Gas warfare scored its greatest successes against the poorly equipped Russian troops on the eastern front, who suffered 425,000 gas-induced casualties and 56,000 deaths.100 For Russia, with 2 million dead and 5 million wounded, the war proved disastrous in all regards. Finally fed up with the tsar’s indifference to their hardships, the Russian people overthrew Nicholas II’s regime in March 1917. But many felt further betrayed when, with Wilson’s support, the reformist government of Alexander Kerensky opted to keep Russia in the war. The Russian masses demanded a sharper break with the past.
On November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seized power, dramatically changing the course of world history. They were inspired by Karl Marx, a nineteenth-century German-Jewish intellectual who believed that class struggle would eventually result in an egalitarian socialist society. Marx, ironically, had doubted that a successful socialist revolution could occur in economically and culturally backward Russia. Ignoring Marx’s warnings, the Bolsheviks set out to reorganize Russian society at its roots, nationalizing banks, distributing landed estates to the peasants, putting workers in control of factories, and confiscating church property. Lenin’s Red Guard ransacked the old Foreign Office and brazenly published what it found: a web of secret agreements between the Allies from 1915 and 1916 that divided the postwar map into exclusive zones of influence. Much as the United States would react to the WikiLeaks publications of its diplomatic cables in 2010, the Allies were outraged at this brazen violation of the old diplomatic protocol, which now exposed the hollowness of Wilson’s call for “self-determination” after the war. Among the treaties was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided up the Ottoman Empire among Great Britain, France, and Russia. Carving out new nations with little regard for historical and cultural affinities, it planted the seeds of future conflict in the oil-rich Middle East.
Not since the French Revolution some 125 years before had Europe been so profoundly shaken and changed. Lenin’s vision of worldwide Communist revolution captured the imagination of workers and peasants around the globe, posing a direct challenge to Wilson’s vision of liberal capitalist democracy.
Wilson’s Anglophile secretary of state Robert Lansing reported disappointedly that Lenin’s Communist message was resonating with workers. He warned Wilson on January 1, 1918, that Lenin’s appeal was directed “to the proletariat of all countries, to the ignorant and mentally deficient, who by their numbers are urged to become masters. Here seems to me to lie a very real danger in view of the present social unrest throughout the world.”101
Wilson decided to make his own bold move in an attempt to steal Lenin’s thunder. He announced his Fourteen Points on January 8, 1918. This liberal, open, anti-imperialist peace plan endorsed self-determination, disarmament, freedom of the seas, free trade, and a League of Nations. Only such an exalted mission would justify continuing “this tragical and appalling outpouring of blood and treasure.” “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants,” he declared in what later would turn out to be a boldfaced lie.102 But suddenly two competing new visions for the postwar world were on the table.
Lenin again caught the capitalist world off guard. On March 3, eight months before the armistice, he signed a peace treaty with Germany, pulling Russian troops from the war. Lenin was so desirous of peace that he acceded to the harsh terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk even though it meant relinquishing Russian control over Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia, and more—over 300,000 square miles of territory and 50 million people. Wilson and the Allies were furious. They reacted quickly.
The conservative counterrevolution against the Bolsheviks was ferocious. Separate armies attacked the new Russia from all directions—native Russians and Cossacks, the Czech legion, Serbs, Greeks, Poles in the west, the French in Ukraine, and some 70,000 Japanese in the Far East. In reaction, Lenin’s co-revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky ruthlessly put together a Red Army of approximately 5 million men. The outspoken ex–Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill spoke for capitalists everywhere when he said that Bolshevism should be strangled in its cradle.
An estimated 40,000 British troops arrived in Russia, some deployed to the Caucasus to protect the oil reserves at Baku. Though most of the fighting would be over by 1920, pockets of resistance persisted until 1923. In a foreshadowing of what was to come some sixty years later, Muslim resistance in Central Asia lasted into the 1930s.
Japan, France, Great Britain, and several other nations sent tens of thousands of troops to Russia, in part to assist conservative White Russians attempting to overthrow the fledgling Bolshevik regime. The United States initially hesitated to join them but finally sent over 15,000 troops to eastern and northern Russia with the hope of maintaining a limited eastern front against Germany and limiting Japanese gains. Wilson rejected proposals by British cabinet officer Winston Churchill, commander in chief of the Allied armies, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, and other Allied leaders for a direct military intervention to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Wilson resisted Foch’s ongoing entreaties, explaining “any attempt to check a revolutionary movement by means of deployed armies is merely trying to use a broom to sweep back a high tide. Besides, armies may become impregnated with the very Bolshevism they are sent to combat.”103 Still, U.S. troops remained in the country until 1920, long after the original military rationale had ceased to exist. U.S. participation in this operation poisoned its relations with the new Soviet government from the start.104 It also deepened mistrust toward Wilson and his motives on the part of a crucial group of mostly midwestern progressive senators—a mistrust that would come back to haunt him when he struggled to achieve his crowning vision, a league of nations.