Bloodlands (4 page)

The suffering soldiers and impoverished peasants of the Russian Empire were in revolt in early 1917. After a popular uprising had brought down the Russian monarchy that February, a new liberal regime sought to win the war by one more military offensive against its enemies, the German Empire and the Habsburg monarchy. At this point Lenin became the secret weapon of Germany. The Germans dispatched Lenin from Swiss exile to the Russian capital Petrograd that April, to make a revolution that would take Russia from the war. With the help of his charismatic ally Leon Trotsky and his disciplined Bolsheviks, Lenin achieved a coup d’état with some popular support in November. In early 1918, Lenin’s new government signed a peace treaty with Germany that left Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, and Poland under German control. Thanks in part to Lenin, Germany won the war on the eastern front, and had a brief taste of eastern empire.

Lenin’s peace came at the price of German colonial rule of what had been the west of the Russian Empire. But surely, reasoned the Bolsheviks, the German Empire would soon collapse along with the rest of the oppressive capitalist system, and Russian and other revolutionaries could spread their new order westward, to these terrains and beyond. The war, Lenin and Trotsky argued, would bring inevitable German defeat on the western front and then a workers’ revolution within Germany itself. Lenin and Trotsky justified their own Russian revolution to themselves and other Marxists by their expectation of imminent proletarian revolt in the more industrial lands of central and western Europe. In late 1918 and in 1919, it seemed as if Lenin just might be right. The Germans were indeed defeated by the French, British, and Americans on the western front in autumn 1918, and so had to withdraw—undefeated—from their new eastern empire. German revolutionaries began scattered attempts to take power. The Bolsheviks picked up the spoils in Ukraine and Belarus.

The collapse of the old Russian Empire and the defeat of the old German Empire created a power vacuum in eastern Europe, which the Bolsheviks, try as they might, could not fill. While Lenin and Trotsky deployed their new Red Army in civil wars in Russia and Ukraine, five lands around the Baltic Sea—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland—became independent republics. After these losses of territory, the Russia of the Bolsheviks was less westerly than the Russia of the tsars. Of these new independent states, Poland was more populous than the rest combined, and strategically by far the most important. More than any of the other new states that came into being at war’s end, Poland changed the balance of power in eastern Europe. It was not large enough to be a great power, but it was large enough to be a problem for any great power with plans of expansion. It separated Russia from Germany, for the first time in more than a century. Poland’s very existence created a buffer to both Russian and German power, and was much resented in Moscow and Berlin.

Poland’s ideology was its independence. There had been no Polish state since the late eighteenth century, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned out of existence by its imperial neighbors. Polish politics had continued under imperial rule throughout the nineteenth century, and the idea of a Polish nation had, if anything, consolidated. The declaration of Polish independence in November 1918 was only possible because all three of the partitioning powers—the German, Habsburg, and Russian Empires—disappeared after war and revolution. This great historical conjuncture was exploited by a Polish revolutionary, Józef Piłsudski. A socialist in his youth, Piłsudski had become a pragmatist capable of cooperating with one empire against the others. When all of the empires collapsed, he and his followers, already organized into military legions during the war, were in the best position to declare and defend a Polish state. Piłsudski’s great political rival, the nationalist Roman Dmowski, made Poland’s case to the victorious powers in Paris. The new Poland was founded as a democratic republic. Endorsed by the victorious Entente Powers, Warsaw could count on a more or less favorable boundary with Germany, to the west. But the question of Poland’s eastern border was open. Because the Entente had won no war on the eastern front, it had no terms to impose in eastern Europe.

In 1919 and 1920, the Poles and the Bolsheviks fought a war for the borderlands between Poland and Russia that was decisive for the European order. The Red Army had moved into Ukraine and Belarus as the Germans had withdrawn, but these gains were not acknowledged by the Polish leadership. Piłsudski saw these lands between as independent political subjects whose history was linked to that of Poland, and whose leaders should wish to restore some version of the old Commonwealth in Belarus and Lithuania. He hoped that Polish armies, supported by Ukrainian allies, could help create an independent Ukrainian state. Once the Bolsheviks had brought Ukraine under control in 1919, and halted a Polish offensive there in spring 1920, Lenin and Trotsky thought that they would bring their own revolution to Poland, using the bayonet to inspire workers to fulfill their historical role. After Poland’s fall, German comrades, assisted by the
new Red Army, would bring to bear Germany’s vast resources to save the Russian revolution. But the Soviet forces on their way to Berlin were halted by the Polish Army at Warsaw in August 1920.

Piłsudski led a counterattack that drove the Red Army back into Belarus and Ukraine. Stalin, a political officer with the Red Army in Ukraine, was among the defeated. His own misjudgments there prevented the proper coordination of Bolshevik forces, leaving the Red Army vulnerable to Piłsudski’s maneuver. The Polish military victory did not mean the destruction of Bolshevik power: Polish troops were too exhausted to march on Moscow, and Polish society too divided to support such an adventure. In the end, territories inhabited by Belarusians and Ukrainians were divided between Bolshevik Russia and Poland. Poland was thus established as a multinational state, its population perhaps two-thirds Polish reckoned by language, but including some five million Ukrainians, three million Jews, one million Belarusians, and somewhere between half a million and a million Germans. Poland was constitutionally a state “for the Polish nation,” but it held the largest population of Jews in Europe and the second-largest (after Bolshevik Russia) population of Ukrainians and Belarusians. It shared all three of its large national minorities—the Jews, the Ukrainians, and the Belarusians—with its eastern neighbor.

As east European borders were being decided on the battlefields of Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, the victors in the First World War were dictating terms in central and western Europe. While Poland and the Bolsheviks were fighting on what had been the eastern front of the First World War, defeated Germany sought to present a pacific face to the victors. Germany declared itself a republic, the better to negotiate terms with the French, British, and Americans. Its major Marxist party, the Social Democrats, rejected the Bolshevik example and made no revolution in Germany. Most German social democrats had been loyal to the German Empire during the war, and now saw the declaration of a German republic as progress. But these moderating choices helped Germany little. The postwar settlements were dictated rather than discussed; in violation of long European tradition, the defeated were denied a place at the table at the Paris peace talks. The German government had no choice but to sign the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, but few German politicians felt bound to defend its terms.

Because the treaty was drafted by moralizing victors, it could easily be attacked as hypocritical. While fighting a war against continental empires, the Entente Powers had declared themselves to be supporters of the liberation of the
nations of central Europe. The Americans in particular characterized their participation in the war as a crusade for national self-determination. But the French, who had suffered more than any power, wanted the Germans punished and France’s allies rewarded. The Treaty of Versailles indeed contradicted the very principle for which the Entente Powers had claimed to fight the war: national self-determination. At Versailles, as at Trianon (June 1920) and Sèvres (August 1920), the peoples considered allies by the Entente (Poles, Czechs, Romanians) got more territory and accordingly more numerous ethnic minorities within their frontiers. The nations considered enemies (Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians) got less territory and accordingly larger diasporas of their own people within the borders of other states.

The Polish-Bolshevik War was fought in the period between the opening of discussions at Versailles and the signing of the treaty at Sèvres. Because Europe was still at war in the east while these treaties were being negotiated and signed in the west, the new postwar order was a bit ethereal. It seemed vulnerable to revolution from the left, inspired or even brought by the Bolsheviks. So long as the Polish-Bolshevik war was underway, revolutionaries in Germany could imagine that help was coming from the Red Army. The new German republic also seemed vulnerable to revolution from the right. German soldiers returning from the eastern front, where they had been victorious, saw no reason to accede to what they regarded as the humiliation of their homeland by the new republic and the Treaty of Versailles that it had signed. Many veterans joined right-wing militias, which fought against left-wing revolutionaries. The German social democratic government, in the belief that it had no alternative, used some of the right-wing militias to suppress communist attempts at revolution.

The Polish victory over the Red Army at Warsaw in August 1920 brought an end to hopes for a European socialist revolution. The treaty between Poland and Bolshevik Russia signed in Riga in March 1921 was the true completion of the postwar settlement. It established Poland’s eastern border, ensured that divided Ukrainian and Belarusian lands would be a bone of contention for years to come, and made of Bolshevism a state ideology rather than an armed revolution. The Soviet Union, when established the following year, would be a state with borders—in that respect, at least, a political entity like others. The end of large-scale armed conflict was also the end of hopes on the Right that revolution could lead to counterrevolution. Those who wished to overturn the new German republic, whether from the Far Right or the Far Left, would have to count
on their own forces. German social democrats would remain supporters of the republic, while German communists would praise the Soviet model and follow the Soviet line. They would take their instructions from the Communist International, established by Lenin in 1919. The German Far Right would have to reimagine the end of the postwar order as a goal of Germany alone, to be achieved after Germany itself was rebuilt and remade.

The rebuilding of Germany seemed more difficult than it really was. Germany, blamed for the war, lost not only territory and population but the right to normal armed forces. It suffered in the early 1920s from hyperinflation and political chaos. Even so, Germany remained, at least potentially, the most powerful country in Europe. Its population was second only to that of the Soviet Union, its industrial potential second to none, its territory unoccupied during the war, and its possibilities for expansion sketched implicitly in the logic of the peace settlements. Once the fighting in Europe had ceased, the German government quickly found common ground with the Soviet Union. After all, both Berlin and Moscow wanted to change the European order at the expense of Poland. Each wished to be less isolated in international politics. Thus it was a democratic German government that signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union in 1922, restoring diplomatic relations, easing trade, and inaugurating secret military cooperation.

For many Germans, self-determination was both persecution and promise. About ten million speakers of the German language, former subjects of the Habsburg monarchy, remained beyond Germany’s borders. Some three million such people inhabited the northwestern rim of Czechoslovakia, right at the border of Czechoslovakia and Germany. There were more Germans in Czechoslovakia than there were Slovaks. Almost the entire population of Austria, resting between Czechoslovakia and Germany, were German speakers. Austria was nevertheless required by the Treaty of St. Germain to exist as a separate state, although much of its population would have preferred accession to Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party established in 1920, was an Austrian and an advocate of an Anschluss: a unification of Austria and Germany. Such goals of national unity, dramatic as they were, actually concealed the full measure of Hitler’s ambitions.

Later, Hitler would be the German chancellor who signed the treaty with the Soviet Union that divided Poland. In taking this step, he would be taking to an extreme an idea that many Germans held: that Poland’s borders were illegitimate
and its people unworthy of statehood. Where Hitler stood apart from other German nationalists was in his view of what must come next, after the unification of Germans within Germany and the mastery of Poland: the elimination of the European Jews, and the destruction of the Soviet Union. Along the way Hitler would offer friendship to both Poland and the Soviet Union, and disguise his more radical intentions from Germans until it was too late. But the catastrophic visions were present in National Socialism from the beginning.