Gavrilo Princip and the Archduke

[BrainGlutton]

@eschereal

Now I read that Woodrow Wilson’s entry of the US into the Great War contributed to the success of the Bolshevik revolution. This apparently comes from a book by Jim Powell, has anyone read this book? Is there anything to it, or is it, as one reviewer says, a screed? Because I find it hard to fathom how a case could be made for that.

It’s hard to see how America getting into the war – on Russia’s side – would have weakened the Tsar’s government.

[Guinastasia]

@BrainGlutton

It’s hard to see how America getting into the war – on Russia’s side – would have weakened the Tsar’s government.

America didn’t enter the war until after the Tsar abdicated and the Provisional government under Alexander Kerensky was in place. (Obviously though, the idea that our coming into the war had anything to do with the Bolsheviks gaining control sounds like pure bullshit)

[carnivorousplant]

@BrainGlutton

It’s hard to see how America getting into the war – on Russia’s side – would have weakened the Tsar’s government.

The United states senttroops to fightagainst the Communists in Russia. That may be it.

[carnivorousplant]

As usual, Guin, you are right.
:dubious:

[Captain_Amazing]

@eschereal

Now I read that Woodrow Wilson’s entry of the US into the Great War contributed to the success of the Bolshevik revolution. This apparently comes from a book by Jim Powell, has anyone read this book? Is there anything to it, or is it, as one reviewer says, a screed? Because I find it hard to fathom how a case could be made for that.

His argument (really more of a sidenote. The title of the chapter is “How did Lenin take advantage of Wilson’s Blunder and Secure Power?”, but it’s mostly about the rotten things Lenin did when he took power ) is that Wilson’s pressuring the Provisional Government to stay in the war when the Russian population and rank and file soldiers wanted peace destroyed the army and destroyed popular support for the government, making it easier for the Communists to take over).

[BrainGlutton]

@Guinastasia

America didn’t enter the war until after the Tsar abdicated and the Provisional government under Alexander Kerensky was in place.

Well, then, again, it’s hard to see how that would have weakened the Provisional Government.

Of course, many people tend to forget that there were two Russian Revolutions in 1917, or to confuse/conflate the two. And I’ve occasionally seen Kerensky described as a “Menshevik” – actually he was a Socialist Revolutionary (their power-base was the peasantry and their main agenda was giving land to the peasants – in smallholdings, not collectives). The Mensheviks were the reformist faction of Lenin’s Russian Social Democratic Labour Party – they shared the same goals and ideology as the Bolsheviks but differed on tactics. Trotsky was a Menshevik until Lenin persuaded him to cross over.

[BrainGlutton]

@Captain_Amazing

His argument (really more of a sidenote. The title of the chapter is “How did Lenin take advantage of Wilson’s Blunder and Secure Power?”, but it’s mostly about the rotten things Lenin did when he took power ) is that Wilson’s pressuring the Provisional Government to stay in the war when the Russian population and rank and file soldiers wanted peace destroyed the army and destroyed popular support for the government, making it easier for the Communists to take over).

Now that might be a valid point. By that time Russian troops at the front were simply deserting and walking home in vast numbers, sometimes after shooting their officers. Making a separate peace with Germany would have been the sensible thing, but Kerensky refused to consider it.

But, I never read before that Kerensky’s intransigence had anything to do with pressure from Wilson.

A really good account here is Comrades, 1917 – Russia in Revolution, by Brian Moynahan.

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

But, I never read before that Kerensky’s intransigence had anything to do with pressure from Wilson.

After the Revolution, Wilson sent Elihu Root to Russia to observe conditions there. Root met with the Provisional Government and told them that he’d recommend US aid only on condition that Russia stay in the war, or, as he summarized it, “No war, no loans”.

Kerensky’s government, desperate for American credit to stabilize the Russian economy, decided they’d have no choice but to stay in.

[carnivorousplant]

@Captain_Amazing

Kerensky’s government, desperate for American credit to stabilize the Russian economy, decided they’d have no choice but to stay in.

What is the time line on this? I thought Lenin was busy trying to stop the nationalizing of beautiful women.

[Captain_Amazing]

@carnivorousplant

What is the time line on this? I thought Lenin was busy trying to stop the nationalizing of beautiful women.

If there’s a joke in the “nationalizing of beautiful women” there, I’m not getting it, but the Root party got to Petrograd on June 13th, left Petrograd on July 9th, and left Vladivostok on July 21st.

[BrainGlutton]

Michael Lind writes in The National Interest that it was Germany’s ambition to achieve global-superpower status that caused the war, and Britain and America getting involved was no mistake:

The centenary of the beginning of World War I has revealed a deep divide between perceptions of the war held by the general public and historians, at least in the English-speaking world. Pundits and commentators and politicians routinely opine that World War I was a needless and unavoidable catastrophe, variously attributed to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, runaway arms races, imperialism in general, or “sleepwalking” politicians who stumbled blindly into catastrophe. The general impression among the broader public is that nobody in particular was to blame for the greatest conflagration in world history before the Second World War. Literary and cinematic masterpieces like Remargue’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Kubrick’s Path’s of Glory have reinforced the perception that the conflict proved the absurdity of war. The lesson is that war is like catastrophic climate change—a destructive force that must be avoided and for which everyone is partly to blame.

In the Anglophone world, this popular interpretation of World War I has deep roots in strains of isolationism, the international peace campaigns of the early twentieth century, and, not least, Woodrow Wilson’s call for a “peace without victory.” In the European Union, treating World War I as the product of abstract forces like arms races or nationalism is doubtlessly useful in minimizing national animosities.

But unlike the chattering classes, most historians, ever since Fritz Fischer published Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961), have tended to agree that the major cause of World War I was Imperial Germany’s determination to become a “world power” or superpower by crippling Russia and France in what it hoped would be a brief and decisive war, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Following the Archduke’s assassination, Berlin deliberately used the crisis in relations between its satellite Austria-Hungary and Russia’s satellite Serbia as an excuse for a general war that would establish German hegemony from Belgium to Baghdad. World War I started in 1914 for the same reason that World War II started in 1939—a government in Berlin wanted a war, though not the war it ultimately got.

<snip>

The British historian Niall Ferguson once suggested that if Britain and the U.S. had stayed out of World War I, a Mitteleuropa established by the Kaiserreich might have evolved into something like today’s European Union. Nonsense. Within Imperial Germany, victory would have strengthened the authoritarian militarists and weakened the forces of liberalism and democracy. The political culture would have been not that of today’s bourgeois Germany but that of a Latin American banana republic or today’s Thailand or Egypt, illiberal regimes in which generals and colonels pull the strings.

A German victory in World War I would have created a European superpower which, if less maniacal and murderous than Hitler’s aborted superstate, would have been much more formidable than the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia was a backward nation that controlled the poorest half of Europe during the Cold War. If it had prevailed in World War I, Imperial Germany would have been the most advanced nation of Europe, dominating the richest region in the world.

Would this new superpower, created in a bloody war of aggression by Berlin, have been a status quo power? It seems more likely that the German imperial elite, emboldened by success, would have charged recklessly on to wage cold war against the British empire and against the U.S. in the western hemisphere. In any hypothetical German-American Cold War, Imperial Germany might have mobilized superior scientific and technological resources, including areas like chemistry and rocket science in which it led the world. And unlike the Hitler regime, a triumphant Kaiserreich probably would not have allowed distinctions between “Jewish science” and “Aryan science” to get in the way of developing atomic weapons.

[adaher]

I don’t know about all that. Wealthy societies in the Western tradition were going to democratize eventually. That’s partly why Hitler was going to such great lengths to change German culture. The German army’s victory would only have delayed the inevitable death of the monarchist systems in Europe. And we would have avoided the Second World War if Germany had won.

[BrainGlutton]

I tell ya, if I had a time machine I wouldn’t bother with Princip; I’d send a professional assassin to make sure Kaiser Wilhelm died in infancy (by some method that looks like natural causes). The Kaiser (as is known from his letters, found after the war – you can read about that in Paul Johnson’s Modern Times) wanted a war, and would have found a pretext for one sooner or later. It was the only way he could see to win Germany a “place in the sun” (i.e., lots of colonies in the sunnier climes, like Britain and France had).