The failed offensive also weakened the resistance of the army high command to another proposed solution to the Bolshevisation of the soldiers, namely, the nationalisation of the imperial army. The largest such movement was among the Ukrainians, who argued that allowing soldiers to fight alongside their co-nationals would enable the military to mobilise their fighting spirit and better defend their native land. This movement spread to other non- Russian groups and frequently provoked counter-mobilisations on the part of self-identified 'Russian' soldiers. The conflicts of the early years of the war, especially in the prisoner-of-war camps, were now infiltrating the army itself. And the constant rhythm of army and national congresses and conferences and the reassignments and reorganisations that were agreed to in the name of these nationalisations led to further disorganisation in the military and the collapse of its fighting capacity. The deterioration of the generals' place in politics was captured by the failure of the coup by General Lavr Kornilov in August, which was itself intended as a move largely to reverse the decline in order and security.
The Bolsheviks who seized power in October 1917 proclaimed peace to all the belligerent powers and hoped that they would have a peaceful breathing spell to consolidate their new regime. The Germans, though they had supported just such a revolutionary outcome in Russia from the beginning of the war (and had sent the Bolshevikleader Vladimir Lenin back from his exile in Zurich across German-occupied Central Europe), saw an opportunity to break the stalemate of the previous year and advanced on the fledgling revolutionary dictatorship. The splits that had transformed the politics of moderate socialists now were replicated in the republic of soviets. Revolutionary defencism moved yet further to the left and allowed the mobilisation of war to be harnessed to a programme of socialist transformation of the nation. The hard-headed Lenin, however, had little initial faith in the demoralised soldiers to defend the latest version of the revolution; he fought hard for peace with the Germans. After they had occupied most of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic coast, and only after he threatened to resign his party and state posts, did Lenin get his way. He bought peace with the surrender of the western borderlands to the enemy and was not forgiven for many years by patriotic Bolsheviks who wanted to carry the international revolutionary war to Europe and beyond. (Other Russian nationalist forces also considered the Brest Treaty a betrayal of'Russia's' national interests.)
Still, even the initial experience with the steamrollering German army during the winter of 1917-18 forced another epochal change on the Bolshevik Party, which had not only opposed the war but had also been opposed to a standing, professional army. In the spring of 1918, the party leadership began to jettison its objections to an effective, bureaucratic fighting force and its previous attachment to a democratic, militia force that would unite a democratic citizenry in self-defence. Though the Bolsheviks' real baptism by fire would come in the civil war fought against the Whites and other rivals, the German invasion of winter 1917-18 was their wake-up call and had been prepared by the ongoing realignment ofsocialism and war mobilisation that was captured by the slogan of revolutionary defencism and the general trend of conflating military and civilian spheres.
Moreover, the Bolsheviks carried further the innovations in political- military organisation that the Provisional Government had introduced in 1917 under Kerensky. Not trusting in the spontaneous politics of the soldiers but acknowledging their potential as cultural and organisational forces in the country, the Provisional Government created a 'Bureau for Socio-Political Enlightenment' and eventually an entire Political Directorate of the War Ministry to channel the considerable political energies of the soldiers in support of the regime. The Bolsheviks waited only until April I9I8 before it replicated this experiment with its own Political Directorate of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. The conflation of civilian and military spheres that Kerensky attempted to push forward from the summer of 1917 was finally accomplished by the Bolsheviks in their creation of the Council of Defence. The new form of parastatal complex that had emerged over the course of 1917, the soviet network of local organs of self-administration, was attached to the new war mobilisation effort as the revolution spread across a war-weary population.
1918, the final year of war: occupation and intervention
After the winter assault of the Central Powers, the eastern front became the occupation regime of Germany and Austria-Hungary over the lands they acquired under the harsh and exploitative terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.[58]The war had taken its toll on the Central Powers, too, and the Russian Revolutions of 1917 had created new senses of possibility for oppositionist politicians there too. Not surprisingly, new revolutionary governments supplanted the dynastic monarchies very shortly after the capitulation of Germany and Austria-Hungary in November I9I8. In the intervening year, the two armies served to shield a series of recently proclaimed sovereign states along the western and southern borders of Bolshevik Russia. From Finland to Georgia the Central Powers appeared to have accomplished one of their most important wartime goals, the detaching of the borderland peoples (Randvolker) from the Russian heartland. Only now that a genuinely revolutionary regime was in place in Petrograd (soon to relocate to Moscow), Germany and Austria- Hungary (and the other major belligerent powers as well) began to fear the 'contagion' would spread to their own war-weary and weakened populations. Early in the war Lenin had called for the transformation of the international war into a global civil war. That threat came much closer to realisation due to the continued involvement of the major belligerent powers in the conflicts on the territory of the now former Russian Empire.
The war also continued by proxy when the Entente Powers recognised the Bolsheviks' leading rivals, the volunteer army of South Russia, as the legitimate successor government of Russia, especially after the Bolsheviks signed the peace treaty with the Central Powers and thereby threatened to give the Germans one more respite on the eastern front. In order to keep Russia in the war, mainly the British, French and American (soon joined by the Japanese) governments sent advisers, some arms and military equipment to the anti- Bolshevik forces who became known as the Whites. The core of the White movement was former imperial military men, but they were joined by representatives of the former civilian political elites of the Provisional Government, who had recently been Centrist-Left in their politics but who mostly moved rapidly to the right over the course of 1917. Among other platforms, they persisted in their patriotic defence of the integrity of the Russian Empire as they had earlier in the war. Because these anti-Bolshevik proto-states (the most important in the south of Denikin and Wrangel, Siberia under Admiral Kolchak and the north-east under General Yudenich) were forced to operate on the peripheries of the former empire, however, in borderland regions of ethnically very mixed populations (and certainly not necessarily dominated by Russian nationals), this politics undermined their cause, especially when the Bolsheviks (and even Woodrow Wilson) were promising varying degrees of national self-determination. Not surprisingly, the Whites made scant progress in uniting the anti-Bolshevik forces across the empire, notably the Cossacks, Ukrainians, Finns and Turko-Muslim peoples. In fact, they were barely able to sustain a united front among themselves over such fundamental issues as the conduct of the anti-Bolshevik war or how much of the recently overturned political and socio-economic orders to restore.
58
See John W Wheeler-Bennett,