowning elements. The aristocratic financiers and traders of the City of London exercised a leading role in the state, represented by the hegemony of the exchequer over the government cabinets. Beneath them, concentrated in the liberal party, were the small British textile and consumer goods magnates. Over time, a portion of northern heavy industry moved into the Tory Party, embracing Chamberlain's proposal for a system of imperial preference.

The continual expansion of the British war effort required ever-larger sacrifices from the aristocratic financial class. The traditionally laissez faire British state drained their profits and redirected them into the booming war industries. By the end of 1918, the traditional ascendancy of the financiers was fraying. It was dealt another blow by the decision to leave the gold standard, weakening London's status as an international financial hub, but also strengthening British export industries. The Indian revolution shattered it decisively by destroying or rendering impotent a large share of their investments.

Into this new world stepped the manufacturing bourgeoisie, which at last emerged from its long period of tutelage. The system of tariffs and excise taxes allowed it to develop in the shadow of its more productive American counterpart. However, 1920 threatened to upend this new order prematurely: the Indian revolution cut off a large source of imports, forcing Britain to lean more on its partners in the Western Hemisphere, and the currency began to rapidly depreciate against the dollar. Inflation, which had long acted as an incentive for manufacturers to invest in their plant, now was widely felt to be undermining labor discipline. The old financial class, damaged but not destroyed, began calling for an aggressive policy of deflation and a restriction in the money supply. The conservative party of Churchill, now a de facto alliance between the northern military-industrial interest and the southern financial-commercial bloc, looked to America to buttress the British political economy and resolve its sectional tensions.

There were good reasons for America to take the British up on this plea. It would need Britain to fight off the world-wide revolutionary advance, and diplomatic engagement and financial assistance might prevent it from eventually instituting a system of imperial preference. Most important for American decision-makers, however, was the British Navy and its extensive system of world-wide coaling stations. These would be crucial if America was to win its war against the Japanese adversary in a timely fashion.

Japan inflicted repeated and humiliating defeats on America during the first half-year of the Eastern Seas War. More than a few comparisons were made to the abysmal Russian performance in 1905. While some progress had been made on fortifying and expanding the Manila garrison in the runup to the war, America simply did not possess the logistical capacity to resupply it. The Asiatic Fleet based in the Philippines was dealt a devastating blow at the battle of the Philippines Sea as it attempted to return home, losing a little under half its ships. The port city was surrounded and besieged on January 19th, leading to a halfhearted attempt from the American Battlefleet to steam west from their bases in California to resupply its defenders. The 12 American battleships were an overmatch for Japan's six, but the Japanese had no intention in engaging in a decisive battle which would likely be a losing one. The ships were permitted to approach and begin resupplying Manila harbor. One day later, the four battleships of Division Three were ambushed by the main body of the Japanese fleet while detached from the main force; after taking on water, American sailors were forced to scuttle USS New York and three cruisers. The absence of sufficient scouting boats had proven fatal, and the US Navy, which was skeptical of a resupply mission they felt to be politically motivated, now reasserted control over their own operations. Manila fell a week later.

Without a large scouting force or coaling stations closer to Japan, the US Navy would be forced to enter into its engagements blind. Most American naval experts estimated that it would take at least two years to build up a large enough scouting force and extensive enough series of naval bases to retake the Philippines and break the hold of the Japanese Navy over the western Pacific, permitting aid to flow to their Chinese allies. This meant that the war could not realistically be won until 1924, a prospect that the anti-communist internationalists in the state department found utterly unacceptable.

The only ready solution was to secure British entry as a cobelligerent. The first set of Atlantic Accords, negotiated in London at the end of 1920, had cut British tariff rates, reduced British loan repayments, and laid the groundwork for future negotiations. American exports to Britain soared once again, but the weakening pound threatened to deplete Britain's foreign currency reserves. Loans from America's financiers, strapped by the depression, were not forthcoming. A more formal arrangement was needed to avert another economic slowdown in the midst of the slow recovery of the Anglo-American economies. Internationalist-minded policymakers hoped to achieve something more than another one-off deal; the temporary, makeshift character of Bryan's Alexandria Accords were blamed for failing to truly stabilize relations between the two Atlantic powers. Now more than ever, new and enduring institutions needed to be created to wed together the emerging Anglo-American alliance. For the internationalists, this was the only hope of containing the spreading rot of Bolshevism.

American and British diplomatic delegations met in Boston at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel on July 12th. On the agenda were discussions to "permanently stabilize the international situation", "ensure lasting economic prosperity", and "achieve a durable understanding between the two great nations of English-speaking peoples". The American delegation was led by President Elihu Root, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, and Senator Frank Kellogg, its British counterpart, by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Cecil, and the former one, Edward Grey. Representatives from all of the British dominions were also present, as well as some of the nations of South America. However, these generally acted as observers rather than active participants in the discussions.

Sharing a desire to prevent the spread of the socialist revolution further into Eurasia and Western Europe, America and Britain had plenty of incentives to get along. They focused initially on areas of acknowledged mutual interest. Root agreed to pressure the federal reserve into extending a generous loan to Britain, and also assented to forming a body of financiers that would assist the British in pegging the pound to twice the value of the dollar. Reluctantly, Britain consented to formally repudiate the Japanese alliance in return for an American promise to respect the British zone of influence in China. In secret negotiations, Britain also vowed to permit American use of British coaling stations in the Pacific, including the port of Singapore, by July 1922 at the latest. It was widely expected that Japan would declare war on Britain shortly thereafter; it was hoped that by this date, the Indian revolt and a nationalist guerilla movement in Egypt would be close to defeat.

The more thorny matter was the formation of durable institutions that would wed together the Anglo-Americans over the long term. American suggestions for a free trade zone were rebuffed by the British, who hoped to maintain some level of protection for the northern industries. Britain also refused to vow that new territories which came under its suzerainty would be opened to American trade on an equal basis, though they made an exception for the Dutch East Indies, which had become utterly reliant on British protection following the social revolution in the Netherlands.

The two powers did agree to cooperate on efforts to shore up the peripheries of Eurasia from the red advance. America promised development aid and assistance to Persia and Spain, and pledged to redouble its support for the legitimist government in France. Britain also would have the option to buy American planes and landships at a heavily discounted cost. Additionally, both powers agreed to a permanent economic and diplomatic council with headquarters rotating between New York and London, and a schedule of additional meetings to discuss the sharing of military technology.

The second round of Atlantic agreements laid the groundwork for the Atlantic Union. The diplomatic and economic councils would eventually evolve into the Council of State and the Bureau for Global Development. Already, the basic distribution of power could be perceived in these first meetings: an Anglo-American centre, around which revolved the British dominions and South American clients. The revolutionary wave posed unprecedented challenges to the capitalist world, and a coterie of British and American internationalists believed that the response must be equally revolutionary. The forces of international capital, divided before the Great War, had learned a hard lesson: they would cooperate or they would die.

 

[Curby]

Soviet Power Forever
The Consolidation of Bolshevik Rule, 1919-1921​

In the Treaty of Riga, the new Soviet state formally acknowledged its weakness and international isolation, and resolved to convert itself into an appendage of the German war machine as a protective measure. Those who sought to take up arms and continue the fight had already been sidelined, and with a Central Powers victory in the west looking increasingly likely, it was decided that concessions must be secured before they achieved their final victory. Ludendorff proved surprisingly amenable. The Ukrainian territories had been a nightmare to administer, and the Bolsheviks promised that the critical trade in raw materials would be expanded under their government. Most of Belarus and Ukraine was returned to the Soviets, a major diplomatic victory for the Bolsheviks.

Perhaps the most critical condition of the Treaty of Riga, however, was the requirement that Russia export millions of bushels of grain to Germany and Austria at heavily discounted rates. They would at least receive some marks for their trouble, which could be used to import heavy machinery and other capital goods, but this made little difference to the peasants and their representatives. The left-sr's, who were ousted from Sovnarkom a few months before the treaty was signed, continued to act as a mostly loyal opposition, and their support was particularly vital to the government in the agricultural provinces of Western Siberia, the Urals, Central Russia, and the Volga, where Bolshevik power was weaker. But their erstwhile communist allies knew they would be sickened at the terms of the treaty, and engaged in preemptive repression of numerous organs left-sr power before it was signed.

Over the final months of 1918, organized white resistance was eliminated by the armies of Budyonny, Trotsky, Frunze, and Brusilov. They were assisted by the dismal perception of the aristocratic whites amongst peasants and townsfolk alike, who associated them with the old, discredited Tsarist regime. The centrist socialist-revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued to call for the Provisional Assembly to be reconstituted, but these protests fell, at least for the time being, on deaf ears.

In 1919, the second phase of the Civil War began as the Bolsheviks, struggling to meet the German grain requirements, resorted to increasingly harsh requisitioning. Matters were made far more difficult by the recalcitrance of the highly autonomous Ukrainian government, a coalition of Ukrainian Social-Democrats, Borotbysts, and Bolsheviks. They insisted on carrying out their own grain procurement and did not meet the quotas set by the central government until September. With administration still being established in the eastern provinces, the majority of the reparations burden fell on peasants from Central Russia and the Volga region. Unfortunately, the seizure of the large estates and the socialization of the remaining medium-sized farms created under the Stolypin reforms reduced agricultural productivity, leading to lower farm marketings from the peasants. The absence of left-sr's from the government meant that there was no real countervailing force to the Bolshevik drive to implement more coercive measures to make up for inevitable shortages. Martov's internationalists, though frustrated by the turn toward repression, had few connections to the peasantry and no desire to expend their scant political capital on them.

At great cost to their legitimacy amongst the rural folk, the Bolsheviks met the German deadlines in the first three months of 1919. To do so, they resorted to increasing use of political as well as economic repression, including the disbanding of previously autonomous peasant organizations or their outright incorporation into the Bolshevik Party. A warning sign came when Maria Spiridinova, the loyalist left-sr, left the executive committee of soviets in protest. Next came mass peasant revolts in Tambov and Samara which were bloodily suppressed by the Red Army. Then, a "democratic counter-revolution" swept across Central Siberia in mid-April, as centrist SR's finally took up arms against the Bolsheviks. A significant portion of the Red Army's peasant conscripts revolted and seized the railways running from Perm to Yekaterinburg, which became the seat of a new government led by Victor Chernov and some sympathetic left-sr's. A second round of peasant uprisings now swept across Central Russia, imperiling the Red Army's ability to quickly march east to confront the rival government. Alienated by the authoritarian measures of the Bolsheviks, a number of outlying Soviet Republics, including those of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, declared their neutrality in the coming conflict.

Chernov's Siberian government was fueled primarily by peasant discontent with the Bolsheviks. It was plagued early on by accusations that it intended to shut down the worker's soviets, a claim levied against it with particular force by left-mensheviks and other non-bolshevik workers still loyal to Moscow. Chernov insisted that calling the provisional assembly would not mean ending Soviet power, but few of the more radicalized workers believed this. Many also speculated that he intended to institute a "peasant dictatorship", even though townfolk received generous provisions of food (however, this is owed mostly to the comparatively small population of the Siberian cities). His new government was thus eroded from the very beginning by internal labor unrest.

He nonetheless managed to raise a large peasant army in the next few months which posed a real threat to Bolshevik power. Chernov also made promises to the traditionalist Turkic peoples of Central Asia, who had chafed under the modernizing impetus of the Soviet-allied Jadidist intelligentsia and Russian settler-colonialism only thinly cloaked by emancipatory communism. In July, an army under the command of the SR general Vasily Boldyrev marched to Samara and Tambov, where it linked up with peasant partisans under the command of A.N. Antonov, who had previously fought against the whites. For the time being, the "green" peasant-armies in Central Russia remained out of their reach. The Germans were forced to accept "delays" on the reparations payments, made somewhat less bitter by the conquest of Romania and its sizable grain reserves.

The Red Army, which had begun demobilizing at the beginning of 1919, was called back into action. After crushing several peasant armies in Central Russia, they moved on the cities of Tambov and Perm. The disorganization and isolation of Chernov's forces made the work of the Red Army significantly easier. Landlocked and unable to procure aid from foreign governments, they were forced to rely on the inferior, secondary military industries of the Urals and Siberia, which were frequently staffed by disloyal workers. While the "green army" fought the reds to a standstill over July, their ammunition situation grew ever-more desparate, made worse by a lightning offensive of Brusilov and Trotsky which retook Samara and Ufa in August. Stocks of artillery shells were depleted by the end of the summer, and the morale among soldiers collapsed; Chernov and his ministers began a headlong retreat into Central Asia, but their Alash Orda allies in Kazakhstan detained them and came to an understanding with the Bolshevik Government.

The capture of the political and military elite of the socialist revolutionaries eliminated a potent source of opposition to the Bolsheviks. A sizable fraction of the left-SR's had been tarnished by their alliance with the revolting government, while the left-communists, who had once allied themselves to the left-wing of the socialist-revolutionaries, redeemed themselves through their loyal service. Many had worked their way up the Moscow party administration, and others played an important role in remobilizing the army.

Throughout the seven-month "SR Rebellion", the left-mensheviks began distancing themselves from Lenin. Martov penned increasingly critical articles denouncing the deterioration of the justice system, the centralization of economic power, and the spread of bureaucratization across the state-apparatus. The upshot was improved Menshevik performance in most Soviet elections in mid-1919 amidst a general dip in Bolshevik support among the urban working-class, as well as a rapprochement between Martov and the centrist Mensheviks, who were more hostile to Bolshevik rule but had maintained their credibility as a loyal opposition by refusing to cooperate with Chernov. Heightened tensions between the two parties finally led to the expulsion of the Mensheviks from the Council of People's Commissars in September of 1920. Thereafter, the Bolshevik-dominated Sovnarkom gerrymandered the soviet elections, ensuring that their majority would not be imperiled by the political campaigns of their former allies.

The November Revolutions and Internal Reform

The insurrectionary wave which toppled the old empires of Europe was both an astounding fulfillment of the predictions of the left-communists and a validation of Lenin's general revolutionary strategy. Lenin argued for a seizure of power in Russia to set an example for the workers in the rest of Europe, and now, though a year or two later than expected, they had conformed to expectations. Even the purged opposition of left-mensheviks and left-sr's could not help but to congratulate the government on its success.

Lenin's erstwhile governing partners on the party's right, who had opposed the initial seizure of Soviet power, were not so lucky and soon found their position untenable. While Lenin's towering reputation was sufficient to shield him from the charge of being a lackey of German imperialists, no such protective aura shielded the persons of Rykov, Kamenev, and Stalin, who were now accused of rank opportunism in the revitalized left-wing press. The right had clearly underestimated the revolutionary energy of the European proletariat, and were all-too-eager to cooperate with the arch-reactionary Ludendorff dictatorship. And for what purpose? Lenin, of course, was quite pleased that these polemics were directed at the right flank of the party rather than himself.

Russia soon experienced its own November Revolution. A rapidly crystallizing worker's opposition led by the metalworker Alexander Shliapnikov found the courage and boldness to openly defy the Soviet government in a series of political strikes. The working-class had long strained under the wartime measures of the government, and there was particular bitterness at soaring food costs and the hegemony of the bourgeois "specialists" who many believed were little better than the old managers of the Tsarist era. Workers demanded curtailment of the privileges of these specialists, free elections to Soviets, the resurrection of the long-defunct factory committees, and the end of the crackdown on proletarian speech. The left-communist circle in Moscow, against the advice of Trotsky (who was skeptical of the presence of right-wing, Menshevik elements in the strike movement), soon backed the worker protests. Sensing where the wind was blowing, the People's Commissars Yakov Sverdlov, Alexandra Kollantai, and Adolph Joffe led a campaign to expel the right-wing people's commissars and negotiate with the strikers. The cause of the right became hopeless when Lenin endorsed the efforts of the left-wing troika, leading to the voluntary resignation of the besieged commissars. In their place, Nikolai Bukharin was made the minister of Internal Affairs; Leon Trotsky, of the Army; Vladimir Smirnov, of Labor; and Georgy Pyatakov, of Finance. The centre of power on Sovnarkom now drifted away from Lenin and toward Sverdlov, who sat midway between the Bolshevik center and the left. Sverdlov met most of the demands of the worker protests, including the curtailment of many privileges enjoyed by the specialists, but he maintained the system of gerrymandering which ensured Bolshevik control of Soviet elections.

The new government, the most left-wing yet, waged campaigns against both internal bureaucratization and the white governments to the west. Rather than demobilize the victorious red army, it was directed to Finland, which was militarily weakened by the withdrawal of several German garrisons. Several "international contingents" entered Germany to assist the Luxemburg government. Others fought to support fledgling baltic soviet republics in their battle against the whites. The new Polish state, which occupied the entirety of Galicia and a substantial portion of Western Ukraine and Belarus, was not targeted by the Soviet government, at first because it believed that the "united front" of Radek and Pilsudski would remain in power, and then because it feared the costs of engaging in a direct battle against the modernized, German-trained Polish Army.

1920-1921 were years of dramatic reform. Moribund factory committees were revived and integrated into the national council of the economy, returning a degree of worker's control to the major industries. The ultra-left urged for an immediate effort at centrally planned industrialization, but found itself evenly matched by the Leninist centre at the Bolshevik Party Congress, which instead advocated an "opening up" of medium-sized industries to limited market pressures. It was Sverdlov and his allies Georgy Pyatakov and Nikolai Bukharin that successfully won the day by splitting the difference between the two programs and urging a "straight and steady path to socialism".

The new plan envisioned a gradual industrialization of the Soviet economy through a process of "consensual socialist capital accumulation". Grain requisitions would first be rationalized, and then faded out entirely with an in-kind 20% tax. The state would employ and expand the existing cooperative network to make purchases of grain for the cities, while the taxed foodstuffs would be exported to the industrialized socialist states of the west in return for agricultural machinery and other capital goods. These would be offered at heavily discounted prices to peasants willing to combine their holdings into cooperatives and collectives. Peasants would also be incentivized to form larger, more efficient farms through targeted subsidies and limited tax exemptions. The increased productivity of these large-scale agricultural enterprises would provide the capital and the labor necessary to embark on more ambitious programs of industrialization.

Some on the left assaulted the incrementalism of this approach, but they found themselves undercut by their own internationalism: the majority of socialist states were net food importers, and without Soviet assistance, they would be forced to rely on capitalist Argentina and Australia for their grain needs, making them vulnerable to a renewed British blockade. Proletarian internationalism compelled the adoption of the new plan just as much as the need to come to a detente with the peasants after a ruinous two-year civil war. Trotsky reluctantly gave his assent at the end of the Party Congress. To appease the ultra-left faction, the Sverdlov-Bukharin bloc proposed only a minor expansion of the private sector. Some small and medium enterprises would be leased on a purely conditional basis to entrepreneurs and cooperatives, but they would still fall under the jurisdiction of the Council for the National Economy. The state would give up the monopoly on trade that it acquired during the civil war, but it would still exercise considerable power through its network of nationalized cooperatives. In a concession to the center, it was agreed that grain requisitions would cease entirely by the end of the year.

As a limited private sector emerged, the Soviet Union underwent a deeply contradictory process of political liberalization. Wartime restrictions on expression and assembly were gradually lifted, and the right to strike and form independent labor unions was returned to workers. While bourgeois papers were still the subject of frequent lawsuits, a wider range of "proletarian opinion" was permitted. Soviet elections began to be conducted through secret ballot, and votes were no longer weighted by type of worker. Simultaneously, the Bolshevik party-state entrenched itself further in all aspects of civil society. The Menshevik opposition was perpetually hounded by Komsomol and other organs of the Bolshevik Party, and most of the leadership eventually left Russia for Germany and Scandinavia. Some Left-SR's received amnesty, but few were allowed entrance into the upper levels of the bureaucracy. Civil Administration was extended throughout Siberian Russia and eventually Central Asia.

Such liberalization was able to occur because of the quite genuine enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks amongst wide segments of the urban working class. After teetering in their loyalty to the new government amidst the privation of the Civil War years, the return of worker control and the slow improvement in living conditions during the early 1920s brought the laboring class decisively back into the communist fold. By all accounts, the peasants maintained a healthy dose of skepticism, but incidences of revolt fell dramatically after the end of grain requisitioning. With proletarian power on more secure footing, it was possible to release the population from the more onerous restrictions of the civil war era.

Conflicts in the West

Over 1920-1921, the prestige of the Bolshevik Government was bolstered by military victories in the west. The revolutionary wave ended German control of the Baltics and German protection of Finland. Right-wing occupying soldiers left and made their way to Bavaria to fight for Ludendorff, while others joined white partisans in East Prussia. Governments of the national-bourgeois emerged in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In rural Lithuania, there was little real resistance to the nationalist government from the nation's small socialist worker's movement, but red insurgencies plagued the two northern Baltic states, forcing them to rely upon remaining German freikorps soldiers and the Riga Landswehr.

The intimidated proletariat of Finland, which had been brutalized during the Finnish civil war, only engaged in sporadic protest during the first few weeks of the revolutionary era. However, the violent response of the Finnish police was enough to provide a casus belli for the Soviet Union. The new sovnarkom of Leninists and left-communists was eager to use military force to export the revolution, and toppling the weak Finnish government was seen as key to ensuring that the Baltic was safe from British machinations.

The invasion began in the last week of November, with the main axis advancing out of Petrograd and toward the southern industrial cities of Vilpuri and Helsinki. Only a little over a third of the red army participated in the initial invasion; a similar fraction moved through Poland with the tacit permission of the United Front Government to aid their German allies, while the rest was dedicated to garrison duty. Carl Mannerheim instituted a national draft, but in practice was forced to rely upon the same northern farmers and landowners which were his base of support during the Civil War. Outnumbered and outgunned, Mannerheim settled upon a defensive strategy and depended upon partisans to harry the rear of the Red Army.

Mannerheim was assisted by freezing winter temperatures and the manifestly aggressive character of the war, both of which weakened the morale of the Red Army and necessitated frequent troop rotations. Nonetheless, he was not able to prevent the fall of Vyborg in January or the steady Soviet advance to the north. In March, the lines of battle appeared to temporarily stabilize, and some members of the Soviet government were tempted to accept a generous peace offer from Mannerheim. This was preempted by a proletarian revolt in early June across the entire southern seaboard of Finland. Buoyed by the tales of the heroic Finnish workers, the Red Army broke through Mannerheim's defenses and reached Helsinki, where they united with their partisan allies. Additional revolts soon broke out in Tampere, Lahti, and Turku, imperiling the resupply of the white forces in the south and easing the advance of the red army north. By the end of the summer, the white government had evacuated to Norway.

In its place, the Finnish Communist Party led by the exiled radical Kullerco Manner assumed power. The existing social-democratic party within Finland, the subject of fierce repression by the Mannerheim government, voluntarily subsumed themselves into the communists. Manner successfully resisted Soviet demands for incorporation as a Soviet Republic, hoping to avoid being tarnished as an agent of Moscow. Despite this, he was forced to rely on the Russians for military assistance in repressing an ongoing partisan insurgency in the north.

In late 1920, the Soviets also intervened in the Baltics. Latvian and Lithuanian white governments were plagued by food shortages and labor unrest. Proletarian neighborhoods in the big cities were controlled by paramilitary red guard formations, and the peasantry, which came under pressure to market its food, was generally ambivalent about the new governments. It took only moderate Soviet assistance to provide the rebels with the military support necessary to oust the bourgeois from rule, which they did at the end of 1920. Shortly afterwards, the Estonian and Latvian Soviet Republics were incorporated as autonomous regional units of the USSR.

Victory in the Soviet-Finnish War (also known as the Winter War and 2nd Finnish Civil War) and the subsequent conflicts in the Baltics brought several additional highly industrialized regions under the Soviet umbrella. As the first revolutionary state and a vital supplier of foodstuffs for the entire socialist bloc, Russia accumulated tremendous prestige; many initially believed that the new International would be headquartered in Moscow, and suspected that the decision for it to be built in Berlin owed more to Leninist magnanimity than anything else.

Conflicts in Central Asia

The contribution of Red Army soldiers to the first battles on the Central European plain was overshadowed by their German counterparts. This must be attributed at least in part to their involvement in an ongoing quagmire in Central Asia, which was a continuing hotbed of unrest and a sore on the new Soviet government. Repeated revolts and insurgencies sapped the Bolsheviks ability to project additional power westward, even as trade with Germany and Scandinavia and an improving food situation in the big cities ameliorated domestic discontent.

The largest bastion of Soviet power in the area was the city of Tashkent. A soviet was proclaimed here shortly after the revolution, though it was composed of Russian settlers and its loyalty to the government was likely more ethnic than ideological. They collaborated with elements of the reforming Jadidist movement, which saw the Bolsheviks as natural allies in the fight against the conservative mullahs.

The defeat of the whites in 1918 prompted the first sustained attempt to assert sovereignty over Central Asia. By this point, a Muslim Kokand Autonomy had already been proclaimed in the Fergana Valley, and a small Bolshevik force entered the area in January of 1919, where it violently suppressed the separatist movement, killing over 20,000 civilians in the process. Sufficient effort was not made to reconstruct civilian authority, however, and shortly after the establishment of the Chernov government in Yekaterinburg, most of Central Asia fell to enemy forces. The Kokand Autonomy was proclaimed once again, the wavering Alash Orda government of Kazakhs agreed to cooperate with Chernov, and in the vital transport hub of Askhabad, Socialist-Revolutionaries launched a successful coup. In the final military operation of white forces, Tashkent was seized by a garrison sympathetic to Kolchak, who knew little of the action, having taken up exile in distant Constantinople. Mutual weakness and mutual interest in containing both Bolshevik and Islamic forces led to uneasy cooperation between the Ashkhabad and Tashkent municipalities; this was one of the only known instances of sustained alliance between white and green forces.

The end of Chernov's rival government once again changed the balance of power in Central Asia. Bolshevik troops streamed back into the region, deposing separatist leaders and forcing the Emirs and Khans of Central Asia to flee south to Afghanistan. Governments led by Jadidist intellectuals were imposed on the conservative Muslim peasantry, and the Alash Orda resubmitted to Soviet rule.

Motivated by a sense of proletarian internationalism, Bolshevik leaders withdrew most of the occupying Russian soldiers from Central Asia in the beginning of 1920, redirecting them to the Baltics, Finland, and the Netherlands. This was a grave mistake. The new Soviet Republics led by reforming jadidist intellectuals had only a thin base of popular support, and without Red Army troops to call upon to police local insurgencies, they were forced to rely upon bands of Russian settlers. Their often abhorrent behavior greatly embittered the local population, which joined the guerilla Basmachi movement in droves.

The absence of the Red Army and stable government authorities created a void of power, and the quasi-islamist Basmachi bandit insurgency surged to occupy it, in the process taking on many of the functions of civilian government. They were supported by the exiled emirs and khans in Afghanistan, some of whom returned when it became clear that the Soviets had once again lost control over Central Asia south of Kazakhstan. Perhaps most critical to the longevity of the Basmachi movement, however, was the assistance provided by the British military mission in Persia. A skeptical British Indian ministry at first resisted the requests of Wilfred Malleson for increased arms, artillery, and ammunition, but they were overruled by Churchill himself, who was impressed by the "martial spirit" of the Muslim rebels and brigands. Whatever the central government's reasoning, the growing Basmachi army created a nightmare situation for the Soviet Army in Central Asia, and forced troops from the west to be withdrawn to police the wayward province.

The Soviets decided to place Enver Pasha, a former leader of Turkey, in charge of an expedition of Red Tatars tasked with reasserting Soviet control over the area. Pasha had succeeded in convincing the Soviet government that he still had sway in Ankara, an assertion belied by the fact that he was no longer permitted to enter his native country. Still, the Soviets had grown quite desparate in their search for Islamic allies, and chose to ignore some of his more inflated claims. His expedition into the Ferghana Valley predictably ended in disaster when he defected to the Basmachi movement; though he later claimed this was out of solidarity with the traditionalist Muslims of Central Asia, it was later revealed that he received a substantial bribe from the British intelligence services.

It would take much of 1921 for the Soviets to fully pacify Central Asia and defeat the British-supplied Basmachi army, which was now led by Enver Pasha. They were forced to give up on some of the more ambitious elements of their reform agenda; the waqf (clerical property) and Islamic schooling were enshrined in the new constitutions of the four new non-kazakh soviet republics in Central Asia, and Jadidist intellectuals were forced to implement clerical and education reform in a slower, more incremental manner. These concessions helped in winning the loyalty of the local Muslim population and stripping the insurgency of its social base.

Having secured Central Asia, the Soviets could at last take revenge on the British for their support of the Basmachi movement. Supply routes into Northern India were solidified and new roads laid down; Afghanistan hardly had the capacity to repulse Soviet convoys from using the thin Wakhan corridor en route to India, though they did protest vigorously at the violation of their sovereignty. The steady supply of Soviet arms, ammunition, and medicine to the INC government were crucial in keeping it in the fight, especially given the parlous state of the Indian Army, which found itself increasingly outgunned by the swelling British Army. In new garb and with new players, the great game went on.

 

[Curby]

Spoiler: Future Entries (Before 1923)

The Social War in Iberia and South America

The Italian Revolution: Politics and Society in the New Italy

India: The Tragic Revolution

Proletarian Enlightenment: German Art and Architecture in the 1920s

1922: The Year of Blood and Lead​

What can be expected of the Anglo-American menace, but that it will attempt to crush and to strangle all the fresh, healthy, collective life of the European peoples? Theirs is not a desire to contain social radicalism, or any such nonsense, but to establish a new imperium over the earth. One need not be red or white to say: no, we Europeans shall not consign ourselves to be the obedient underlings of a English Imperialism, we shall order our own affairs.

-Werner Sombart

The pustules of the red disease have embedded themselves in many peoples once thought to be mostly immune to this sickness, such that even now, men we previously considered reasonable, upright, and morally healthy are being gripped by a strange and overweening barbarism. It falls to the English-speaking peoples, whom have shown themselves to possess sufficient will to resist this pathology, to quarantine this sickness in its place, to declare: no further! And then we must hope that one day the rudiments of civilization will return to Europe.

-Oswald Spengler

And so Americans and Germans kill one another in the skies of France, and yet we continue to eat American wheat and American meat, and diplomats continue to exchange niceties in Berlin. Are we at war, or at peace? It does bear all the marks of war, though perhaps we would prefer not to say so. What a contrast from just a few years ago, when the enemies all had to be labelled and caricatured! Now German men bloody the fields of France and we studiously pretend to know nothing of it! Strange new world...

-Siegfried Kracauer

---

One could be forgiven for imagining that human civilization, having tired of its ordeal of bloodletting, had at last begun disembarking from its long nightmare to commence the hard task of reconstruction. The optimists found an abundance of pleasing portents in 1921: what was the sustained quiet across the Pacific, India, and France except so many signs that those embroiled in war had at last started to shirk from their ruinous vocation? The division of the world into competing blocs may be hardly sanguinary, but perhaps it would offer the basis for a diplomatic settlement between responsible powers.

Such were the hopes which floated like twilight smoke, intangible and powerless, above the iron laws and faultless logic stoking the world inferno. 1921 was not the denouement of the First Revolutionary Era but an intermission, a moment of temporary relief for the main players, who having gathered their strength and fixed their composure, readied themselves to make a final settlement. In Mindanao and Lucknow, in Vilnius and in Dijon, the guns of war thundered once again. Whole nations were put to the sword, and the forces of proletarian internationalism, having achieved stunning victories over the past two years, were forced to witness the frightful expansion in the destructive powers of the Anglo-American behemoth. The British Empire inexorably swelled, adding new territories and protectorates even while it battled for its existence in the Deccan plains. American industrial might, hampered by the depression, sprung back phoenix-like, buoyed by a rapidly metastasizing military complex. Spurred on by American diplomacy and American arms, a reactionary Balkan bloc began to coalesce. Predictions now abounded of a "second" Great War, a fresh cataclysm that would outdo the horrors of the last one…

Eastern Europe

The flow of American weapons and military advisors into Croatia and Romania fundamentally changed the nature of the Hungarian War. For some time, the leaders of the Council of Revolutionary States had been averse to supporting Karolyi, considering his regime nothing more than a relic of bourgeois social-chauvinism. Despite the support of the left-wing social democrats for the Hungarian government, the Revolutionary Council of State stuck firmly to its position of non-intervention throughout the winter of 1922. The German Revolutionary Social-Democrats were more sympathetic, and there is evidence that the Hungarian government was able to procure older weaponry at discounted costs from RSD-dominated Austria as early as January.

Growing indications of American involvement prompted another meeting of the Council of Revolutionary States in April. By this point, Czech forces had broken into Hungarian Slovakia, and Croatia was on the verge of swallowing what remained of Serbia. This imperiled the position of the Bulgarian revolutionaries, who had recently launched successful offensives into white territory in the east. The Bolshevik faction came around to arming the Hungarians, and over the summer increasing aid from IntRevMar flowed through Austria to Budapest. Unfortunately, it was far too little to salvage the Hungarian position. Following the capture of Belgrade in June and the beginning of the Serbian ethnocide, the Romanian army, the second-largest in the war, broke through several Carpathian mountain passes and streamed into Transylvania. A large Croatian offensive began shortly afterwards, recapturing Vojvodina and linking up with Romanian advance units around between Pecs and Szeged.

Ironically, the main victim of Hungary's imminent death (besides Hungary itself) was Poland. Pilsudski had long been suspected of harboring sympathies for the reactionary Croatian-Czech-Romanian bloc, and in June of 1922, German intelligence unveiled that a swathe of Czech Silesia had been ceded to Poland in 1921 in exchange for grain and weapons shipments. Thus far, the Polish Federation had permitted trade and soldiers to move between Germany and the Soviet Union free of charge, but if it ever became a hostile state, the land-link between the two main socialist powers would be cut off, creating a strategic vulnerability. In August, increasing economic and political pressure was placed on Pilsudski to bring Radek's socialists back into government, a prospect which Pilsudski feared would reduce Poland to a mere vassal of the larger socialist powers.

On the 16th of August, Pilsudski mobilized the Polish Army and marched it into the German province of Posen. He had little prospect of winning a long war against the socialist bloc, especially while his potential allies to the south were preparing to besiege Budapest. Yet a window of opportunity had emerged to cement Poland's independence: Germany was in the midst of a military reform process, transforming its professional army to a revolutionary militia, and the Soviets were currently engaged in a standoff with Japan over Sakhalin. A quick march to Berlin, he speculated, might shock the Germans into agreeing to a peace on reasonable terms.

At first, his gambit appeared to pay off. Assisted by Polish partisans in Posen, a stubborn white insurgency in East Prussia, and the disorganization of the German armed forces, Pilsudski seized a vast swathe of territory in the first week and a half of the war, including the cities of Danzig and Posen. Silesia proved a tougher net to crack; here, the red militias rallied quickly to the defense of the socialist republic, and the hoped-for Polish uprising did not materialize. The majority of the proletarian miners of Upper Silesia opted to fight against their ethnic brethren. Nonetheless, not just Kattowitz but Breslau as well fell by the end of the month, opening up the road to Berlin.

This was to be the kulminationspunkt of the Polish assault. Pilsudski had woefully underestimated the speed at which the Soviet Red Army could mobilize. Trotsky and Brusilov had implemented a series of ambitious military reforms following the lackluster performance of the Red Army in the Finnish Winter War, intended to give it a preponderance of power in any conflict in Eastern Europe. Almost immediately following the invasion of Posen, the Ukrainian and Northwestern theaters began mobilizing; after Poland ignored a Soviet ultimatum, the invasion of Lithuania and Polish Ukraine began. Numerically inferior and frequently poorly-trained Polish Confederation forces had little option but to retreat before the Soviet advance. Lithuanian nationals put up a valiant defense of Vilnius, which fell on the 30th; the "Ruthenian army" of the Polish Federation was a good deal less enthusiastic in the defense of Rivne and Lviv, with many mutinying to join the Ukrainian Red Army in its march into Galicia.

Facing an invasion of inner Poland, Pilsudski was forced to divert a sizable portion of his elite guard to the east. His offensive toward Berlin was halted well short of the city in mid-September, and with a massed German counterattack threatening to break what remained of his western army, he hastily sued for an armistice. There was some dispute in the socialist camp about whether this ought to be accepted. Most of the left-wing ministers in both Berlin and Moscow favored marching straight into Warsaw and installing a socialist government, but Lenin and some of the Revolutionary Social Democrats were skeptical about whether Poland was ready for a fully socialist administration. Pilsudski still undoubtedly commanded the allegiance of most Poles, and at this point, he appeared fully amenable to being made a puppet of the new International. He was therefore sent back with Radek to a much-reduced Poland stripped of Lithuania, much of East Galicia, and its Ukrainian and Belarusian territories. There are more than a few theories that this decision was informed by the distrust which both Lenin and Luxemburg had for the leader of the Polish left-socialists, Karl Radek, though there is no evidence that their attitudes toward the man figured into their calculations.

While the Polish imbroglio was sorted out through diplomacy, the nation of Hungary faced a far less ambiguous fate. Despite the pleas of Karolyi, there was no peace deal or armistice, but only a demand for unconditional surrender. Budapest was captured on September 12th, and Karolyi himself forced to sign a humiliating treaty that reduced Hungary to a diminished rump state. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians living in Vojvodina, Slovakia, and Romania were expelled by the new occupying powers. Karolyi was deposed, and a government of national salvation led by Miklos Horthy took his place. Horthy, an ultraconservative Navy Admiral, was widely seen as a puppet of Hungary's hated adversaries, and his government was sustained primarily by military force and repression.

Colonial Conflict and British Colonial Expansion

The basic tendencies of the First Revolutionary Era bore a complicated relationship to those of the Great War. From 1914-1919, European weakness became increasingly evident; each year, the Japanese and American economies grew as a proportion of the global total, and the Imperial Metropoles of London and Paris became dependent upon their backwards peripheries. British claims on American assets evaporated, and the center of world finance migrated over the Atlantic to New York following the abandonment of the gold standard. The Japanese intervention in China was only imaginable in a situation of extraordinary British weakness and imperial overstretch.

Yet while the First Revolutionary Era shattered the old empires of Europe, it did not bring about the end of European centrality in the world-system. In relative terms, Russian, British, and German power grew from 1920 to 1924. British economic might not only successfully reconstituted itself on a new industrial basis, but also adopted a fresh territorialist logic that won it control of the largest empire in human history, which at its height in 1928 encompassed more than a third of the world's total population. America, which may have otherwise used its immense financial-industrial power to discipline Britain, was initially dependent on British military might to ensure a proper cordon sanitaire was built around the Red Menace. Britain knew that this American dependency was not to last forever, and operating on a standard window-logic, engaged in a campaign of territorial aggrandizement while it still held a blank check. This only heightened American suspicions that Britain would soon form a Sterling bloc to protect its own manufacturing interests, thereby precipitating a renewed competition for the world's remaining markets.

British power, which had been damaged in absolute terms by the Great War, could only expand with such effortless ease because the French, Italian, Dutch and German Empires had been shattered by the revolutionary wave. Most of the German imperial territories had already been seized by the Entente during the war's first few years, and it was simple enough for British colonial administrators to step in and assume a benevolent guardianship over these lands. Italy, meanwhile, already struggled to administer Libya and defeat a partisan movement of rebels before the Great War; confined to the impoverished island of Sardinia, the weak Italian legitimist government had no hope of providing the reactionary Italian colonials sufficient arms and support to hold onto their bastions in the northern cities. Behind the back of their own government, the colonial governors of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania petitioned for British assistance - from there, it was a short road into being made a protectorate.

The Dutch East Indies shared a similar fate. The East Indies were dependent on British naval power even before the war, and the royal government-in-exile soon required more overt forms of British assistance to police labor unrest and a growing native insurgency. The installment of a British commissioner in 1922 was met with great alarm in America, but the foreign minister insisted that they did not intend to win any "special economic rights" in the East Indies. Nonetheless, the area had become a protectorate in all-but-name by the end of the First Revolutionary Era, and was increasingly integrated into British markets.

Perhaps the most explosive transformation of the existing colonial order occurred in the vast and unevenly developed French territories of North Africa, the Congo, Madagascar, and Indochina. The vast majority of colonial officials were loyal to Clemenceau's legitimists, but frequently found their administration understaffed. The Toulouse government simply did not have the fiscal capacity to maintain the colonies, and many of the underpaid colonial administrators left to either fight the reds or settle down in greener pastures, typically in either America or booming French Algeria. Some of the Central African territories, particularly those in the Sahel region, were so bereft of trained personnel that British expeditions were positively welcomed. As it became clear that ultrareactionary elements held the real power in Toulouse, some of the more liberal colonial officials, such as Abraham Schrameck in Madagascar, drifted into the British sphere voluntarily, while others looked to the Americans for support.

The situation of French Indochina was undoubtedly the most vexed and troubled. Seeing an opportunity to wrest back territories coerced from it at gunpoint by European diplomats, the Kingdom of Siam invaded the provinces of Laos and Cambodia in July. The governor at the time, Albert Sarraut, was no friend of Clemenceau's, and the Prime Minister's refusal to send soldiers from the home country to defend against the invasion enraged him; Sarraut speculated that this had to do with Clemeanceau's own previous criticism of French Imperialism, though it is more likely that the leader of Legitimist France simply felt as if he could not spare the resources to defend the distant colony. He suggested instead entering into negotiations with Siam over the territories. This Sarraut would not do; the threat of invasion had already rallied portions of the Vietnamese nation to the French flag, and Sarraut formed a conscript army to fight off the Thais. His major bottleneck was a lack of arms and artillery. Without a merchant marine necessary to procure them, he was forced to call for British assistance, which soon came with not only arms, but military advisors as well. This prompted accusations of treason by the reactionary catholics, but Sarraut, disdaining these types even more than Clemenceau, denounced their government as "illegitimate", even while continuing to pay them a portion of the colony's revenues, as was customary.

Sarraut was successful in stymying the Siamese invasion. Intended to be a fast, bloodless affair that would force a fait accompli on the colonial administration, it devolved into a protracted jungle war. While most Laotians and Cambodians felt no especial loyalty to French Indochina, the behavior of the Siamese troops spurred local peasant opposition and helped provide the first building-blocks of an Indochinese identity. The Siamese Army was frustrated by guerilla resistance and the fanatical defense of a largely Vietnamese conscript army in Cambodia, though they had greater success to the north, in Laos. By the end of 1922, the Thai government decided to enter into negotiations, though Sarraut's demands, which included the cession of additional Thai territories, prevented any peace from being made in the immediate future.

Ethiopia engaged in a more successful campaign of military adventurism. Under pressure from a modernizing, progressive faction behind the Regent Lij Tafari (eventually Haile Selassie I), the conservative Empress Zewditu ordered the Ethiopian Army into Italian Eritrea. This was a border region of countless previous Ethiopian Empires, and was felt by most of the ruling elite to be rightfully Ethiopian. With little Italian presence left by 1922, it turned out to be a relatively simple matter to occupy the territory, but sectarian religious tensions were never far away. Later in the year the British Somaliland protectorate was unceremoniously extended over its Italian and French counterparts; the anxious officials were sufficiently worried about the prospect of an Ethiopian invasion to sign away their sovereignty.

America looked on this silent expansion of British imperial power with great wariness, and sought assurances that in the post-revolutionary era, there would be a return to a free trade regime and that colonies would be yielded back to their original masters or to new, native-led governments. Not without a certain logic, the British replied that this latter matter was not entirely up to them, as these colonies possessed leadership that was typically not "british" in character. As for the matter of trade, Churchill insisted that any such negotiations be put off until the French conflict was settled (and thus until it could be guaranteed that the British loans to France could be repaid). America had little option but to reluctantly assent.

The Pacific War and the Lucknow Offensive

The final ten months of 1921 were some of the quietest in a war between two major powers. No major naval battles, no storming of the Japanese positions, no rumored Japanese assault on Hawaii took place during this long interlude. This is not to say that nothing happened. The Japanese did seize Wake Island in April, an event that was not much reported on in the press. They did not, however, advance any further into the Pacific; Midway was too distant a prize, and Hawaii far too ambitious a goal while the Americans still possessed such a crushing disparity of naval force.

Perhaps most importantly, each side spent time building up fortifications and naval bases. The rudimentary naval station in Pearl Harbor was expanded at breakneck speed, and America nationalized the Merchant Marine with an eye to conscripting a portion of the fleet to serve on logistics duty. New cruisers were laid down at existing dockyards, and when these reached their limits, fresh dockyards were built. Heavy industry began recovering.

The Japanese were not sitting idly by. Mindful of America's desire to intervene in Europe, a strategy of defense and attrition was settled upon by the military command. Coastal fortifications were built up in Manila, Iwo Jima, and the Marianas Islands. Efforts were made to consolidate control over the more rural regions of the Philippines, a task never fully completed owing to the fierce resistance of guerillas.

By 1922, the American public had begun to voice doubts about the direction of the war, especially after Japan publicized several peace offers which included the return of the Philippine Islands. Britain still refused to offer assistance until the planned Lucknow Offensive in August, which rendered any attempt to retake the Philippines before then impractical. Hoping for some positive propaganda, it was decided to begin an "island hopping campaign" across Micronesia a few months ahead of schedule. In February and March, marines recaptured Wake Island and several of the Japanese Marshall Islands after brief but bloody battles against small local garrisons.

Japan had no means to reliably resupply soldiers this far out from the mainland without putting their own naval forces at undue risk, and they constructed their primary line of defense from Luzon through Formosa to Okinawa, with an outer ring in Iwo Jima and Saipan. The decision to not fully garrison the newly-acquired Marshall and Caroline Islands has been criticized by certain Japanese military historians, who believe that much greater losses could have been inflicted on American soldiers if more stout resistance was offered here, but the Navy refused to risk the battlefleet on resupply missions.

Hence over the summer, America successfully seized not just the Marshall, but also most of the Caroline Islands, as well as the strategically situated Palau, which was the site of the most brutal battle of the war so far. American losses steadily mounted in this campaign, but still numbered no more than 10,000 casualties, prompting some to speculate about whether Japan may have left most of its army in China. In reality, the islands won were of no great strategic value, as they lacked naval or logistics facilities which could aid in the planned invasion of the Phillippines. Building them up would require at least another half-year. The naval command therefore hoped fervently for British victory in the coming Lucknow Offensive, which the government did their best to secure through the generous provision of excess airplanes and landships to Britain.

William Birdwood was placed in charge of this operation, which was the largest and most ambitious of the entire Anglo-Indian war. 250,000 British infantrymen supplemented by an additional 200,000 Indian auxiliaries gathered in the loyal princely states of Central India. They were to fan out in two formations to seize the cities of Kanpur and Allahabad, and then converge on Lucknow, the heart of the United Provinces. In contrast to Bengal, Punjab, and Bombay, the various zamindars and local elites of the United Provinces had shown little enthusiasm for the INC government; the military forces billeted there, largely of Bengali origin, aroused frequent ire from the local population. Despite this, control of the U.P. was crucial for the Republic, as it linked together the two real heartlands of rebellion, Bengal and Punjab.

The British aimed to sever this lifeline and cut the territory of Republican India in two; this would also starve the Bengalis of Soviet supplies, which had swelled worryingly over the past year. Opposing the British force was an army of around 280,000 Republican soldiers under the command of several great war veterans. Growing factionalism within the INC government and peasant discontent made conscription more difficult, a problem that could not be redressed through the importation of additional Russian rifles. To the west, the sizable Army of Punjab was occupied with the invading Afghan army of Amunullah Khan, who had finally agreed to attack the INC government following border clashes with the Soviets, while a massive but poorly-trained conscript army was stationed to the east, in Bihar.

The British attacking forces were bolstered by the presence of American-supplied landships and aircraft. Having achieved both numerical and technological superiority along the front, Indian lines were broken through with relative ease. Markedly less partisan and guerilla resistance was encountered than in previous offensives. Allahabad and Kanpur were captured within operational deadlines, and the reeling Indian Army struggled to halt the British strategic initiative. British landships converging on Lucknow shattered the exhausted defenders of the city, encircling 45,000 soldiers in the process. They soon drove up to Nepal, cutting the remaining Republican territory in two and isolating Bengal, Bihar, and Assam. An attempt to drive east met with less success when units from the Army of Bihar met advancing Indian auxiliaries outside the Republican stronghold of Benares; they inflicted enough casualties on the soldiers to force them into a headlong retreat.

As a whole, the offensive was a resounding success for British Indian forces, and likely sealed the death warrant of the fledgling Republic, which did not have the means to eject their adversary from the United Provinces. Confident that the crown jewel of the Empire would be reconquered in full, the British now gave the go-ahead for American troops to begin disembarking in Singapore, North Borneo, and French Indochina. British diplomats prevaricated for as long as possible, but it was impossible to hide the arrival of entire American divisions on British territories. Britain's decision shocked and enraged the Japanese government; they had known for some time that Britain would not take their side in a conflict with the Americans, but they did not imagine that they would ever have to count them as an enemy. Perfidious Albion had struck again. The leading Japanese newspapers excoriated the British for placing white racial solidarity before the accumulated diplomatic handiwork of decades.

Yet amidst the diatribes of nationalistic outrage, there was an undercurrent of trembling unease. How could Japan find itself in this situation? In 1919, near the end of the Great War, the nation had stood astride the world, its manufacturing industries booming, its exports the envy of all peoples, its navy an indispensable aid to the British in the mediterranean, and its sphere of influence set to steadily expand in China. Japan had entered the conflict as a custodian of peace and civilization, seeking to secure for itself a place among the world's great powers; now these same powers were arrayed against it. Japanese industries, which had eked out a precarious existence over the past two years, now stood at risk of collapse as its trading partners evaporated.

Some looked back to the ministership of Hara Takashi. He had been made Prime Minister after nationwide riots, and proferred inflated promises for democracy and reform. Food prices were brought down, but universal manhood suffrage was never implemented. Takashi had been unable to contain the Japanese military in its bellicose drive into China, and incapable of devising a means to avert a war with a far larger and more powerful nation. Takashi's cabinet fell shortly after the invasion of the Philippines; he was followed by a succession of ministers from his own Seiyukai party, who were each unceremoniously sacked after showing insufficient obeisance to the military-navy-industrial complex. Eventually, a purely aristocratic-military cabinet was formed, with Tanaka Giichi, a Japanese general, at its head. This was enormously unpopular at a time when Japanese mass party politics had finally begun clawing some power from the insular, oligarchic elite.

The national emergency of war provided the cabinet with some cover from newspaper accusations that it represented a "sliding back of Japan's journey to democracy". So long as this war was being conducted successfully, the military government could present itself as the saviors of Japan. On September 14th, they proclaimed the Anglo-Japanese alliance dissolved and declared war on the United Kingdom. Determined to exact revenge, an expedition was sent to seize the port of Hong Kong on the 22nd. Anticipating such a move, the British had already reinforced the island. Around 4,500 Japanese troops were able to land on the island, but the rest were turned back after an American cruiser squadron operating out of Singapore ambushed several poorly defended troop transports. The 4,000 Japanese troops were outnumbered by the British defenders, and also found themselves fighting against a Chinese Army stationed in the area; many of the same soldiers who initially participated in the invasion of Hong Kong now found themselves fighting to defend it from the Japanese. No attempt was made to salvage the situation of the stranded Japanese marines, and most were either captured or killed by the end of the month. More murmurs of discontent spread among the Japanese press. The mayor of Tokyo and "Father of Japanese Constitutional politics" Yukio Ozaki spoke before the Japanese Diet and reproached the incompetent Giichi ministry for its monumental military and diplomatic blunders. He received applause from both the minority Kensekai faction and many Seikuyai parliamentarians who had soured on the government. Shortly thereafter, nearly half of the conservative Seikuyai delegation split from the party to form a new political club, the Seiyuhonto.

The war, of course, went on. In October, the invasion of the Philippines began as American troops operating out of bases in Micronesia, Singapore, and French Indochina landed on Mindanao and the Visayan Islands. Here, the Japanese had much more success; British entry into the war did not change the calculus of forces in this theater, and over a year had been spent preparing for an American invasion. The Japanese fleet was still intact, and in fact growing; the outgunned navy refused to engage in the desired "decisive battle", instead dispersing itself to engage in ambushes. This strategy now bore fruit. Despite the best efforts of American planners to secure sufficient escorts for the American troop and resupply convoys, several were attacked by superior Japanese forces, throwing the invasion logistics into disarray. Japanese defenders in well-entrenched positions used their fortifications and interior lines of communication to devastating effect. More American soldiers were killed within the first week of the Second Battle of the Philippines than in the entirety of the Pacific War thus far. This created a public relations disaster for the Root administration.

American casualties only mounted over the next few months. The planned invasion of Luzon had to be delayed until 1923. American officers were aghast to discover that the famed Phillippine Guerilla movement was just as hostile to American as it was to Japanese soldiers; the countryside quickly turned into a no-man's land, forcing the American government to commit more soldiers to counterinsurgency, garrison, and police work. Nonetheless, some progress was made by the end of the year. Three of the Visayan Islands fell under American control. Despite the fierce resistance of the Muslim Moro peoples, all of the major towns in Mindanao were secured. The Japanese, in fact, were rebuffed somewhat more easily; after being ousted from their defensive positions and forced into the rural backwoods, few of the soldiers were heard or seen from again. They too, succumbed to the Philippine Guerillas.

The French Civil War

In 1922, renewed fighting erupted in the French Civil War after a year of relative quiet. Each of the combatants had grown increasingly dependent on their benefactors, and political leaders on both sides felt pressure from their allies to resume the offensive. In Revolutionary France, it was only Soviet-German food shipments that prevented a famine in 1921, while the Legitimists, who controlled only a small fraction of France's manufacturing base, required a continuous flow of American arms and ammunition to stay in the fight.

The benefactors anxiously waited for a return on their investment. The International Union of Revolutionary Marxists worried over the expanding presence of American pilots and landships in Legitimist France; one had to strike before the American behemoth recovered fully, and it was too late. The Americans adopted a similar logic, urging the legitimists to take the offensive before the revolutionaries could convert their demographic advantage into a military one.

The whites struck first. Rather than march into the heavily fortified Loire Valley, the white army proceeded east toward Dijon. Taking the city would cut the main artery between Paris and Lyon. Despite extensive planning for the operation, it failed to achieve the element of surprise; Soviet intelligence was already embedded deep within Legitimist France. American firepower provided the means to achieve an initial breakthrough, but it could not be sustained indefinitely. Legitimist air superiority was challenged by volunteer pilots from Germany and Italy. For the first time in the war, most aerial engagements were not between Frenchmen but between Germans and Americans. The conflict was being internationalized.

The resounding failure of the Dijon offensive marked the end of Petain's generalship. Clemenceau's right-wing opponents went on the attack, and the embattled Prime Minister was forced to concede to the opposition. General Del Castelnau, a right-wing Catholic who was also the unofficial leader of a paramilitary movement, was placed in charge of the Army. His nomination was bolstered by the favor he won from the American diplomatic corps, who admired him for his simplicity and directness. Castelnau was clearly a man of the right, and his fervent catholicism had likely prevented him from being promoted in the Great War, despite his distinguished service. Now, his religiosity became an asset, especially when paired with his refusal to become involved in the factional disputes between individual right-wing factions. He was a man almost everyone - or at least, almost everyone besides Clemenceau and his loyalists - could approve of.

At the urging of their anarchist and syndicalist allies, the Reds began their offensive out of the Rhone Valley. The main goal was to retake Marseille. If successful, this would be a great symbolic victory for revolutionary france, avenging the white massacre of 1920. It would also cut off a major point of entry for American aid. Normally, the mountainous terrain in the region would have made a frontal assault difficult, but over the summer, the Italian government massed the majority of its militia army in the western alps, prompting fears of an intervention. Legitimist France was forced to transfer troops to the border, while a new model of German landship provided the French advance out of Lyon with a heavily-armored spearhead. The attack toward Grenoble achieved a level of operational surprise, while another toward Valence plodded on slowly. Grenoble fell on August 15th, encircling 8,000 legitimists. The fall of Valence three days later stirred hopes that Marseille was still within reach, but the quick arrival of several American "volunteer" divisions sufficed to halt the armored spearhead toward Avignon. Italy retaliated for this overt intervention by ordering its army to occupy the cities of Nice and Cannes.

The failure of both major offensives led some to think about an armistice. Clemenceau, an exhausted and beaten man, mooted the prospect of peace to his cabinet. Soldier's councils in Paris endorsed a resolution calling for negotiations. However, few could imagine what peace might look like. While some thought that the division of France into two separate states had become an inevitability, most believed this was an unacceptable solution. Yet the internationalization of the conflict would make any post-war "national unity" government exceedingly unstable. America had already soured on Clemenceau after learning of his peace proposal, and plans were afoot to replace the increasingly powerless prime minister. In the north, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard had to deal with the spiralling demands of the soldier's councils, which requested an ever-growing share of the national income. Utterly reliant on the army for the tasks of both war and domestic peacekeeping, he had little option but to meet their requests, though this made it more difficult to feed and clothe the home front. Tensions between the worker's and soldier's of the French worker and soldier's republic were soon to balloon out of control.

 

[Curby]

Red Republic: The Political and Institutional Foundations of the New Italy​

Lenin asked Borghi if he were opposed to the Centralism of the Bolsheviks, to which he replied: "You have that right. How could any anarchist be in favour of Centralism"? To which Lenin retorted: "Freedom cannot be the death of the revolution." Borghi countered with: "In the absence of freedom, the revolution itself would be a horror."

-Conversation purportedly overheard at the 1st meeting of the International Union of Revolutionary Marxists

Anarchy is synonymous with Socialism. Because both signify the abolition of exploitation and of the domination of man over man, whether maintained by the force of arms or by the monopolization of the means of life.

-Enrico Malatesta

The point of Modernity is to live without illusions without becoming disillusioned.

-Antonio Gramsci

Excerpts from Aurelio Chessa, Italy: Liberal Kingdom to Socialist Republic (Rome, 1964)

Much like its more populous counterpart to the north, the institutional structure of the Italian polity was determined both by the failures of the bourgeois state which preceded it and by its particular configuration of revolutionary forces. These were far more plural than in most other socialist states. The Italian Socialist Party never held anything close to a monopoly of working-class support, and in the prewar era, only a small fraction of the working-class was affiliated with socialist-aligned trade unions. War contributed to an extraordinary growth in their membership, but in relative terms, they were outpaced by the syndicalist USI (Unione Sindacale Italiana). In the year and a half-long period preceding the November revolution, non-marxist radicals successfully outflanked the socialists, and a wave of workers defected from the traditional socialist unions. Ousted from its position of hegemony in the Italian left, the socialists were forced to conciliate with other tendencies; as the most outspoken proponent of such a strategy, leadership of the party fell to Antonio Gramsci in the summer of 1919.

The platform endorsed by the Gramscians emphasized the worker-councils as the basis of the revolution, and called for permanent industrial militancy to win worker's control of production. Here, the policy of the "broad worker's front" was first explicitly formulated; the vanguardist party would collaborate with all truly proletarian social forces if their interests aligned. The ultra-left Bordigists reluctantly agreed to these measures: they were conscious that it had thus far been the anarchists and syndicalists who had acted as the advance spearhead of the worker's struggle, and were chastened by this realization into temporarily adopting a strategy of collaboration.

Liberal Italy was in a terminal state of crisis, with its cabinets recycled on a monthly basis and its leaders casting bitter incriminations at each other. The grand nation-building project of the Italian Liberals, the project of risorgimento, had ended in a humiliating treaty which permitted the indefinite occupation of Venetia by Austrian soldiers and forced the Italian state into harsh financial austerity to pay for reparations. Fiscal retrenchment meant that any efforts to forge a social peace were likely doomed in advance.

In this situation, it is perhaps unsurprising that Gramsci's "broad front" soon encompassed significant sections of the middle-class and rural population. Tepid efforts at land reform were not sufficient to placate the peasants of southern and central italy, and reformist attempts to negotiate wage-disputes merely exacerbated rising inflation. Over the summer, rural unrest in Central and Southern Italy exploded as peasants took it upon themselves to expropriate the estates. Middle-class elements and demobilized soldiers disillusioned with the liberal order flocked to revolutionary syndicalism.

The November Revolution turned the social war into a civil one. The "industrial triangle" of Milan, Genoa, and Turin fell to the revolutionaries in the first week of fighting. Anarchists in Apulia and Central Italy wreaked havoc on white supply lines. Gramsci's broad front policy was reaffirmed when the leaders of the nascent revolutionary state met in Milan and agreed to merge their assorted militias into an army, though Malatesta's "black brigades" largely fell outside the unified chain of command.

There was also the matter of the catholics. The Catholic Popular People's Party, formed in 1918 to contest the parliamentary elections, had won broad support amongst the smallholder peasantry in Central and Southern Italy. Many genuinely revolutionary elements of the body politic could be found in its rank-and-file. Even before the revolution, mid-ranking party activists were already advocating for a tactical alliance between left-catholics and socialists. Yet the party leadership had ties to the Vatican, and was predictably of a more conservative bent. The right-wing, led by Alcide de Gasperi, denounced the revolutionary upheaval and supported the legitimist government. The party left, however, refused to take sides in the civil war, declaring a "pox on both their houses". When the anarchist army marched on Rome, in a bid to prevent the outright destruction of the catholic church bureaucracy, the left-wing priest Luigi Sturzo declared his support for the revolutionary government. He was soon joined by Ernesto Buonaiuti, Romolo Murri, and Giorgio La Piana.

While the anticlerical anarchists and ultra-left bordigists were naturally united in opposition to catholic participation in the revolutionary government, the other factions took a more pragmatic approach. Gramsci favored an alliance with the catholics, not least to sideline the increasingly influential anarchist faction of Armando Borghi, which controlled the powerful USI. Mainline syndicalists led by Alceste De Ambris were willing to tentatively welcome the catholics into the fold on the condition that a new papacy be installed. However, the provisional executive committee remained deadlocked on the issue until the mass peasant revolts in 1921 convinced them of Sturzo's loyalty to the revolutionary project.

The Ideological Camps of the Early Republic

By the end of the Civil War, at least five distinct ideological tendencies had emerged with unique power bases and leaders. Firstly, there was the revolutionary socialism of Gramsci, situated in the new center of the Italian Socialist Party. This workerist form of council-communism most closely resembled the right-wing, pragmatist wing of the German Luxemburgists, though they retained a somewhat more libertarian outlook. The Gramscians desired a unitary state run by delegates from worker's councils. Contemptuous of revisionists and radicals alike, they believed in a steady path toward socialism which would involve a mixture of economic planning and market incentives. Generally speaking, Gramscians favored building as broad a tent as possible, but were skeptical of the ultra-radicalism of anarchists and bordigists. They were distinguished from other parties of the "new European centre" by an especially assertive and thoroughgoing embrace of proletarian internationalism. The counteroffensive of socialist trade unions in early 1921 won the Gramscian faction a plurality at the initial all-Italian congress of worker and peasant's delegates, but they found themselves outmanuevered by an unexpected coalition of opponents. Nonetheless, the Gramscians would be key players in all of the early governments of the republic.

The next largest faction were the anarchists of Armando Borghi and Errico Malatesta. Despite Malatesta's influence as a theorist, it was Borghi, as general secretary of the USI, who occupied a dominant position. Borghi also demonstrated a greater degree of pragmatism, especially in his willingness to work alongside the socialists and even, at times, the catholics. The close relationship between the two men likely delayed an inevitable split, but there were more than a few anarchists who accused Borghi of being a closet syndicalist from the very beginning of the Italian Worker and Peasant's Republic.

The anarchists, of course, favored a highly decentralized political system, and sought from the very beginning to strip the federal government of its powers. They also pushed particularly firmly for a national militia to replace Italy's army, a highly popular policy which nonetheless ended up having disastrous consequences for Italy's military readiness. In short, the anarchists left an enduring imprint on the politics of Italy, and a number of the main differences with the German and Soviet systems are directly attributable to their influence.

The "third force" of the early republic were the catholics. The remaining political factions, such as the right-wing syndicalists, ultra-left bordigists, and the rump of the reformist and left-centrist socialists were inconsequential compared to the "big three" (catholics, socialists, and anarchists). The reconstituted Catholic Popular People's Party named itself the Union of Catholic Socialists, and allied itself to the new red papacy in Rome. The beleaguered catholics became some of the staunchest defenders of traditional liberal rights, which they considered the main bulwark against left-radical anticlericalism. They also frequently aligned with the anarchists on issues of regionalism and federalism. Opposed to both cultural revolution and workerist conceptions of socialism, they were natural reformists and incrementalists; many of the welfare programs of the republic's early years were formulated either by catholics or in cooperation with them. They were especially popular in rural areas and among women and the elderly. Despite their quite genuine support in the country-side, the catholics were the political bloc most frequently in the minority, and it took some time before they could credibly rebut allegations that they were a counterrevolutionary fifth column.

Situated at the opposite end of the spectrum were the followers of Amadeo Bordiga's ultra-left communists. They held off on splitting with the socialists - who soon renamed themselves the Italian Party of Revolutionary Marxists - because they lacked support in the broader trade union and council movement. This would eventually change, but initially they operated as a pressure group on Gramsci's left, checking his penchant for opportunism. Calls for a revolutionary reorganization of the Italian economy and the introduction of Luxemburgist-style central planning were unable to make much progress, though they had more success as early proponents of European Federalism. Their clout grew considerably as Bordiga's ideas spread across Europe and a new generation of intellectuals grew critical of the perceived sclerosis in the Gramsci ministries. The Bordigists also resolved to carry out a "decisive break" with the anarchists, which principally meant shattering the power of the USI and using the power of the state to crack down on anarchist organizing. Gramsci shared their distaste for the anarchists despite his "broad front" policy of 1919, but was unwilling to employ such radical measures against the opposition. Of course, Bordiga's proposals were unacceptable to many in the republic who accepted anarchist participation in the political system as a given, but he did find some unexpected allies among the right-wing socialists. It is to them we now turn.

The socialist reformists and previous syndicalist leadership of the USI found themselves in a similar situation in 1919: tarred for their support of the war, banished from their positions of power, and overrun by previously marginal leftist radicals. Right-wing syndicalists such as De Ambris found some success in mustering up patriotic outrage against Austrian reparations, but his calls to restart the war were met primarily by laughter and derision. Reformist and left-centrist socialists, meanwhile, found themselves utterly out of touch with the mood of the rank-and-file; their complete loss of support amongst party activists doomed their position in 1919. Each group sent disappointingly small delegations to the All-Union Congress, and in an effort to shore up their numbers, they entered into cooperation. Gramsci finally expelled the right-flank in late 1921, shortly after the conclusion of the Third Internationale; unable to wrest back control of the USI, the syndicalists joined them in a small grouping of "Socialist Republicans". Though initially tiny and powerless, they won increased support in the next few years as middle-class participation in the new regime rebounded. Ideologically, they adhered to a corporatist version of Mazzinian Republicanism, and were consistently the most bellicose and jingoistic section of the All-Italian Congress. Their wish for a war with Croatia was eventually fulfilled, though the government was less willing to commit to its extensive plan of annexations.

The 1st All-Italian Congress and the Drafting of the Basic Law

​

In the summer of 1921, the first All-Italian Congress met in the provisional capital of Turin to draft the basic law of the new republic. The decision to host the congress here, in the northern stronghold of socialist unionism, had been an early victory for Gramsci, but he was to quickly find himself outmaneuvered by the opposition. In a historical irony that recalled Hegel's "cunning of reason", Gramsci's own attempt to bring the catholics into the political system to limit anarchist power had precisely the opposite effect. Of course, the alliance which brought together Catholics and Anarchists was not to last; it was broken later that year, in fact, when Gramsci invited the Catholic Socialists into government. But it would have an enduring impact on the political institutions of the new republic.

Composition of the First All-Italian Congress​

Party/Faction	Delegates	%
Italian Socialist Party (Gramscian)	272	32
Italian Socialist Party (Bordigist)	34	4
Italian Socialist Party (Right-wing)	25	3
Anarchists	238	28
Union of Catholic Socialists	204	24
Revolutionary Syndicalists	76	9

There were some crucial points of consensus. The vast majority of delegates agreed that they could not repeat the "German mistake", which was heartily mocked by participants of every ideological stripe as typical teutonic excess: what manner of madman would enshrine dual-power as a positive principle of government? Of course, the Italians had their own problems. Even though they agreed on the need for a "pure" council republic, the councils were not nearly as widespread in Italy as elsewhere; trade-unions, in fact, had expanded at a faster clip than the councils themselves, owing largely to the weakness of the Italian state in regulating and suppressing them. Yet the Gramscians, anarchists, and bordigists alike denounced the notion of making the trade unions the basis of the new polity. Even the syndicalists weren't overly enthused by the idea; after all, they had lost control of their own unions to the anarchists!

Eventually, the delegates settled on a compromise solution: the new basis of the state would be the Camera del Lavor. These "Chambers of Labor" were originally affiliated with the main socialist trade union, the CGT, but they quickly grew into autonomous organizations. They became centers of social life for working-class communities, and also disbursed funds and assistance to strikers. Typically, leadership of the regional chambers was determined both by the composition of nearby unions and the dominant tendencies of local left-wing organizers. The chambers coordinated the massive protest wave at the beginning of the Great War, and were increasingly run by anarchists and syndicalists.

The Congress planned to fold regional administrations into the Camera del Lavor, and establish new ones where necessary. The Camera would also be responsible for appointing delegates to the All-Italian Congress, which would act as the supreme legislative body for Italy. This legislative body would directly appoint an executive, much like in the German system. Each Camera would have its leadership determined by votes in local trade unions, peasant leagues, worker-councils, and municipal committees. The first three would vary in proportion to the workers present in each, while the latter would remain fixed at 30%.

This solved the most basic issue of institutional design, but disagreements persisted about the true role of the Camera. The anarchists wanted to miniaturize and empower them, and proposed establishing hundreds of new chambers of labour across Italy to ensure an unbreakable connection between workers and the new bodies; naturally, the Gramscians considered this a recipe for chaos, and instead envisioned them as little more than regional councils which would appoint delegates to the all-important All-Italian Congress. When the catholics joined the anarchists in vetoing the Gramscian proposal, it became clear that it did not have the necessary support. It now fell to the opposition to sketch a robust alternative.

What emerged was, of course, a compromise. The Chambers of Labour were to take on a crucial administrative-political role in governance, but certain essential functions would remain the purview of the All-Italian Congress. While additional Chambers would be created, they would act as engines of regionalism rather than localism. Each Camera would be allowed, within limits, to determine its own composition: with the approval of a democratic, region-wide vote, a chamber could choose to reduce or to increase the share of members appointed by municipalities. They would also be empowered to recall appointed delegates and call elections at any time of their choosing.

The Central Government's freedom of maneuver was hamstrung by the federalist basic law. In order to engage in large-scale economic planning, cultural revolution, or any other "grand project", it would need to secure the assent of key Chambers of Labour. This arrangement certainly helped create a federal government uniquely attentive to the needs of particular regions, but it also likely contributed to a certain tendency for deadlock and institutional inertia in the early republic, which would only be fully resolved with later reforms which revised the balance of power between the camera and the central government.

Nonetheless, the libertarian and anti-statist proclivities of Italian worker's culture left a lasting mark on the basic structure of the Italian polity. The "cooperative federalism" of the Italian system persists into the present, and has recently become a model for new socialist states with highly uneven regional development and significant populations of national minorities. Today, Italy's council and trade union elections have the highest participation rates in the entire socialist sphere, and more Italians serve in government at some point in their life than in any other nation on earth. Political scientists attribute this to Italy's wide-ranging institutions of participatory democracy, as well as to the continuing importance of municipialism and regionalism in Italian political culture.

Camera Del Lavoro Elections and the First Gramsci Ministry

The 1st Congress of the Republic dispersed after adopting the basic law. Over three months, an additional twenty-five Camera del Lavor were established - at first, many of them were little more than rechristened administrative buildings. Elections were delayed until the end of the Third International, and took place amidst another feverish socialist campaign to win back the industrial laborers who had defected to anarchist and syndicalist unions. Gramsci had made it his mission to force the anarchists into a purely ancillary role. The policy of the "broad front", which sanctioned a temporary alliance with the anarchists to achieve revolution, ceased to apply now that proletarian power had been secured.

Despite the best efforts of the socialists, however, Borghi and Malatesta's anarchists won a little over a quarter of the delegates to the 2nd Congress, and also achieved outright victories in the camera of Genoa, Apulia, and Romagna. To form a national government which excluded the anarchists, Gramsci was forced to enter into coalition with the catholic-socialists, something which had already been accomplished in the regions of Lazio and Umbria. This was perhaps the natural culmination of Gramsci's voluntarist version of Marxism: long an opponent of "free thought", "naive positivism", and the entire tradition of Italian liberal anticlericalism, Gramsci now forged the first "alliance of hammer and crucifix".

Control of Italian Chambers of Labour

Light Red: Socialist
Dark Red: Socialist/Anarchist Coalition
Black: Anarchist
Orange: Socialist-Catholic Coalition
Blue: Catholic​

The new government's first task was the rationalization of economic life. For Gramsci and the socialists, this principally meant formalizing the worker's "prefigurative" institutions as the new basis of the economy. The most important of these were the producer's cooperatives and the factory committees. Revolutionary expropriations were given a legal basis, and the producer's cooperative made the primary unit of the new economy. In a rare show of unity with the Camera, Gramsci agreed to concentrate tremendous financial power in a network of community and municipal banks controlled by the chambers of labour; these would still, however, need to compete for grants from a central bank.

Gramsci was a critic of the statist socialism embraced by Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks. While Lenin believed that the cartelization of the wartime German economy paved the way for socialism, Gramsci argued that the massive industrial agglomerations of the 1910s represented a step back for worker's power. Markets were necessary tools to calibrate prices, though systematic guardrails must be instituted to limit their more corrosive effects and restrain the hegemony of "market-logic". Hence producer's cooperatives were allowed to buy and trade with one another, but were also subject to the control and sanction of their Camera del Lavor; in practice, this meant that economic planning, when it occurred, happened at the regional and local level. Enterprises which desired capital were required to prove the "use-value" of their products to local communities; unsurprisingly, this soon created complicated relations of patronage, though it did have the effect of limiting overly speculative businesses and ensuring close links between cooperatives and the municipalities they served.

Italy's new government also pushed for closer economic and political relations with its more thoroughly industrialized northern neighbor. Britain, Italy's main commercial partner since the Risorgimento, did not institute any explicit embargo, but the supply of most key British imports nonetheless mysteriously "dried up" in 1920. German coal allowed Italian industries to continue functioning, but these purchases came at a heavy cost. Gramsci, long influenced by the "free trade socialists" of the 19th century, hoped to regularize interstate commerce by entering into a customs union with Germany, and even mooted the building of a new railway through the alps. These endeavors were supported by an unusually large proportion of the Italian body politic: Bordigists, Anarchists, and even Catholics were interested in pursuing European confederation. It thus represented a natural avenue for the new government to explore: here, political capital could be won rather than expended.

At first, there was resistance to the idea in Germany. Having already established close economic ties with the Soviet Union, some in the Revolutionary Worker's Front worried that the confederative project would flood Germany with cheap consumer goods, harming local industries. Italy was also far less willing to accede to military cooperation, which was the main demand of the Germans; the deeply antimilitarist tenor of Italian politics at the time was only partially matched in Germany, and the catholics and anarchists in particular worried about being drawn into a new global war. Halting, incremental progress was nonetheless made: in 1922, a trade deal was signed removing tariffs on most heavy-industrial goods, and in 1923 the first set of new transalpine railway lines were laid in Venetia and Tyrol. The foreign ministers of Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands signed a memorandum in early 1924 expressing their commitment to creating a common market - this was perhaps the first real step toward European Federalism, though it was only the beginning act of a long saga.

Notes

I want to thank @PrognosticHannya for helping me brainstorm ideas for this post, especially regarding the red papacy and left-catholics.

 

[Curby]

The Tragic Revolution: Two Perspectives on the Indian Revolt
​

The innermost essence, the core, the whole meaning and content of the policies of the imperialist capitalist countries is the continuous and incessant tearing apart of all countries and peoples so that they can be gradually devoured and digested by capitalism. ...And, consequently, the working class must draw the conclusion that imperialism, war, plundering countries, haggling over peoples, breaking the law, and the policy of violence can only be fought against by fighting capitalism, by setting social revolution against global genocide.

-Rosa Luxemburg

Yes, this is the logic of the Nation. And it will never heed the voice of truth and goodness. It will go on in its ring-dance of moral corruption, linking steel unto steel, and machine unto machine; trampling under its treat all the sweet flowers of simple faith and the living ideals of man.

-Rabindranath Tagore

The present policy of the International Union of Revolutionary Marxists seems to consist in throwing the Indian proletariat and peasantry into the maw of British imperialism, so that we may avoid the hard task of confronting it ourselves.

-Anton Pannekoek

---

Mosse, George. 1959. "A Failed Bourgeois Revolution: The INC and the Indian Revolt." The Journal of Social History.

In the accumulated index of failed bourgeois revolutions, the Indian experiment must be accorded a special place. Only the naked brutality of British colonialism could have compelled the parasitic rentier landowners, the reformist professional classes, and the nationally-conscious peasantry into a revolutionary alliance; only in the heady days of proletarian revolution and Leninist anti-imperialism could the Marxist states of Europe believe that the Indian revolt was a prelude to a social revolution rather than what is really was - an attempt to dam up the revolutionary discontent of the Indian lower-classes.

Let us begin in 1914, before the outbreak of war. What was the character of Indian resistance at this point? Twofold: either consisting of revolutionary terrorism in the anarchist mold, carried out overwhelmingly by the sons of Zamindars (landowners), industrialists, and other middle-class professionals, or a kind of milquetoast reformism, which reached at its most extreme no further than the boycott of British goods. The Indian National Congress, the purported representative body of the national-bourgeoisie, was no more than a debating society which met every year, passed its formulaic denunciations of British excesses, and then dispersed. The most robust bourgeois activism took place outside its purview, as in the boycott movement of 1908, and even here, there was little real connection to the broader Indian population. Mass unrest of the Indian proletariat and peasantry, when it did occur, was sporadic, uncoordinated, and generally apolitical. Tellingly, rioters and strikers were as likely to engage in communalist violence against perceived religious enemies as they were to target British rule.

What do these forms of resistance indicate about the social composition of Indian radicalism? Simply this: that it was perpetually frightened of the great mass of Indian people, and unwilling in principle to work with them. Perhaps this may have been excused in more propitious circumstances, but the Indian bourgeoisie was too feeble to carry out a revolution on its own, and its highest sections, such as the Bombay industrialists, were frequently its most reformist elements. True radicalism was concentrated among lawyers, civil servants, clerks, and other members of the mittelstand; their utter failure to forge active connections with the mass of Indian laborers and peasants must be judged a world-historical mistake on par with the failures of 1848. Perhaps the task of bourgeois revolution is too important to entrust to the bourgeois alone.

When the war came, the British accomplished what the INC could not: they roused the discontented lower-classes, politicized the simmering tensions at the base of Indian society, and precipitated a turn toward revolutionary nationalism amongst sections of the population that ought to have been steadfastly loyal to British rule. One does not need to look far for an explanation of these phenomena: the war forced the British to dramatically intensify their exploitation of the colony. The "drain of wealth" theory had long been a staple of nationalist rhetoric: now it became an unavoidable lived reality. As Bryan tightened the purge-strings of American financiers, the British pound began to precariously teeter, and domestic protest in England spread in response to rising prices. Naturally enough, the colonies were made to bear the fiscal burden of the British war machine.

The full damage done to the Indian economy and the full decline in Indian living standards over the half-decade of the Great War is likely impossible to calculate. There was, firstly, a marked increase in taxation as Indians were forced to pay for the over 2.5 million-man army raised on behalf of Britain. This led to a more than seven-fold increase in income tax revenue, predominantly impacting the middle and upper-classes. Secondly, wartime expenditure, transport bottlenecks, and spiralling inflation caused a more than threefold increase in the price index, even as real wages lagged behind this considerably. British manipulation meant that the prices of most imports went up dramatically, while the value of exports stayed mostly level, a situation that impoverished many wealthy peasants who depended on British agricultural equipment. New excise taxes placed on exports hit Indian industries as well, harming traders and industrialists. Perhaps most injurious, however, was the use of coercive practices of conscription to target both skilled workers and potential army recruits. In the Punjab, the proportion of drafted soldiers changed over a single year from 1:150 to 1:38. Workers were "recruited" under manifestly unfree conditions to work in English factories and peasants were press-ganged into regiments that served on the western front. The loss of skilled agricultural and industrial labor stoked nationalist sentiments greatly. Combined, British measures greatly expedited the drain of wealth from India, forced a decline in the living standards of Indians of every class, created systemic obstacles to indigenous capitalist growth, shattered the livelihoods of both poor and wealthy peasants, and decimated the remaining artisan handicraft industry.

The first wave of resistance occurred in 1917-1918 under the leadership Tilak and Besant, who, inspired by the recent events in Ireland, advocated for Indian "Home Rule". The British attempted a mixture of repression and conciliation here, exiling both Tilak and Besant, but not before each were able to make some major inroads amongst the general population. Balfour issued a declaration offering Indians some degree of "self-government", but in light of its tepidness and ambiguity, it was widely viewed as unsatisfactory.

The INC moderates were not explicitly targeted by the law, and they continued to meet under the leadership of the new president Molital Nehru. Yet despite the radicalism of the new body, which called for India to be accorded self-rule and dominion status within five years, there were little real efforts to resist the war effort. As late as September 1919, there is evidence of the INC cooperating with British officials to implement wartime measures. In short, the leadership of the national-bourgeousie remained utterly divorced from the radicalized sections of the Indian population.

Popular radicalism had an uneven and markedly regional character. Despite the failure of the first Ghadar Mutiny, many of their transnational networks remained intact, and Lala Lajput Rai, flush with American dollars and German marks, used them to coordinate a highly effective "no-conscription" campaign in the Punjab over 1919. Punjab's Sikhs traditionally bore the brunt of British recruitment efforts, though in the great war, they were extended to the region's substantial Hindu and Muslim communities. The coercive measures of the Punjab Governor O'dwyer, who enlisted Lambardards (village chiefs) to forcibly conscript peasants, had already led to unrest in the province during the 1917-1918 home-rule protests: now Lajput Rai, in concert with Ajit Singh and a pre-existing network of Punjabi radicals, helped villagers resist the efforts at conscription, which was likened to kidnapping. They were helped by an unusual degree of communal amity between Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus.

Some of the first proletarian protests broke out in Bengal around the same time. Workers demanded an end to the war, the beginning of home-rule, and for factories to be operated on the "Russian model". A number of sympathetic home-rule politicians such as H.B. Mandavale, Janji Dwarkadas, and Umar Sobhani supported them, helping them achieve a compromise settlement which led to a 60% wage increase and a formal recognition by their Anglo-Indian employers of the right to form trade unions. Buoyed by this first victory, unionization in the Bengali textile mills started expanding at a rapid clip.

Perhaps the most explosive pre-revolt social movement, however, took place in the country-side around the city of Bombay. A traditional stronghold of radicalism, it was nonetheless plagued by internal caste divisions. The Brahman caste dominated most clerical and civil-service positions - compared to most other provinces, there was a particularly firm distinction between castes. Peasant revolts began in early 1919, when they refused to pay rents and expropriated Brahmin-owned farmlands. They were led by Mukundaro Patil, the intellectual spokesman of the Satyashodhak Samaj, a social reform society and advocacy group for the Dalits. The insurgency was mostly put down in the late summer, but it continued to simmer, and burst forth again during the beginning of the First Revolutionary Era. A number of radical movements also emerged in Madras, particularly in the Andhra Delta and Tirunelveli, where similar populist lower-caste organizations helped coordinate resistance to both Brahman and British rentier rule.

Finally, we must discuss Bengal itself. The traditional heartland of radicalism, Bengal saw little open protest during 1919, in large part because it was under a state of de facto military rule. A brutal massacre of protestors in February led to a brief period of sustained protest, and then prolonged quiet. Discontent and revolutionary activism continued to flourish just below the surface; many middle-class prewar Bengali terrorist networks were reconstituted, though they held their bombs and assassination plots in abeyance for the time being. The British were more concerned about the Sikh soldiers posted in the area, who frequently fraternized with Bengali civilians. They were worried that in the event of a major uprising they might prove untrustworthy, an anxiety that was to be mostly confirmed by the end of the year.

Revolution Betrayed?

The November Revolutions were the signal for a world-wide proletarian, anti-imperialist revolt. Unfortunately, the social forces were not yet present in India for such a revolution to be led principally by workers - or even workers and peasants. While over half of Bombay and Calcutta workers were on strike by November 11th, the largest strike actions occurred after the mutiny of most Indian soldiers in the north had already begun. There was, of course, little chance for the under 30,000 white British soldiers in India to contain the spreading unrest; more than a few of them determined that they wanted to play no further part in the British imperial venture. Yet the revolutionary networks that connected the mutinying soldiers and striking workers were intended principally to coordinate resistance, nor to construct a new government. These were not "interstitial institutions" of the classic type. Simultaneous revolts in Bombay, the Punjab, and Bengal were not able to link up and communicate for over a week. A general strike of northwestern railway workers on the Gujarat-Gujranwal- Lahore-Amritsar-Delhi line did paralyze the British response, but it also made it more difficult for a unified national-revolutionary administration to be formed.

What was the role of the INC in the opening stages of the revolution? Nil. Its leadership were, naturally enough, dispersed across India; around half were located in the Bombay Presidency and the rest were concentrated in Bengal and the United Provinces. Molital Nehru was reportedly relaxing in his large, family home in Allahabad when he first heard of the revolt; he walked into the city center and saw that a Hartal (mass protest) had broken out in the city. After several failed attempts to purchase a newspaper, he retired for the night. The next morning, he read of the events that had broken out across India, and alarmed, attempted to correspond with other members of the INC located in Bengal, only to find the post office workers were also on strike. He was forced to travel to Calcutta, and on the way, he read several sensationalistic reports which made it appear as if India itself was on the verge of social revolution, and England already drowned in one. The INC, he wrote privately, had to "take power to ensure an orderly transition to the new republic". He feared that failing to do so would lead "anarchic elements" to come to power. Briefly, he contemplated whether "some deal" could be made with the British, but he was assured by his colleagues that the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, would refuse any cooperation, and besides had his hands full himself with a brewing worker's revolution.

The INC possessed what all of the revolutionary organizations lacked: a truly nation-wide network of activists which had some pretense of national political legitimacy. Thus when Nehru issued his declaration of independence, the mutinying soldiers, striking workers, and most of the peasant movements (safe some of the lower-caste ones) swore loyalty to the new government. The zamindars soon did the same, believing (with fairly good reason) that they could preserve their privileges in the new order. The radicalized Muslim League was brought in by a promise of co-rule and potential federalization once the British were kicked out; barring this, the electoral agreement made in the Lucknow Pact would be preserved.

Nehru and the rest of the INC overestimated both the extent of British weakness and the degree of social radicalism in India itself. In fact, across vast expanses of the United Provinces, many peasants had not even heard that a revolution was taking place. A good deal of the "revolutionary" discontent had a narrowly economic focus. The first of many defeats inflicted on the INC came when the princely states declared their loyalty to Britain and raised several divisions which marched on Bombay, extinguishing the allied city government and keeping the revolutionary upheaval sequestered from Dravidian Southern India. Yet, having declared their own insurrectionary intentions, the leadership of the INC had little option but to continue onward.

Only in the states of Bengal and Bihar did the INC have the administrative personnel necessary to form anything like a functioning central government. In regions like the United Provinces (outside of Benares and Lucknow) and the Punjab, local administrations were formed from pre-existing elites who frequently were more concerned with their own aggrandizement than they were with the success of the new revolutionary order. Control over populous Bengal, Bihar, and Assam did allow massive armies to be raised; revolutionary enthusiasm in Bengal was particularly high, and at first, the government had to turn down many volunteers whom it could not arm and equip.

Naturally enough, the INC attempted to draw in a "broad front" of social forces - this was also, of course, the policy which IntRevMar advocated. In practice, however, this meant something quite different from what most of Lenin's allies at IntRevMar imagined: nascent socialist elements were placed in subordinate positions to the moderate leadership, lower-caste organizations were ignored entirely, and Zamindar representatives were placed in the commanding heights of the provincial administrations, which frequently had more power than the central government.

Hindu nationalists and other "extremists" presented a difficult problem for the INC. These figures often held considerable popularity among the general population and common soldiers. Some of the old-guard, such as Lagput Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, entered the cabinet of the Bengal government, thereby neutralizing a potent source of opposition. Younger individuals involved in the Ghadar Conspiracy could not be brought into the government so easily, as they were severe critics of the INC, and many of them believed they were the rightful leaders of India. At the insistence of IntRevMar, the Ghadar conspirator Bhai Bhagwan Singh and some of his allies were permitted entrance into the diplomatic corps. More hardline Hindu nationalists, such as Savarkar, were not given government posts due to the protestations of the Muslim League.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of the INC government was that it lost the loyalty of its own people within the space of just a few years. Of course, the war would require sacrifices from the population, and perhaps it was impossible for any administration to fully meet the millenarian hopes of the Indian peasantry. Yet the INC government made little effort to ensure an adequate distribution of war-burdens. Its leadership continued to insist on a class-collaborationist, nationalist mythology in which proletarian workers could not truly be repressed by their own national-bourgeoisie. By refusing to place meaningful conditions on the shipment of arms, the Leninist majority at IntRevMar covered itself in ignominy, sanctioning not just the repression of the rural peasantry, but also the INC's utter unwillingness to embark on meaningful programs of social reform for fear of losing conservative-nationalist support. Beginning in late 1921, peasants in the United Provinces and Rajputana began revolting against harsh conscription measures. Fearful of Bengali dominance of the new government, the Punjab administration refused to meet its fiscal obligations, and ensured that the majority of Soviet Arms did not reach the east. To meet its own financial and economic needs, the Bengal government was forced to resort to increasingly desperate measures, which finally led to scattered peasant revolts breaking out amongst Muslims in East Bengal during 1922, and then in Bihar. Once again, the timidity of the bourgeoisie had doomed the national revolution - the "broad front" was little more than a mirage to cover for bourgeois rule and peasant-proletarian subjection.

---

Habib, Mohammed. 1961. "The Indian Revolt: Assessing Luxemburgist Revisionism." The Journal of Social History.

It is quite curious that many esteemed Marxist historians, who have written systematic exculpations of the Russian Revolution's authoritarian turn, are liable to direct such furious heat and ire toward the leaders of the Indian Revolt. We are told by the same authors that the Russian Revolution's betrayal of Soviet rule can be excused because of the exigencies of German imperialism, but that all the mistakes of the Indian Revolution may be attributed forthrightly to the voluntary decisions of the Indian Government. Apparently, a century and a half of British imperialism and the miserable conditions it created may be brushed aside as so much historical detritus. One standard for the Russian, then, and another for the Indian - it appears we Europeans have not rid ourselves completely of imperialism after all.

George Mosse writes that the INC declared independence to avert a social revolution, and yet he admits in the same paper that there were not adequate forces to launch such a revolution in the first place. What ought the INC have done in this situation, then? Can anyone doubt that without any central authority, the British would be reconquered India in not 4 years, but 4 months? And what, then, of our treasured European Revolutions?

It is impossible to deny that the INC failed to fully direct the forces of social radicalism against the British, but any comparison to 1848 is mere hyperbole. The colonized bourgeoisie of India did not abandon the revolution, they did not turn themselves and their conspirators into the British, but continued to fight, and to die, for the cause of national independence. If the German bourgeoisie showed the courage of the Indian in 1848, then perhaps the proletariat would not have had to wait for the Great War's bloodletting to assume power.

As the war went on, the INC grew more, not less radical. Socialist soldiers such as Kari Nazrul Islam and Brijpal Singh were promoted as generals, and future communists such as M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherjii, and Virendranath Chattopadhyay ascended into upper government posts. Plans for land reform were drawn up. Indian nationalists accepted the alliance with IntRevMar, and swore to implement progressive social policy in the postwar period. The presence of reactionary provincial governors attests much more to the weakness of the Bengal Government than it does to alleged conservatism.

Some point to the eventual failure of the Indian Revolt, and it is here that they claim to locate the great failures of the government. They point too, to the peasant revolts, the strike actions, and the increasing discontent on the home front. Yet it is far more useful to ask not why the revolution failed, but how it was able to succeed for so long. The Indian Republican Army faced a vastly superior force that possessed a crushing disparity of firepower and technology. Its soldiers frequently could not speak to or understand one another, and were often completely untrained. And, of course, the government was cut off from global commerce and trade, even while they ruled a territory that had been engineered to be a dependent and peripheral adjunct of London.

How, then, were the British held off for nearly four years? Traditionally, historians have praised the heroism of the Indian soldier, particularly the returning divisions of the western front, who by all accounts were some of the most well-disciplined and effective fighting forces of the Anglo-Indian war. Yet paeans to martial prowess fail to account for the larger, structural factors at play. The INC successfully mobilized the populations of Bengal, Bihar, and Punjab in defense of the national revolution. They directed popular support for the revolution into a variety of channels, recasting the traditional Indian movements of Swadeshi, Samiti, and Swaraj into modern forms.

Swadeshi, initially a movement for self-strengthening and self-sufficiency, came to the fore in Bengal, Bombay, and Punjab in the early 20th century. The nascent bourgeousie attempted to build up national industry and enterprise in the face of British repression. During the Indian Revolt, Swadeshi became a call for service to the nationalist-revolutionary government. Businessmen pledged generous loans to Calcutta, particularly in Bengal, allowing the government to finance the purchase of discounted Soviet landships and other high-end military equipment. They also built up munitions factories, even when these yielded far smaller profits than other industries. Swadeshi ensured the government the material means it required to survive.

The Samitis were national volunteer groups which came to prominence at a similar time to Swadeshi. Most were open bodies engaged in a variety of activities: physical and moral training, social work, religious festivals, and practicing the techniques of passive resistance. A minority turned to revolutionary terrorism. A national samiti union was declared by the government, and all existing samiti groups were unilaterally enrolled in it. At first, there was no obligation for citizens to form additional samitis, but they nonetheless did so in droves. The youth were particularly active in them; samitis helped repair infrastructure, coordinate the provision of aid to soldiers, and assisted in construction projects. In Bengal, it is estimated that over 40% of males aged 15-30 participated in the samitis at one point: the value of their labor was likely worth over 25% of the government budget.

Finally, there is the concept of Swaraj, or "self-rule". Admittedly, the Indian government made only halting progress toward a real democratization of Indian political life, yet the mere promise of Swaraj electrified large sections of the Indian population. Whatever its flaws, a great many Indians were willing to make enormous personal sacrifices for the new government, something which cannot be said for the colonial regime. Here, the ideology of "self-rule" is key: the promise of Indian government over India did a good deal to inspire loyalty to the INC, even in the face of economic deprivation and rising poverty. The soldiers of the princely states may have only infrequently mutinied, but they were far quicker to surrender than their northern counterparts, who only rarely permitted themselves to be taken prisoner. The propaganda drive of Swaraj accounts for the difference.

In short, the INC government successfully mobilized the territories of Northern India in defense of the revolution and cultivated a national-revolutionary anti-colonial consciousness. The long afterlife of the INC's efforts should be evident enough in the continuing terrorism, unrest, and guerilla resistance which plagued British rule in the Northern provinces for the next two decades. If IntRevMar was less equivocal in its support for the Indians, and America less willing to throw its substantial weight behind the British imperial project, then there is some chance that the revolution would have been successful. Yet it was a remarkable achievement in any case. The martyrs of the first revolution prepared the groundwork for the second.

 

[Curby]

1923: The Year of Decision​

March on, Red Soldier! What may have befallen the Jews of Galicia, the Serbs of Belgrade, the benighted peoples of Hungary, without your courageous advance? March on, Red Soldier! Strike dread into the reactionary lords of terror that crush under their heel our European brothers! March, on, Red Soldier! In your hands has been entrusted the fate of the world's peoples; by the thrust of your bayonet and the sweat of your brow shall long-suffering humanity be at last redeemed! March on, Red Soldier!

-John Heartfield

We have entered a war not simply for the advance of socialism, but for the continued survival of undegraded humanity. We charge the Anglo-American power with nothing less than placing man upon a cross of capital and sacrificing the innocent peoples of Europe to preserve bourgeois power. Not even Marx and Engels could predict the horrors which the bourgeois now bring into the world as they attempt to delay the inevitable end of their class rule.

-Ernst Thalmann

It was not 1919 when the socialists gained ascendancy, but 1923; the cultural hegemony of the capitalist powers, their claim to moral and political legitimacy, was already battered by the war, but it only truly died in the killing fields of Galicia. The old liberal cause of equality, brotherhood, and freedom, what we today call "humanity", passed over to the new powers. Equipped with this potent weapon, they did not hesitate to employ it.

-Enzo Traverso

The curious thing about being made a soldier of humanity - if one may use such a term - is that one's enemies cease to be truly human. Has the Pole and Croat truly surrendered their own personhood by dint of their crimes? May humanity truly be saved in a sea of blood? Shall the red terror provide recompense to the victims of the bourgeois, or shall we instead numb our own humanity by such unrepentant violence? I fear that, having grown so drunk on our own self-righteousness, we shall soon enough cease to recognize ourselves.

-Karl Kraus

We have all had enough of the moral hand-wringing of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Was such consideration offered to the countless victims of the reactionary terror? Perhaps if Mr. Kraus had acquainted himself with those who survived the bourgeois ethnocides and atrocities, he would not spout such drivel, but this is likely too much to ask of his genteel sensibilities."

-Georg Ledebour

Whether they march to the Marseillase or the Ode to Man, the spirit is the same. Whether he be a Napoleonic volunteer or German convert to the latest millenarian creed, I am terrified of the man who engaged in wide-eyed slaughter while intoning his love of humanity. The man who exalts abstract humanity is the same man who hates the actuality of human existence.

-Martin Heidegger.

The British Empire is already tottering - all it requires is a gentle push.

-Yakod Sverdlov

We had best be careful, or within a few years that damned American flag will be hung over Melbourne and Toronto.

-Winston Churchill

---

Prelude

What were the essential lineaments of the 19th century world-order, in which Britain secured a leading but not hegemonic role? The British World-system required, first and foremost, a balance of powers across the channel, such that no European coalition could divide the booty of the British empire without first taking on continental challengers. In East Asia, it needed a passive or at least friendly group of powers which would not challenge British commercial supremacy in Malaya and China. And it demanded, if not complete restfulness, than at least comparative tranquility in South Asia, the great backstop of British power. In the First Revolutionary Era, as Japan made a bid for hegemony in East Asia and a German-Soviet alliance looked poised to establish a condominium over Europe, all the essential conditions for British supremacy were called into question.

For much of the 19th century, the great fear of British diplomats was the possibility of an enlarged Russian hyperpower immune to the chastening effects of sea power by virtue of its Eurasian geography. Such a state could batten at the four great doors of the British imperium: the Straits of Dardanelles which connected the mediterranean and black seas, thus far managed by a compliant Turkey; the maritime approaches to the Raj off Persia and its vulnerable Central Asian land frontiers; and, finally, the crucial British commercial grip on China. At the beginning of the 20th century, the disastrous Russian performance in the Russo-Japanese war made the dire prognostications of the Russophobic "Central Asian" lobby appear to be little more than paranoid fantasies. Lacking the economic and industrial might of Britain, Russia was not a serious threat. The 1907 Anglo-Russian convention settled their remaining disputes and prepared the way for an alliance against the burgeoning German power.

For eleven years, defeat after defeat was inflicted upon the weary and bedraggled Russian state. Germany's shattering victory in the Polish offensive confirmed Russian military weakness, and the 1918 Treaty of Warsaw, which transferred control of the Empire's western borderlands to Germany, seemed merely another signal of the interminable decline of Russian power. Yet in reality, this marked a nadir before a remarkable resurgence of Russian prestige. Lenin's Bolsheviks defeated their white opponents in short order, and an isolated Germany was forced to cede back lost territories in exchange for Russian grain. Then, the First Revolutionary Era brought the return of the Baltics and Finland into the Russian domain. Central Asia was pacified, and a friendly regime installed in Mongolia. Turkish weakness allowed a nearly effortless expansion of Western Armenia into Erzerum and Trabzon. Russian arms and military advisors threatened to bring down the British Raj.

Protected on its western flank by its German ally, the Russian military attained an unprecedented freedom of action. Lenin faced steadily mounting criticism from those who believed him to be overly cautious in its use. India's defeat in the Lucknow offensive brought a flurry of outrage from the left, who urged more direct intervention against the British. Before an early congress called in 1923, though, Lenin contracted the Yankee flu and died. There was little question about his successor. Almost immediately, Yakov Sverdlov became the "First-among-equals" at Sovnarkom. As party-secretary, holder of multiple commissar posts, and crucial intermediary between the party's left and centre, he had already grown to wield power equivalent to Lenin's; the upcoming Party Congress would merely confirm his ascendancy.

Sverdlov shared Lenin's pragmatism and ideological commitment to the communist project, but not his caution. He intended to do whatever was necessary to bolster the position of his Indian allies. This meant, first and foremost, creating difficulties for the British. Under the pretense of intervening in support of an aggrieved Kurdish minority, an invasion of eastern Turkey was launched. Such a plan had several advantages. Firstly, Turkey was at war with Britain's Greek ally, and it would therefore be politically impossible for England to send it aid. Secondly, the creation of a Kurdish client state and the presence of Soviet troops near Southwestern Persia would force the diversion of British troops into the region. Finally, such a route avoided directly assaulting Persia, which was doing its best to resist British attempts to extend a formal protectorate over the region. The presence of Soviet troops along its border would provide it with an incentive to continue these efforts.

Sverdlov also directed a sizable contingent of soldiers to Bulgaria via the Black Sea. These were not to commence any direct invasion of Constantinople, but they were to quite noisily menace both Greece and the International Zone, forcing additional diversions of British soldiers. In addition to this, a sizable bribe convinced the governor of Xinjiang to allow Soviet troops into the area, ostensibly as protection against Japanese imperialism, a fairly absurd pretense given the distance of Japanese soldiers from the province. Finally, the Soviets began sending raids into Afghanistan, intending to force it to desist from its invasion of the northwestern border provinces and Punjab.

These maneuvers did not determine the details of the year's struggles, but they did set the stage for them. Soviet advances on the British Empire's strategically vital flanks were met with predictable alarm by Britain, particularly because it had exhausted the means to counter them without enforcing a prolonged pause on the Indian campaign. In February, Churchill requested American military assistance in Iraq and Constantinople. Commentators rightly noted that this was an epochal development: England was now forced to rely not just on American financial aid, but also American military and industrial power to shore up the defense of its empire. As befuddled American soldiers were sent into Iraq and Constantinople to guard against Soviet incursions, the new, quadripolar world-order was being born, and the long century of British predominance being laid to rest. Perhaps most consequently, realization of the full extent of British weakness prompted the Americans to fully commit to creating a "Eastern European bloc" to counterbalance Soviet-German designs and prevent them from establishing a red condominium over Europe.

The Battles of 1923 - The Opening Blows

Over 1923, the fate of Asia and of Europe was determined on the battlefields of Luzon, Taiwan, Czechia, Bengal, Romania, Punjab, and Poland. As we will see, these military conflicts had become truly globalized, and it is impossible to fully understand the decision-making of political elites in the eastern campaigns without also examining the unfolding situation in the west - and vice-versa. For this reason, they must be considered together, as part of a single global ideological struggle. 1923 continued the pattern that had already begun in 1921 and 1922: the two power-blocs would continue to muster their forces and inch ever-closer into open and unmediated conflict, but would make no overt declaration of war.

In the Asian theater, the American fleet finally achieved its decisive battle in March, defeating an inferior Japanese force and sinking a third of its battleships. The invasion of Luzon began to great fanfare, but ended in great consternation and foreboding as the public learned of the staggering losses of American troops suffered to entrenched Japanese defenders. The internationalists in the state department began to speak of a negotiated peace, something which the easterners believed would only embolden Japan in the long-run. President Root intervened, and funneled additional resources, principally artillery and landships, to the allied Eastern European bloc, prompting the outrage of the generals fighting in the East Asian theater, as well as among Sun Yat-sen, who had been promised generous aid shipments. The Japanese army in China held out against several counteroffensives prosecuted by an undersupplied and frequently under-nourished Chinese Army.

Across the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, British forces made steady advances. An invasion out of Burma seized the province of Assam in February, and in April, Bengal itself faced an assault from the south and the east. The difficult terrain gave the defenders an initial edge here, buying time for many members of the INC government to flee through the Himalayan mountains into Tibet, where they would eventually make their way to the Soviet Union. It would take until September for the British to fully conquer the region, and a good deal longer to "pacify" it. Punjab, with its large and well-trained Sikh army, was defeated by the end of the year; pledges of amnesty for lower-level soldiers eventually provoked mass desertions as news of British success in Bengal spread to the region.

In July, before the campaigns of the Anglo-American powers had reached their conclusion in the Asian theater, war broke out once again in Europe. The arrival of American military advisors, planes and landships into East-Central Europe could not be masked. A steady stream of spies, insurgents, and provocateurs from the socialist bloc streamed into the reactionary states to undermine the adversarial regimes. Germany quietly began a military buildup, and Russia halted its troops along the border of British Baghdad, having waged a successful campaign to take the key city of Mosul. It was not, however, just the exigencies of geopolitics which demanded intervention.

News of the Jewish and Serbian ethnocides had gradually reached the socialist publics of Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. For some time, these three states had maintained a tight leash on their militaries, worried about the potential of pacifist backlash against undue expansion of the army. Roman Dmowski's coup against Pilsudski's weakened Polish government had already inflamed relations, and now reports of Anglo-American aid and massacres against Jewish and Serbian minorities provided further resources for a militarist propaganda drive. The reactionary states, now the "Bucharest Pact", responded to the military build-up by cracking down on perceived fifth columns. New regulations targeted German minorities in the Czech Sudetenland and in Croatian Slovenia. Germany responded by stepping up surveillance against "counterrevolutionary elements" of the Polish community in Posen.

Matters reached a head on July 14th, when the German community in the Czech city of Pilsen began an uprising that successfully won control of around half the city and proclaimed a "German Soviet Republic of Pilsen". Ironically, many of the participants in the revolt were not workers but middle-class elements in the pay of both German and Soviet intelligence, who had determined that the "socialist devil" to the north was preferable to the intrusive "Czech hydra". When the Czech authorities crushed the short-lived republic with extreme prejudice, an aggrived Germany sent a note demanding that atrocities against civilians be prosecuted, leading to a Czech denunciation of German involvement in its internal affairs. In border clashes, half a dozen German and Czech soldiers were injured.

What followed can only be described as a pattern of purposeful escalation by the socialist states. Outraged by the temerity of the Czech dismissal, Germany issued another note, informing the Czech government that a failure to protect the remaining German minorities in Czechia would be grounds for war. The military thinking of most of the top brass in Russia and Germany was that the reactionary states had grown overly emboldened by the provision of American aid, and that there was a narrow window to strike before the Pacific and Anglo-Indian wars wound up. What followed was a relentless campaign of vilification - largely not unfounded - against the states of the Bucharest Pact. Socialist leaders who previously believed that reports of atrocities were exaggerated now quickly switched tunes, both in public and in private. In any case, the invasion of Poland would soon reveal the full extent of the tragedy that had transpired under the first seven months of Dmowski's rule.

In the press and in the official pronouncements of the socialist bloc, the campaign that followed was declared to be a grand crusade against reactionary barbarism and a creeping Anglo-American invasion of Europe. In reality, it was both of these things and more. Military mobilization to match the swelling Anglo-American armies was felt to be a necessity, and such a war provided the perfect opportunity for it. Failure to intervene now might mean that no opportunity for intervention would ever arise - at least, no opportunity that would not provoke the Anglo-American enemy into a repeat of the Great War. It was now or never.

Soviet and German soldiers began the invasion of Poland on July 21st. With its diminished borders and decimated military hierarchy, it had little chance against the combined onslaught. The sizable Romanian army and well-supplied, experienced Czech soldiery waged a much more successful defense of their outlying provinces in the initial weeks of conflict. Warsaw fell in early August, and Galicia, the burial ground of over 600,000 Jews killed in the infamous ethnocide, was mostly captured by the 17th. The Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, and Croatian governments sent a confidential note offering generous peace terms on August 31st, including the cession of border areas, the expulsion of American advisors, and the legalization of banned socialist parties.

This was overwhelmingly rejected by the cabinets in both Russia and Germany. The second, and more brutal phase of the war thus began in September, coinciding with the American invasion of Taiwan. Alarm now spread among the capitalist powers that the red armies would soon sweep across the Balkans, bringing them to the gates of Constantinople and Greece. Several British expeditionary divisions were ferried into Romania, and for a few weeks, Anglo-American air support prevented the Red Army from making any breakthroughs. But then, the unstable Hungarian state, already facing sporadic protest at home, was requested to bring its army into Moravia to shore up Czech lines. Horthy at first equivocated, worried of the domestic implications of such a move, but eventually complied. He was right to be anxious. A patriotic revolt broke out across the army; Horthy was accused of "sacrificing Hungary's men to Hungary's butchers", and red militias under the command of Bela Kun successfully stormed Budapest, executing most of the government's ministers and proclaiming a soviet republic. The rest of the army almost immediately swore allegiance to Kun, as did the besieged Social Democrats. A war of reconquest soon began: Kun marched his men into Slovakia later that week and met up with advancing German forces, cutting off the remainder of the Czechoslovak Republic from its Romanian and Croatian allies.

A panicked America rushed through a hugely controversial bill that placed a complete embargo on shipments of grain, foodstuffs, and industrial goods to the socialist bloc; Britain did the same a few days later, and wielded its still-considerable financial power over Argentina to force it to pass a similar measure. Yet, crucially, Britain was not able to convince its own dominions to move forward with the embargo. The governments of both Canada and Australia feared that cutting off exports to the socialists would precipitate a farmer's revolt, and perhaps even bring the rural masses into coalition with domestic labor. Most of British financial leverage over its dominions had been whittled away by the wartime sale of securities and investments, not to mention the considerable loss of moral legitimacy Britain suffered through its use of dominion soldiers as cannon fodder in the campaigns of the western front.

Australia and Canada were two of the largest food exporters in the world, and as a consequence of their refusal to sign onto the blockade, they became some of the prime beneficiaries of rising global grain prices. So too would the Soviet Union, which would use its tremendous "food-power" as leverage in negotiations over the new order in Southeastern Europe. Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands were all immediately forced to reimplement rationing measures, even though the latter two made an only negligible contribution to the war.

The Battles of 1923 - Rising Tensions

Root's embargo was instituted at a time of acute national anxiety. The invasion of Taiwan had turned into a spectacular debacle. The initial landings, bloody but successful, were not followed up with continued progress. Japanese attritional warfare forced the American advance to a crawl. Despite the best efforts of the Navy, they could not stop the island's numerous defenders from being resupplied under the cover of darkness, often from Japanese-held China. A report in the Wall Street Journal indicated that there was a systemic undercounting of military deaths, leading the Secretary of War to resign. Popular concern about the war was matched by official consternation. In the state department, many worried that the "Jap War" had become a distraction from the more important European theater. The Hungarian revolution and collapse of Czech lines in Slovakia finally gave the internationalists a decisive upper-hand: the full might of the American military had to be directed at containing the Bolshevik menace.

To the shock of the world, America sent a formal offer of peace to Japan on September 24th. This was telegraphed across the entire nation: at the very least, Japanese refusal would rally public support. It was not a particularly generous offer. Japan would be forced to retreat from its bridgeheads across China and restore the status quo ante. It would have the option to purchase commercial rights in the Shandong Peninsula from the nationalist government in China. Japan would also lose the South Seas possessions it seized from Germany during the Great War, though almost all of these were already occupied by American soldiers. Perhaps the most injurious to Japanese prestige was the demand that it grant a 99-year lease on several naval bases in Taiwan to America. Taiwan was acquired back in the first Sino-Japanese war, and for the military command, losing sovereignty over any portion of it was politically unacceptable.

Negotiations nonetheless began in Honolulu on September 29th. The government of Tanaka Giichi faced economic collapse and spiraling discontent at home, and they feared that without coming to some sort of deal, there would be another eruption of civilian displeasure. Giich hoped for a settlement that would appease the Americans, end the war, and maintain an expanded Japanese Empire that would placade domestic military hardliners. To accomplish this, they would have to ice out the Chinese delegation. In exchange for generous security assurances to the Americans - including a substantial reduction in the size of the navy - they could perhaps be convinced to acknowledge an enlarged zone of Japanese influence in China stretching down from Manchuria through Shandong and Nanjing. Unfortunately, this was a grave miscalculation. Not only did American diplomats resist any move to sideline the Chinese, but they also insisted on a rapid withdrawal of Japanese from core chinese territories. After a week and a half of frustrated negotiations, the war resumed. The "easterners" were temporarily confirmed in their predictions about Japanese intransigence.

In reality, however, the Japanese political elite were bitterly divided against themselves. The civilian legislature had grown tired of the constant depredations of the military cabinet, and feared that the movement for constitutional rule which had gained steam during the Great War was now being brought to a premature end. An unknown source leaked the minutes of the Honolulu diplomacy to the press, prompting massive "peace marches" in major cities. When the military resorted to violent suppression, the Japanese Diet convened and passed an extraordinary resolution expressing its lack of confidence in the Gliichi ministry. At the crucial moment, the new industrial magnates, the Navy, and progressive sections of the old genro came out against a proposed measure to forcibly disband the Diet, sealing the fate of the Giichi government.

Yukio Ozaki, the leading figure behind the Diet's resistance to government policy, was named the new Prime Minister by the Crown-Regent Hirohito. Ozaki assembled a cabinet of members from all the major parliamentary factions, though the most represented were the liberal elements of the Kensekai, who had been prominent in the push for manhood suffrage. Ozaki immediately re-entered into negotiations to bring an end to the war; a somewhat skeptical American government found the new foreign minister Kijūrō Shidehara to be far more amenable to their proposals. Though hardly an anti-imperialist, Ozaki knew that maintaining a large land empire in China would only provide opportunities to his enemies in the military establishment.

The final details of the peace treaty, now negotiated in San Francisco, required Japanese forces in China to retreat to the Manchurian border and to the city of Qingdao, which they would be allowed to keep in exchange for a small indemnity to China. The Qingdao-Jinan railway would revert entirely to the Chinese. Japan would reserve the right to station one hundred thousand soldiers in its Manchurian zone of influence, ostensibly to guard against Soviet incursions into the area. The Japanese possessions in the South Seas, as well as the islands of Saipan and Iwo Jima, would be ceded to the United States; Taiwan, however, would remain free of American soldiers and ships. Japan would also be obligated to maintain its Naval tonnage at a level slightly below half that of the United States, and to foreswear any alliance with other great powers. In practice, the tonnage agreement solidified Japan's position as the preeminent power outside of the "Big Four" by confirming that it would have the world's third-largest navy.

The Japanese "Constitutional Protection Revolution", as it came to be called by its defenders, was predictably assailed by the military establishment. And yet it proved to be on firmer footing than many expected. To great popular acclaim, the new Ozaki ministry passed laws enshrining manhood suffrage, expanding access to education, and reforming labor law. Relations between Japan and the Soviet Union were formally established later that month, giving it a potent source of leverage in future negotiations with the west. The sharp swing back toward reformist liberalism was vindicated in December elections in which Ozaki's new "Constitutional Reform and Protection Party" won a decisive popular mandate. The question, of course, was whether the economic rudiments were in place for Ozaki's long-term political project, which depended upon the further integration of Japan into the slowly recovering global economy.

Peace with Japan was intended to permit a reorientation toward the west, yet in reality the logistical capacity of the United States was insufficient to save the embattled Balkan coalition. Over September and November, the Red Army surged forward into Romania, Czechia, and then, with Italian assistance, into Croatia. Revolutionary terror followed in the wake of this self-styled army of liberation. It is impossible to discern the full scope of the violence which followed in their wake: it was undoubtedly more discriminating than the ethnocidal killing of their right-wing opponents, but it is likely that over 150,000 Poles and Croat civilians lost their lives over the next few months. Many died in revenge killings that are not clearly attributable to the Red Army.

The Red Army's victories confirmed Soviet-German hegemony in Europe. Provisional socialist governments were constructed in the devastated balkan territories, typically with the support of local social-democratic movements which had radicalized after being subjected to state persecution. A bitter debate began between Sverdlov and Luxemburg about the territorial division of the new states. This was also, at least implicitly, a debate about the future of international socialism. While Sverdlov sought to add the new states as new socialist republics to the USSR, Luxemburg and the Germans hoped for them to either become independent or - if possible - "associated" states of the DSR under a German military umbrella. Kun's Hungary managed to successfully play off the two powers against one another and won recognition of Hungarian sovereignty over all the lands lost in the previous two years, including many regions which only had minorities of Hungarian-speakers, such as Slovakia.

The bulk of American and British expeditionary forces fled into neutral Albania to avoid capture. After being interned for two weeks, they were permitted to take ocean liners into Constantinople. It was later revealed that the Albanian Prime Minister received two mansions in Southern Connecticut from a shady American financial firm. Contrary to expectations, the Red Army did not move into Greece, Albania, or the British International Zone, which may have set off a real, as opposed to a quasi-war.

This was the first year in which this term - "Quasi-war" - assumed its modern meaning. It was used first in American policy circles, and then in several newspapers of the United States' Eastern Seaboard. It is unclear if the German word, Scheinbarkrieg - also first dated to late 1923 - was formed in response to its American counterpart or arose independently. In any case, journalists and politicians finally found concepts adequate to the new form of warfare that was emerging between the great powers. Even if their armies frequently encountered each other in foreign battlefields, they were clearly not locked into a conventional war. Naval engagements, including blockades and submarine attacks, were studiously avoided. Significant amounts of trade were permitted to continue. The home fronts of the great power combatants were never attacked, even though by this point, German planes could easily have gone on bombing runs against Southern England from bases in the Netherlands - and vice-versa. Careful diplomatic correspondence prevented escalation, even as the armies of the great powers slaughtered each other in their quest to win influence in foreign lands and spread their ideological creed. Such a situation could only exist because each side feared the economic - and political - consequences of resuming the totalerkrieg of the great war. None of the four great powers believed they had the domestic support to launch another "total mobilization" of society. Hence a quasi-war rather than a conventional war, in which certain military measures were "off the table" and no formal declaration of war was ever made.

Of course, there was real concern that the expanding quasi-war would end up turning into and thereby recapitulating Great War. This is why the Red Army stopped short of advancing on Constantinople, despite the urging of ultra-left hardliners in both Russia and Germany. Predictably enough, they did not demobilize, but were transferred to the relatively quiescent French theater. Soldiers of the French Red Army had just recently marched into Paris after being ordered back onto the offensive; they forced Frossard to sack around half of his ministers, and place delegates from the soldier's councils in their place. Frossard himself was more than happy to welcome several hundred thousand German and Soviet soldiers, whom he hoped would improve the flagging morale of his own army. First the Americans, and then the British as well sent dozens of divisions to bolster the white army. A furious Elihu Root, stung by the loss of the Balkans, swore to inflict a decisive defeat on the reds. France would soon become the final and largest battleground of the First Revolutionary Era.

Notes

There were a great deal of events elsewhere that I was simply not able to fit into this post. These include developments in Ireland, Spain, South America, Mexico, Laos, Indonesia, Australia, Canada, and Britain. Covering them all here would make make this just a bit too lengthy. I should (hopefully!) have dedicated posts on the following topics before 1924:

The Lumbering Titan: Britain and its Empire, 1919-1923

The Social War in Iberia and South America

Anti-Colonial Nationalism in Southeast Asia

The Red Papacy and The New Millenarianism

 

[Curby]

The Red Papacy and The New Millenarianism ​

Of the eternal questions, nothing else: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God will talk of socialism or anarchy, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, which all comes to the same thing, they're the same questions turned inside out.

-The Brothers' Karamazov, Dostoevsky

We are not, in fact, afraid of all these socialists, anarchists, atheists, and revolutionaries, he said. We keep an eye on them, and their movements are known to us. But there are some special people among them, although not many: these are believers in God and Christians, and at the same time socialists. They are the ones we are most afraid of; they are terrible people! A socialist Christian is more dangerous than a socialist atheist.

-The Brothers' Karamazov, Dostoevsky

Do you still ask? Is your Manchester liberalism unaware of the existence of a school of economic thought which means the triumph of man over economics, and whose principles and aims precisely coincide with those of the kingdom of God? The Fathers of the Church called mine and thine pernicious words, and private property usurpation and robbery. They repudiated the idea of personal possessions, because, according to divine and natural law, the earth is common to all men, and brings forth her fruits for the common good. They taught that avarice, a consequence of the Fall, represents the rights of property and is the source of private ownership.

They were humane enough, anti-commercial enough, to feel that all commercial activity was a danger to the soul of man and its salvation. They hated money and finance, and called the empire of capital fuel for the fires of hell. The fundamental eco- nomic principle that price is regulated by the operation of the law of supply and demand, they have always despised from the bottom of their hearts; and condemned taking advantage of chance as a cynical exploitation of a neighbour's need. Even more nefarious, in their eyes, was the exploitation of time; the montrousness of receiving a premium for the passage of time — interest, in other words — and misusing to one's own advantage and another's disadvantage a universal and God-given dispensation…

Now, then: after centuries of disfavor these principles and standards are being resurrected by the modern movement of communism. The similarity is complete, even to the claim for world-domination made by international labour as against international industry and finance; the world-proletariat, which is today asserting the ideals of the Civitas Dei in opposition to the discredited and decadent standards of the capitalistic bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the politico-economic means of salvation demanded by our age, does not mean domination for its own sake and in perpetuity; but rather in the sense of a temporary abrogation, in the Sign of the Cross, of the contradiction between spirit and force; in the sense of overcoming the world by mastering it; in a transcendental, a transitional sense, in the sense of the Kingdom. The proletariat has taken up the task of Gregory the Great, his religious zeal burns within it, and as little as he may it withhold its hand from the shedding of blood. Its task is to strike terror into the world for the healing of the world, that man may finally achieve salvation and deliverance, and win back at length to freedom from law and from distinction of classes, to his original status as child of God.

-Naphtha, The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)

Excerpts from a Swiss College-level textbook in Religious Studies, 1972

Key Terms:

Names used for the Fatima Church by its opponents: "White Church", "White Papacy", "Anti-church", "Robber's Church".

Names used for the Fatima Church by third-parties: "Fatima Church", "Fatima Papacy", "White Church", "White Papacy".

Names used for the Fatima Church by its own members: "Roman Catholic Church", "True Church", "Fatima Church".

Names used for the Roman Church by its opponents: "Red Church", "Bolshevik Church", "Anti-church", "Jew-Church".

Names used for the Roman Church by Third Parties: "Roman Church", "Roman Papacy", "Red Church", "Red Papacy".

Names used for the Roman Church by its own members: "Roman Catholic Church", "Roman Church", "Reformed Church", "Franciscan Church".

Introduction

It is a trying task to write an impartial history of the great schism of 1920 and the dual papacy. We have, in fact, already sinned - such concepts as "dual papacy" and "great schism" are rejected by both of the involved parties, who vociferously insist that there was no rupture in the true body of the church, and that the very concept of a "dual" papacy is a contradiction in terms given the indivisible character of papal authority. The categories which the historian employs in this matter necessarily operate at a distance from the lived realities of the laymen, priests, cardinals and other church officials who participated in the momentous events of 1920. By abstracting, we threaten to annihilate the true nature of the conflict that tore apart the church, treating fervent conviction as mere rhetorical gamesmanship. Yet we must persist in employing such artifice, as the alternative is to write a wholly partisan history.

We should begin not with the events of 1920, but those of 1916 and 1917. While most historians have treated the Marian appirations of Fatima as something of an afterthought, or otherwise buried them beneath discussions of their varied post-schismatic interpretations, catholics of every stripe assert their centrality to the momentous events of 1920. By taking the disputants at their own word on this matter, we might better discern the era's characteristic mood.

Beginning in the spring of 1916, three shepherd children reported apparitions of an angel in Valinhos, Portugal, a town just outside of Fátima. A little less than a year later, on April 4th, the children claimed to see five apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom the children described as a "lady more brilliant and beautiful than the sun at morning." The children spoke of a prophecy: prayer would finally bring an end to the great war, and for those who still doubted, a miracle would be performed on November 2nd so that "all might believe". A large crowd of between 50,000 and 125,000 gathered in Fátima on that date, and thousands of spectators reported seeing the sun transform into the Virgin Mary. According to the children, she castigated the sins of men and implored further prayer: "the war is going to end", Mary reportedly said, "but if people do not stop offending God, another, even worse one will begin in the reign of the next Holy Father." All three of the children died a few years later in the global flu pandemic.

In a world without the November revolutions, these miracles would perhaps have never attained the world-historical prominence they did, though we should be mindful of the importance they already possessed during the Great War. The church had begun a formal investigation in May of 1918, and the true meaning of the events was already fiercely debated amongst cardinals and catholic intellectuals. More openly pacifist elements of the church believed that the war constituted a punishment for man's sinful violence. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1919, some laymen and parish priests even suggested that the prophecies heralded the second coming of Christ and the divine judgement of the wicked conspirators who had started the war.

Of course, the November Revolutions began nearly two years to the day of the so-called "Miracle of the Sun". There was, in fact, already speculation that the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 was connected in some way to the miracle; most of the church hierarchy who drew out the connection believed that the "atheistic" revolution was a warning about the dire consequences of continuing the war. This second numerological coincidence was too much to ignore. The embattled church in Rome (officially neutral, but in reality reluctantly allied to the white government) proclaimed that the revolutionary violence had been brought on by the sin of man, and that the secular elites who allowed the war to continue had now unleashed Bolshevik apostasy onto the earth by failing to restrain their lust for power. The white government in Rome had to be convinced by its clerical allies to not censor an official church statement on the matter.

Of course, the "red" Roman Church would have a quite different interpretation of the prophecies, one with long and world-altering consequences, but before racing ahead, we should examine the events of 1920 which precipitated the great schism…

The Storming of Rome and the Origins of the White Papacy

Benedict XV was declared Pope on September 6th 1914, just days after the Great War began. His political and theological instincts were as distant from his "white" successors as the "red" church: as a modernizing reformer and a pacifist, he descried the Great War as the "suicide of civilized Europe" and made numerous attempts to broker peace, at times with the assistance of the American President William Jennings Bryan. After Italy surrendered, he sanctioned Catholic participation in national politics, breaking a long taboo against engaging with the secular and frequently anticlerical Italian state. Although many of the reforming elements allied to Benedict would eventually constitute an important faction of the Roman Church, he sided tacitly with the white government even while declaring official church neutrality in the civil war.

When the red and black assault on Rome began, Benedict resolved to remain in the city as a show of force. It is still unclear why he refused to take measures to evacuate the church's property, which the anarchists gave every indication they intended to seize. In any event, Benedict died shortly before the city was taken. He likely perished from the combined effects of influenza and stress brought on by the ceaseless artillery shelling, though considerable mystery still surrounds the circumstances of his death. The remaining cardinals, around 40% of the total that would typically meet for a Papal Conclave, rushed to elect a new pope while there was still time.The political balance was ultraconservative: montanists held at least half the seats due to the absence of more liberal cardinals from America and France. Rafael Merry del Val, the Secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office, emerged early on as a clear frontrunner.

In certain respects, Del Val was an unusual choice: a Spaniard raised in Protestant England, he would be the first non-Italian Pope since the Dutch Adrian VI in 1522. Historically, the Italian cardinals guarded the position of the Papacy jealousy - it was, in fact, one of their few remaining privileges. However, the chaos presently engulfing Rome convinced enough Cardinals that the need for a strong conservative voice outweighed the preservation of Italianate privilege; after four rounds of balloting, Cardinal Merry del Val was officially elected. He chose the name Gregory in honor of Gregory XVII, who had triumphed over secular rule during the investiture controversy, thereby establishing sole papal supremacy over the church.

Pope Gregory XVII several hours before being elected to the papacy​

Just hours after the papal enclave, the entire church hierarchy remaining in Rome fled to Spain, principally on British vessels; the irony of Protestant England coming to the aid of the Catholic church was not lost on observers. They disembarked first at the port of Valencia, and then made their way to Madrid. The beleaguered Spanish government, however, was in no position to host a new papacy. Spanish liberals of both aristocratic and republican stripes had little desire for Spain to become the new home of the church, particularly given the ultraconservative and montanist leanings of the papacy. In fact, the feeling was mutual: despite his own Spanish heritage, Gregory wished no part in a Spain wracked by regionalist separatism, peasant protests, and social radicalism. For fairly obvious reasons, France was not a suitable destination, and though a few cardinals mooted the name of Brazil, moving this far afield was felt to reek too much of cowardice and capitulation. Portugal was the last remaining option.

The Republic of Portugal was hardly an oasis of political stability, but compared to the rest of Catholic Europe, it was comparatively quiescent. It was briefly an active participant in the Great War, but broad popular opposition to Portuguese entry led to a successful coup by military officers loyal to Sidonio Pais, one of the prime drafters of the 1911 Republican constitution. Pais never formally established peace with Germany, but he did draw down the Portuguese war effort while restructuring the Portuguese constitution to centralize power in the hands of the Presidency. Soon enough, he held significantly more power than any Portuguese monarch. Despite his own temporary masonic flirtations, he rallied conservatives to his side by normalizing relations with the church and amending a progressive law separating the church and state. He survived several assassination attempts through 1918 and 1919, which many speculated were financed by British interests upset with Pais' pro-german outlook.

Portugal was nonetheless dependent on a flagging British economy, and as consumer demand collapsed in 1919, Portuguese export industries crashed, unemployment rose, and labor discontent surged. Pais's government gave covert blessing to the formation of anti-leftist irmanandes, which he hoped would stymie the rising tide of worker militancy. These conservative, anti-modernist, and Catholic fraternal organizations appealed to unemployed young men of a more middle-class milieu, drawing in members with promises of brotherhood, camaraderie, and redemptive violence. They received funding from conservative Catholic landowners frustrated with being frozen out of the Republican political establishment. Pais himself was wary of the ultimate goals of the irmanandes, but he permitted them to continue operating as a useful check on the growing power of syndicalist trade unions and other left-wing political organizations.

By 1921, however, the swelling irmanandes had grown powerful enough to undermine Pais' own authority. Fearing a coup if openly defied the church, Pais allowed the pope to take up residency in Lisbon while working behind-the-scenes to push him out of the capital. To lessen the risk of an overt conflict with secular authorities, Gregory moved his headquarters to Fatima in early 1922, where several of the fraternal irmanandes participated in the construction of a new papal complex.

Unfortunately for Pais, the decision to host the ultramontanist Pope had been the last straw for his erstwhile allies among the Portuguese Republicans, who now entered into a covert pact with syndicalist trade unions and several prominent military officers to force Gregory out of the country. Hemmed in by the irmanandes on his right, Pais did not have the ability to conciliate his former anticlerical supporters. On March 12th 1922, troops loyal to the dismissed republican general Alfredo de Sa Cardoso in the Lisbon garrison revolted and declared the restoration of the Portuguese Republic of 1911. Pais himself was finally assassinated by coup supporters later that week and with the assistance of worker-militias, Lisbon fell to the republican soldiers on the 17th.

Portugal descended into a brief civil war. In the north, royalists loyal to Henrique Mitchell de Paiva Couceiro successfully seized the city of Porto. Pais' right-wing supporters refused to fight against the monarchists until the "Bolshevik uprising" in Lisbon had been crushed. In the center of the country, the Catholic irmanandes seized many small towns, and most of the military rallied to the side of Joao Tamagnini Barbosa and Joao de Canto e Castro, both loyalists to Pais. By the end of March, the Lisbon uprising had been crushed, but Portugal seemed as if it might be on the verge of a prolonged struggle between the northern monarchists and the remaining right-wing republicans, especially since the Catholic paramilitaries appeared set to turn on the latter.

It was in this situation that Gregory offered himself as a unifying national figure. Behind the scenes, he convinced Couceiro to accept a place in a new national government; he was likely helped by the fact that the deposed King of Portugal showed no interest in returning to the nation. The republicans lacked a single figurehead, and after some internal dissension, they settled upon Manuel Gomes de Costa, an ultraconservative officer, as the prime minister of the new administration. In reality, Gomes de Costa was hand-chosen by Gregory's foreign minister Pietro Gasparri. Much of the temporal power in Portugal had seemingly slipped into the hands of the visiting white papacy and his loyal irmanandes without anyone being quite cognizant of it. Over the next two years, a grand new Papal residence was built in Fatima, and a telegraph line laid between the booming town and Lisbon.

The Origins of the Red Papacy

Italy was without a Pope for a little over a year. While the anarchists and significant sections of the Italian socialists opposed in principle any proposal to create a "Red Papacy", Gramsci and his allies believed that the opportunity to create another "international organ of worker's propaganda" was too good to pass up. A socialist papacy would also aid in the integration of the heavily Catholic south and provide the new Italian state a potent source of soft power.

The movement toward progressive Catholicism had begun on the leftward fringes of Benedict's modernizing faction, and picked up steam through 1918-1919 as Catholics entered into parliamentary politics. The political proclivities of discontented Catholic peasants undoubtedly had a role in pushing some of the reformist clergy left. Luigi Sturzo, who considered himself a Christian Socialist, emerged as the revolutionary government's most prominent ally, though he carefully avoided taking too active a role in the First Congress. The establishment of a rival "red papacy" gained momentum throughout 1921 as Catholics and Socialists entered into alliance and Catholic journals, periodicals, and newspapers assailed Gregory's "reactionary and unchristian" leadership. In August, Italian parish priests and bishops formed a commission to investigate the "extraordinary circumstances" in which Gregory was elected. The same body ruled in September that Gregory's election had occurred without providing requisite prior notice, and was therefore illegitimate. In response, Gregory issued an extraordinary decree excommunicating all of the clergymen who participated in the creation of the commission. With the break formalized, the momentum toward a new papacy was now unstoppable. The Italian bishops and priests appointed a new college of cardinals in October, which held a conclave in Rome to determine Benedict's rightful successor.

By the time the conclave met, the majority of bishops in higher church offices had already fled to Portugal, leading to a slew of rapid promotions of lower-level priests more sympathetic to socialism. These constituted the core of the radical faction which allied itself to the new revolutionary state. Politically, they were linked to the reconstituted party of Catholic Socialists, and many of them had participated outright in the peasant activism of 1918-1919. Theologically, they emphasized the "christian duty" to struggle for social justice and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Their more outspoken members castigated the church for abandoning the prefigurative practices of the early Christian communities, in which the institutions of collective property and common ownership anticipated the coming of Christ.

Of course, they did find some support for their views in the christian intellectual tradition: they never tired of referencing the seas of ink spilled by theologians throughout the ages chastising the social elite for their abuses of the marginalized. In continuity with reformers throughout history, they argued that the upper echelons of the church hierarchy had been seduced by the "idolatry" of wealth and power, and lost sight of the Church's true mission: to bring into being a new moral order upon the earth reflective of the Christian teachings of love, justice, and universal brotherhood. As the common radical slogan went: "Love of God is Love of Man, and Love of Man is Socialism". The radicals advocated for a thoroughgoing reform to church doctrine which would return the Christian community to the "purity" of the Church of Saint Peter. This included, most controversially, a return to preaching in the vernacular and the direct election of priests by parishioners.

Opposed to them were the old reforming elite of the Benedictine era. They still held onto a thin majority at the conclave, and hoped to steer the church away from both the "mad ultramontanism" of Gregory and its "heretical politicization" along the radicalist line. Above all, they were fearful of aligning too overtly with the new revolutionary government and thereby harming the international reputation of the true roman church, though they were still more than willing - and in some cases, even more eager than the radicals - to carry out a purge of their traditional ultraconservative adversaries.

The moderates were, in fact, divided relatively early into two distinct camps. On the one side were the "modernists", a liberally-inclined majority, and on the other side were dogmatically apolitical "quietests" who refused participation in temporal politics. Traumatized by the horrific violence of both the Great War and the November Revolutions, some clergymen had begun to advocate that the church should concern itself strictly with affairs of theology, and leave matters of governance entirely to the state. After all, the church had survived and thrived under political orders as diverse as Roman plantation slavery and modern capitalism; catholicism was, to use a favorite phrase, "necessarily apolitical", adapting itself to serve the flock of any and every society. Render unto caesar what is caesar's, and to god what is god's.

Much more prominent at the Papal Conclave, however, were the liberal modernists. They wanted to bring the church into the 20th century, to make its doctrines and its practices adhere with the best of modern times. The modernists were perfectly comfortable launching a frontal assault against ultramontanism and conservative catholicism, which they treated as a reactionary relic of a bygone age. Their candidate of choice was Romulo Murri, who had been condemned and then excommunicated by Pope Pius X for his involvement in democratic politics.

Skirmishes had erupted between the various factions well before the Papal Conclave was called. The radicals accused the liberal modernists of being bourgeois traitors to Christ's mission, and the quietist clergy of being "collaborators in waiting", ready to countenance evil to preserve their own power. For their own part, the modernists charged the radicals with crypto-protestantism, and the quietists cast a pox on both of their houses. Many believed before the conclave met that Romolo Murri had achieved sufficient support to win a majority outright, but quietist dissension prevented him from doing so. The radicals, meanwhile, placed forward a number of lesser-known candidates who had little chance of garnering a majority. After fourteen rounds of balloting, the name of Luigi Sturzo was finally put forward.

Sturzo was assisted by his connections in the government, as well as by his own position midday between the two largest factions. He refrained from embracing the more revolutionary pretensions of the radicals, and advocated for a program of internal reform rather than revolutionary political action. Simultaneously, none could doubt Sturzo's commitment to a positive vision of christian socialism. In the end, enough of the modernists believed him to be a capable steward of the reform process to swing over to Sturzo; his previous leadership of the Party of Catholic Socialists also helped him convince numerous cardinals that he could secure the non-interference of the revolutionary government in church matters. On October 29th, he was finally elected the 258th pope by the reformed Congress of Cardinals after nineteen ballots.

Sturzo assumed the name of Francis I, signaling a commitment to both social justice and catholic tradition: the Franciscan order was one of the oldest and most venerable of catholic institutions, and was well-known for advocating on behalf of the poor and marginalized. The "red pope" quickly accumulated a bustling private mythology. Perhaps the most enduring image from the Storming of Rome is that of the future Francis rushing into the Vatican at the head of the Red Army wielding nothing but a broom, beating the various gold and silver-bedecked clergymen while shouting "Auferte ista hinc!" ("leave from this place", the command given by Jesus as he drove the money-changers from the Temple). In reality, Sturzo was over thirty miles of Rome during the conquest of the city, and he did not enter it until some weeks later, but this has not stopped the story from entering popular consciousness.

Francis I (nee' Luigi Sturzo) in 1905 following his ordination​

Francis also became known for his "day walks", where he would eschew his formal papal vestments and stroll through the streets of Rome clad in ordinary dress; in the mid-1920s, these became something of a public event as crowds thronged around the ambulatory pope. Francis was a robust and lively interlocutor, and he became well-known for his ability to discourse on arcane theological matters without breaking his stride. His temporary parishioners included many anticlerical socialists who made the "pilgrimage" primarily to challenge the most "Holy of "holies". Perhaps the most iconic photograph of the era depicts Francis I embracing a young anarchist radical who had minutes ago been on the verge of assaulting him.

The Duelling Papacies and the New Millenarianism

In the month following Francis I's election, the varied elements of the Catholic world declared their allegiance. Loyal bishops in Germany, the Netherlands, and parts of Northern France recognized Francis I as the legitimate pope and called on Gregory to step down. Meanwhile, across South America, Croatia, Poland, and America, existing Catholic hierarchies declared the "Communist Agitator" an antipope. A much longer war of position commenced in the various catholic orders; sizable minorities of lower-ranking Jesuits and Franciscans left to form new, reconstituted organizations loyal to the Roman church. Curiously, in America many bishops and cardinals expressed reservations about the "politicization" of the church hierarchy in Portugal, while in many locations across South America, parish priests and laymen were considerably less enthusiastic about the Fátima papacy than their superiors, a division which would eventually lead to a prolonged battle for control of the continent's catholics.

Throughout 1922, the two popes directed a series of biting encyclicals against each other. Francis I denounced the ultramontanist monarchism of the "white church", as well as its growing intervention in the temporal affairs of Portugal. Echoing some of the quietists, he appealed to the primarily spiritual character of the Church's vocation. He also made a brief defense of the new "communal economics", though he never outright equated Catholic Social teaching with Marxism. For his part, Gregory accused Francis of being a mere puppet of the socialist bloc and of perverting the traditional teachings of Catholicism.

The Fátima Apparitions quickly became the central subject of dispute in the warring encyclicals. This is perhaps unsurprising given Gregory's decision to locate the new Papacy in Fatima, but it was Francis I who first raised the matter in the (in)famous "Maria, Redemptor Hominis" (Mary, Redeemer of Man) encyclical. This remarkable piece of eschatology is, of course, one of the most discussed theological texts of twentieth-century Catholicism. It was written at a time when Francis was under increasing pressure from the ascendant radicals, and it appears, in fact, as if several left-wing Catholic intellectuals of the Naples circle had a hand in writing it. Though tempting, we should be careful to avoid over-emphasizing the role that this encyclical played in the events which followed, for the ideas, feelings, and convictions which it articulated were already very much "in-the-air" well beyond Italy. Nonetheless, it undoubtedly played a vital part in crystallizing these sentiments and in granting them official sanction, something which successfully enraged the moderate faction of the clergy, who believed that in agreeing to Sturzo's papacy they had guaranteed themselves sufficient political leverage to prevent such politico-religious utopianism from becoming official church policy.

Maria, Redemptor Hominis centered on the interpretation of the Marian Apparitions of 1917. In a drawn-out analogy, Francis likened the Marian auguries to Christ's prophecy of the Second Temple's destruction. The "offenses to god" Mary spoke of in 1917 were none other than the exploitation of man by man, the spoliation of the earth, the accumulation of private wealth, the depredations of war, and the systematic substitution of hierarchical "relations of submission and slavery" for "properly christian relations of brotherhood and love". In sum, it is bourgeois society which is indicted as a "social" sin, and the outbreak of revolution simply the natural and divinely-ordained consequence of such sin assuming monstrous and nearly irremediable proportions. Like the destruction of the Temple before it, the violence of war and revolution, while tragic, were both necessary and divinely predetermined waystations to man's ultimate salvation. At least implicitly, the revolutionaries were depicted as Christian martyrs, even if, as Francis coolly remarked, "many were imperfect agents, practicing the wickedness and cruelty that they suffered, and even more failed to recognize the signs of the Creator reflected in their own burning desire for justice".

One may contrast Francis' reading of the Martian apparitions with an even more radical interpretation that arose among the "prefigurationist" catholic intelligentsia of Naples. For the prefigurationists, the only means of ushering Christ into the world was to first establish a "replica" of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth. Only after the achievement of Gemeinwesen, the "true community" in which man's inhumanity to man is brought to an end, will Christ find human beings truly worthy of salvation. The Martian Apparitions were nothing more than omens that this community was on the verge of being constructed. They therefore had a distinctly eschatological role. Of course, Francis did not offer a plan for achieving the Kingdom of God in Maria, Redemptor Hominis, though he did endorse the notion that the apparitions were signs of a coming change in the fundamental character of human social relations. Without worrying overmuch about a "close reading" of the text, the radicals therefore chose to embrace it as a reflection of their own prefigurative political theology, a charge which Francis studiously refused to either endorse or repudiate.

The Angel of Socialism Takes Flight

Beginning in the 1920s and extending well into the 20th century, various forms of socialist-inflected Marian millenarianism spread across Pacific South America, the Dutch East Indies, Northern Vietnam, Central Africa, and Korea, posing challenges for colonial rule and mobilizing traditionally insular peasants against both native and foreign elites. The Marian apparitions followed a fairly uniform pattern despite their diverse trappings. Either a group of peasants or a charismatic religious leader would claim to see and speak with a divine image of a matronly woman, typically in her late 20s to early 40s; she implored those who listened to gather those closest and ready themselves for the coming of a new world in which the wealthy and powerful would be made humble and the common people exalted. The task of bringing the new world into being was pictured as an active and strenuous vocation, requiring the full employment of human agency. Whether this was to occur through violence, religious reform, or mass conversion was a matter determined on the local level.

In analyzing this extraordinary outburst of world-wide religious fervor, we must be careful to avoid the Eurocentric fallacy which attributes sole agency to the Roman Church. This trope has become quite ubiquitous in the popular histories of Marian-socialist millenarianism and yet there is extraordinary little historical evidence for it. Its staying power is a testament to the interest of both socialist and conservative historians in casting the Roman Church as the ultimate and unique originator of such religiously-inflected resistance to colonial rule. In reality, Marian Millenarianism arose exclusively in areas which already possessed pre-existing traditions of eschatological utopianism. Although it frequently crossed denominational lines, particularly among protestants, it was almost never transplanted into wholly foreign religious contexts. Local circumstances and traditions lent a unique character to each indigenous reworking of prophetic Marianism; the "glorious future" envisioned rarely coincided exactly with the imagined utopia of European socialists.

Among the peasants of Java, apparitions of a "great mother" foretold the coming of a "just king" who would expel the Dutch, eliminate the rent upon land, and end the exploitation of Chinese traders. In Central Africa, Eliot Kenan Kamwana, a charismatic religious leader who had already amassed a substantial following in the pre-war years, announced that he had escaped from British imprisonment in Mauritius with the help of a "white lady of the church". She had promised to meet him in Nyasaland, where she would bring about a kingdom of endless abundance and amity once the people had risen up against the British. Korean preachers spoke of "working toward God" with the assistance of a kindly female spirit, who would end all temporal government, slay death itself, and divide up the lands of the wealthy amongst the peasants after the people had fulfilled Christ's mission.

Mary the Angel of Socialism, Paul Klee​

It is undeniable that the Roman Church had a hand in these movements. They fervently disseminated their own particular interpretation of the Marian apparitions, and among the downtrodden people of the third world, it was the radicals' activist, ultra-millinerian reading which was shared. It appears that the Italian government, too, bears a significant degree of responsibility: for many years, the Manchester Guardian report detailing extensive payments to the Roman Church from socialist-controlled Camera del Lavor
was dismissed as British propaganda, but now the story has finally been confirmed by a number of Italian priests.

It was ultimately none other than the Italian Chairman Antonio Gramsci who was behind these payments. As his declassified notebooks revealed, Gramsci believed that the Roman Church could serve as an invaluable international propaganda arm of the socialist bloc, and he directed loyal chambers of labour to direct some of their savings into the Franciscan and Jesuit missionary orders. However, the independent-mindedness of the zealous young radicals meant that in practice, Gramsci never possessed much control over how these funds were actually spent. The missionary orders took on a life of their own, and soon enough operated outside the purview of the Pope as well as the Italian government. It was in this freewheeling atmosphere that the "Marian prophecies" were spread, though it appears that most of the "work" done here was accomplished not by the radicals themselves but the expanding communications networks of colonial capitalism and learned native elites, often in the employ of colonial governments, who were eager to assimilate and advance anti-hegemonic versions of Christian thought. Direct attempts to secretly teach the new "theology of liberation" to Javanese peasants or Central African villagers rarely resulted in a conversion to "orthodox" Catholic-Socialism, however well-meaning and genuine the effort. Instead, existing religious movements fused the more overtly symbolic concerns of their traditional millenarian practices and the politicized utopianism of the red catholics, resulting in a myriad range of political theologies that collectively exercised a vital role in fomenting the development of national and anti-colonial consciousness.

Notes

I want to thank @PrognosticHannya for helping brainstorm ideas for this post, and in many cases giving me an education about church history and popular catholicism! This entry is at least as much their doing as it is mine.