PARIS 1919 (11 page)

But what were those bounds? There was no clear answer—or rather, every competing nationality had a different answer. “You see those little holes?” a local asked an American visitor to Lvov, on the disputed borders between Russia and Poland. “We call them here ‘Wilson's Points.' They have been made with machine guns; the big gaps have been made with hand grenades. We are now engaged in self-determination, and God knows what and when the end will be.” At its first meetings the Supreme Council had to deal with fighting between Poland and its neighbors. When the Peace Conference officially ended a year later, the fighting was still going on, there and elsewhere. Tasker Bliss, the American military adviser, wrote gloomily to his wife from Paris predicting another thirty years of war in Europe. “The ‘submerged nations' are coming to the surface and as soon as they appear, they fly at somebody's throat. They are like mosquitoes—vicious from the moment of their birth.”
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It is tempting but misleading to compare the situation in 1919 to that in 1945. In 1919 there were no superpowers, no Soviet Union with its millions of soldiers occupying the center of Europe and no United States with its huge economy and its monopoly of the atomic bomb. In 1919, the enemy states were not utterly defeated. The peacemakers talked expansively about making and unmaking nations, but the clay was not as malleable and the strength to mold it not as great as they liked to think. Of course, the peacemakers had considerable power. They still had armies and navies. They had the weapon of food if they chose to use it against a starving Europe. They could exert influence by threats and promises, to grant or withhold recognition, for example. They could get out the maps and move borders this way or that, and most of the time their decisions would be accepted—but not always, as the case of Turkey was to show in spectacular fashion. The ability of the international government in Paris to control events was limited by such factors as distance, usable transportation and available forces—and by the unwillingness of the Great Powers to expend their resources.

In 1919 the limits were not yet clear—to the peacemakers themselves, or to the world. Consequently, many people believed that, if only they could catch the attention of the Supreme Council, past wrongs would be righted and their futures assured. A young kitchen assistant at the Ritz sent in a petition asking for independence from France for his little country. Ho Chi Minh—and Vietnam—were too obscure even to receive an answer. A Korean graduate of Princeton University tried to get to Paris but was refused a passport. After the Second World War, Syngman Rhee became the president of a newly independent South Korea.
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Women's suffrage societies met in Paris, chaired by the formidable Englishwoman Millicent Fawcett, and passed resolutions asking for representation at the Peace Conference and votes for women. Wilson, who had a certain sympathy for their cause, met their delegation and talked vaguely but encouragingly about a special commission of the conference, with women members, to look into women's issues. In February, just before he left on a short trip back to the United States, he hesitantly asked his fellow peacemakers whether they would support this. Balfour said he was a strong supporter of votes for women but he did not think they should be dealing with such a matter. Clemenceau agreed. The Italians said it was a purely domestic issue. As Clemenceau whispered loudly, “What's the little chap saying?,” the Japanese delegate expressed appreciation for the great part women had played in civilization but commented that the suffrage movement in Japan was scarcely worth notice. The matter was dropped, never to be taken up again.
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The peacemakers soon discovered that they had taken on the administration of much of Europe and large parts of the Middle East. Old ruling structures had collapsed and Allied occupation forces and Allied representatives were being drawn in to take their place. There was little choice; if they did not do it, no one would—or, worse, revolutionaries might. The men on the spot did what they could. In Belgrade, a British admiral scraped together a small fleet of barges and sent them up and down the Danube carrying food and raw materials. He brought about a modest revival in trade and industry, often in the face of obstruction from the different governments along the river, but it was a stopgap measure. As he told Paris, the long-term solution was international control of the Danube and the other great European waterways. There were other schemes and other enthusiasts, but was there the political will? Or the money?
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The economic responsibilities alone were daunting. The war had disrupted the world's economy and it would not be easy to get it going again. The European nations had borrowed huge amounts of money—in the case of the Allies, increasingly from the United States. Now they found it almost impossible to get the credit to finance their reconstruction and the revival of trade. The war had left factories unusable, fields untilled, bridges and railway lines destroyed. There were shortages of fertilizer, seeds, raw materials, shipping, locomotives. Europe still depended largely on coal for its fuel, but the mines in France, Belgium, Poland and Germany were flooded. The emergence of new nations in central Europe further damaged what was left of the old trading and transportation networks. In Vienna, the electric lights flickered and the trams stopped running because the coal which had once come from the north was now blocked by a new border.

From all quarters of Europe, from officials and private relief agencies, alarming reports came in: millions of unemployed men, desperate housewives feeding their families on potatoes and cabbage soup, emaciated children. In that first cold winter of the peace, Herbert Hoover, the American relief administrator, warned the Allies that some 200 million people in the enemy countries and almost as many again among the victors and the neutral nations faced famine. Germany alone needed 200,000 tons of wheat per month and 70,000 tons of meat. Throughout the territories of the old Austria-Hungary, hospitals had run out of bandages and medicines. In the new Czechoslovak state, a million children were going without milk. In Vienna, more babies were dying than were surviving. People were eating coal dust, wood shavings, sand. Relief workers invented names for things they had never seen before, such as the mangel-wurzel disease, which afflicted those who lived solely on beets.
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The humanitarian case for doing something was unanswerable. So was the political one. “So long as hunger continued to gnaw,” Wilson warned his colleagues, “the foundations of government would continue to crumble.”
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They had the resources. The Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and the Americans all had surplus food and raw materials which they were eager to sell. The ships could be found to carry them. But where was the money to come from? Germany had gold reserves, but the French, who were determined those should go toward reparations, did not want to see them used up financing imports. The European Allies could not finance relief on the scale that was needed, and the defeated nations, except Germany, were bankrupt. That left the United States, but Congress and the American public were torn between an impulse to help and a sense that the United States had done enough in winning the war. After the Second World War, their mood was very much the same, but with a crucial difference: in place of the diffuse threat of revolution there was a single clear enemy, in the Soviet Union. The equivalent of the Marshall Plan, which contributed so much to the revival of Europe in those circumstances, was not possible in 1919.

The United States, moreover, did not have the preponderance of power that it had after the Second World War. Its European allies were not exhausted and desperate, prepared to take American aid, even at the price of accepting American suggestions. In 1919, they still saw themselves as, and indeed were, independent actors in world affairs. Before the war ended, Britain, France and Italy drew up a plan for pooling Allied credit, food, raw materials and ships to undertake relief and reconstruction under an inter-Allied board. The Americans resisted. They suspected that their allies wanted to control the distribution of resources, even though the bulk would come from the United States, as a lever to pressure the enemy states into accepting peace terms. When Wilson insisted that Hoover be placed in charge of Allied relief administration, the Europeans objected. Hoover, Lloyd George complained, would become the “food dictator of Europe” and American businessmen would take the opportunity to move in. The Europeans only gave way reluctantly, and did their best to make Hoover's job difficult.
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To Wilson, as to many Americans, Hoover was a hero, a poor orphan who had worked his way through Stanford University to become one of the world's leading engineers. During the war he had organized a massive relief program for German-occupied Belgium, and when the United States became a belligerent in 1917 he took charge of saving food for the war effort. “I can Hooverize on dinner,” said Valentine cards. “But I'll never learn to Hooverize, When it comes to loving you.” He was efficient, hardworking and humorless. Lloyd George found him tactless and brusque. The Europeans resented his reminders that the United States was supplying the bulk of Europe's relief and the way in which he promoted American economic interests, unloading, for example, stockpiled American pork products and severely undercutting European producers.
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Although the Allies had a number of economic agencies, supervised loosely by the Supreme Economic Council, Hoover's food and relief section was by far the most effective. With $100 million from the United States and about $62 million from Britain, he established offices in thirty-two countries, opened soup kitchens that fed millions of children, and moved tons of food, clothes and medical supplies into the hardest-hit areas. By the spring of 1919, Hoover's organization was running railways and supervising mines. It had its own telegraph network. It waged war on lice, with thousands of hair clippers, tons of soap, special baths and stations manned by American soldiers. Travelers who did not have a “deloused” certificate were seized and disinfected. In the summer of 1919 Hoover infuriated the Europeans yet again. He argued that the United States had done enough; it was now up to the Europeans. With hard work, austerity and savings they should be all right. His views met with approval in an increasingly isolationist Washington, and American aid and loans fell off sharply.
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In fact, it took Europe until 1925 to get back to prewar levels of production; in some areas, recovery was much slower. Many governments resorted to such measures as borrowing, budget deficits and trade controls to keep their countries afloat. Europe's economy as a whole remained fragile, adding to political strains at home in the 1920s and tensions abroad as governments turned to protectionist measures. Perhaps with American money and European cooperation a stronger Europe could have been built, more able to resist the challenges of the 1930s.
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6

Russia

ON JANUARY 18, 1919, the Peace Conference officially opened. Clemenceau made sure that the opening took place on the anniversary of the coronation in 1871 of Wilhelm I as kaiser of the new Germany. To the delegates assembled in the sumptuous Salle d'Horloge at the Quai d'Orsay, President Poincaré spoke of the wickedness of their enemies, the great sacrifices of the Allies and the hopes for a lasting peace. “You hold in your hands,” he told them, “the future of the world.” As they walked out, Balfour turned to Clemenceau and apologized for his top hat. “I was told,” he said, “that it was obligatory to wear one.” “So,” replied Clemenceau, in his bowler, “was I.”
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Observers noticed some absences: the Greek prime minister, Venizelos, annoyed that Serbia had more delegates than his own country; Borden, the Canadian prime minister, offended that the prime minister of little Newfoundland had been given precedence; and the Japanese, who had not yet arrived. But the most striking absence of all was that of Russia.

An Ally in 1914, Russia had probably saved France from defeat when it attacked Germany on the Eastern Front. For three years, Russia had battled the Central Powers, inflicting huge losses but absorbing even more. In 1917 it had finally cracked under the strain and, in eight months, had gone from autocracy to liberal democracy to a revolutionary dictatorship under a tiny extreme faction of Russian socialists, the Bolsheviks, whom most people, including the Russians themselves, had never heard of. As Russia collapsed, it spun off parts of a great empire: the Baltic states, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Daghestan. The Allies had sent in troops in a vain attempt to bolster their disintegrating ally against the Germans, but at the start of 1918 the Bolsheviks made peace with Germany. The Allied soldiers remained on Russian soil, but to do what? Topple the Bolsheviks and their Soviet regime? Support their heterogeneous opponents, the royalists, liberals, anarchists, disillusioned socialists, nationalists of various sorts?

In Paris it was not easy to tell what was happening in the east or who was on which side. Stories drifted westward of a social order turned upside down, civil wars, nationalist uprisings, a cycle of atrocities, retribution and more atrocities: the last tsar and his family murdered and their bodies thrown down a well; the mutilated body of a British naval attaché lying unburied on a St. Petersburg street. Russian soldiers had shot their officers, and sailors had commandeered their ships. Across the huge Russian countryside, peasants, driven by an ancient hunger for land, were killing their landlords. In the cities, teenagers swaggered with guns and the poor crept out of their slums to occupy the great mansions. It was hard to tell how much was true (most of it was) because Russia had become an unknown land. The new regime was under a virtual blockade. The powers had cut off trade with the Bolsheviks and had withdrawn their diplomats by the summer of 1918. Almost all foreign newspaper correspondents had gone by the start of 1919. The land routes were cut by fighting. Telegrams took days or weeks, if they got through at all. By the time the Peace Conference assembled, the only sure conduit for messages was through Stockholm, where the Bolsheviks had a representative. During the conference, the peacemakers knew as much about Russia as they did about the far side of the moon.
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As Lloyd George put it: “We were, in fact, never dealing with ascertained, or perhaps, even ascertainable facts. Russia was a jungle in which no one could say what was within a few yards of him.”
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His shaky grasp of geography did not help him; he thought Kharkov (a city in the Ukraine) was the name of a Russian general.

Legally, perhaps, there was no need to invite Russian representatives. That was Clemenceau's view: Russia had betrayed the Allied cause, leaving France to the mercy of the Germans.
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The Bolshevik leader, Lenin, at once a realist and a fanatic, had given away land and resources to Germany at Brest-Litovsk (today Brest in Poland) in return for peace so that he could conserve the vital spark from which the Marxist millennium would come. Germany gained access to the materials it so desperately needed and the chance to switch hundreds of thousands of its troops to the Western Front. Lenin's action, certainly for Clemenceau, released the Allies from all their promises to Russia, including the promise of access to the vital straits leading from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

On the other hand, Russia was technically still an Ally and still at war with Germany. After all, the Germans had been obliged to renounce the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the peace treaty they had signed with Russia, when they made their own armistice in November 1918. In any case, Russia's absence was inconvenient. “In the discussions,” wrote a young British adviser in his diary, “everything inevitably leads up to Russia. Then there is a discursive discussion; it is agreed that the point at issue cannot be determined until the general policy towards Russia has been settled; having agreed to this, instead of settling it, they pass on to some other subject.”
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Finland, the emerging Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, Turkey and Persia all came up at the Peace Conference, but their borders could not finally be set until the future shape and status of Russia were clear.

The issue of Russia came up repeatedly during the Peace Conference. Baker, later an apologist for Wilson, claimed that Russia and the fear of Bolshevism shaped the peace. “Russia,” he cried, “played a more vital part at Paris than Prussia!” This, like much of what he has to say, is nonsense. The peacemakers were far more concerned with making peace with a still intact Germany and with getting Europe back onto a peacetime footing. They worried about Russia just as they worried about social unrest closer to home, but they did not necessarily see the two as sides of the same coin. Destroying the Bolsheviks in Russia would not magically remove the causes of unrest elsewhere. German workers and soldiers seized power because the kaiser's regime was discredited and bankrupt. Austria-Hungary collapsed because it could no longer keep itself afloat and its nationalities down. The Russian Revolution sometimes provided encouragement—and a vocabulary. “Bolshevism is having its day,” wrote Borden in his diary, but he was talking about labor unrest, not revolution. “Bolshevism” (or its fellow, “communism”) was a convenient shorthand in 1919. As Bliss, Wilson's military adviser, said, “If we replaced it by the word ‘revolutionary,' perhaps that would be clearer.”
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Of course, the peacemakers were concerned about the spread of revolutionary ideas, but not necessarily Russian ones. The survivors of the Great War were weary and anxious. Apparently solid structures, empires, their civil services and their armies, had melted away and in many parts of Europe it was not clear what was to take their place. Europe had been a place of unsatisfied longings before the war—of socialists hoping for a better world, of labor for better conditions, of nationalists for their own homes—and those longings emerged again with greater force because in the fluid world of 1919 it was possible to dream of great change—or have nightmares about the collapse of order. The Portuguese president was assassinated. Later in 1919, in Paris, a madman would try to kill Clemenceau. In Bavaria and Hungary, communist governments took power, for a few days in Munich, but much longer in Budapest. In Berlin in January, and Vienna in June, communists tried, unsuccessfully, to do the same. Not everything could be blamed on the Russian Bolsheviks.

Many, and not just those on the left, refused to panic. Over lunch in the Hôtel Majestic one day, a Canadian delegate, Oliver Mowat Biggar, chatted cheerfully with a group that included Philip Kerr, Lloyd George's personal assistant. “The feeling of all of us was that money had too much to say in the world—selfish money that is. The logical conclusion is communism, and we shall no doubt all arrive there in a quarter of a century or so.” In the meantime, as Biggar wrote to his wife in Canada, he was having a wonderful time: Saturday evening dances at the Majestic,
Faust
and
Madame Butterfly
at the Opéra, the music halls where he was struck, he told her, by the beauty of the prostitutes. The French, he noted, certainly had different standards from Canadians. In one comic opera, the lead actress “had nothing on above the hips except a few chains and in the other nothing on either above or below except ribbons and shoes. As a dancer she was dismal.” When his wife suggested that she come immediately from Canada to join him, Biggar had serious reservations. Of course, he wanted to see her but even now the flats in Paris were terribly expensive, and they had appalling bathrooms. And he had been told, by a senior politician, that revolution was about to sweep across Germany and possibly into France. There would be serious shortages of food and fuel. The lights would go out, the taps would run dry. “You must, however, make up your own mind to discomfort with, very remotely, danger.” Mrs. Biggar remained in Canada.
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Bolshevism had its uses. When Rumania claimed the Russian province of Bessarabia or Poland advanced into the Ukraine, it was to stop Bolshevism. Italy's delegates warned of revolution at home if they did not get most of the Dalmatian coast. The peacemakers used it as a threat to each other. Germany, said Lloyd George and Wilson, would go Bolshevik if they imposed too harsh a peace.

Western reactions to the new regime in Russia itself were deeply divided. Lack of information did not, of course, prevent people from having strong views. If anything, it made it easier. Both left and right projected their own fears and hopes into the black hole in the east. The radical American journalist Lincoln Steffens, who unusually actually got to Russia in 1919, crafted his famous “I have seen the future and it works” on the journey out. Nothing he witnessed in Russia changed his mind. On the right, every horror story was credited. The British government published reports, allegedly from eyewitnesses, claiming that the Bolsheviks had nationalized women and set them up in “commissariats of free love.” Churches had been turned into brothels. Special gangs of Chinese executioners had been imported to work their ancient Oriental skills on the Bolsheviks' victims.
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Churchill, Britain's secretary of state for war during the Peace Conference, was one of the few to grasp that Lenin's Bolshevism was something new on the political scene, that beneath the Marxist rhetoric was a highly disciplined, highly centralized party grasping at every lever of power it could secure. Motivated by the distant goal of a perfect world, it did not care what methods it used. “The essence of Bolshevism as opposed to many other forms of visionary political thought,” Churchill asserted, “is that it can only be propagated and maintained by violence.” Lenin and his colleagues were prepared to destroy whatever stood in the way of that vision, whether the institutions of Russian society or the Russians themselves. “Of all tyrannies in history,” Churchill told an audience in London, “the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading.” Lloyd George was unkind about Churchill's motives: “His ducal blood revolted against the wholesale elimination of Grand Dukes in Russia.” Others, and they included many of his colleagues and the British public, wrote Churchill off as erratic and unreliable. The shadow of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign still hung over him, and his florid language sounded hysterical. “Civilisation,” he said in an election speech in November 1918, “is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.” After one outburst in cabinet Balfour told him coolly, “I admire the exaggerated way you tell the truth.”
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While most Western liberals in 1919 were inclined to give the Bolsheviks the benefit of the doubt, the revolutionists' seizure of power from a democratically elected assembly, their murders—most notoriously of the tsar and his family—and their repudiation of Russia's foreign debts shocked public opinion. (The French were particularly irritated by the debt issue because a great many among the middle classes had bought Russian government bonds.) But, as good liberals reminded themselves, both the United States and France were the products of revolution. Wilson initially thought that Bolshevism was about curbing the power of big business and big government to provide greater freedom for the individual. His personal doctor, Grayson, noted that Wilson found much to approve of in the Bolshevik program: “Of course, he declared, their campaign of murder, confiscation and complete disregard for law, merits the utmost condemnation. However, some of their doctrines have been developed entirely through the pressures of the capitalists, who have disregarded the rights of the workers everywhere, and he warned all of his colleagues that if the Bolsheviks should become sane and agree to a policy of law and order they would soon spread all over Europe, overturning existing governments.” Progressive thinkers such as himself and Wilson, said Lloyd George, thought that the old order—“inept, profligate and tyrannical”—deserved what it had got: “it had been guilty of exactions and oppressions which were accountable for the ferocity displayed by the Revolutionaries.” There was still something, too, in Lloyd George of the bold young solicitor in north Wales who had taken on the powerful local interests. “The trouble with the P.M.,” Curzon complained to Balfour, “is that he is a bit of a Bolshevist himself. One feels that he sees Trotsky as the only congenial figure on the international scene.”
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The Russian Bolsheviks would, many believed, eventually settle down and become bourgeois. If Bolshevik ideas were permeating Western societies, it was because people were fed up. Remove the causes of Bolshevism, both Wilson and Lloyd George argued, and you would take away its oxygen. Farmers without land, workers without jobs, ordinary men and women without hope, all were fodder for visionaries promising the earth. There was a dangerous gulf, said Wilson, even in his own country, between capital and labor. “Seeds need soil, and the Bolshevik seeds found the soil already prepared for them.” They could defeat Bolshevism, he assured the American experts on the voyage to Paris, by building a new order. Lloyd George, too, was inclined to be optimistic. “Don't you think Bolshevism will die out of itself?” he asked a British journalist. “Europe is very strong. It can resist it.”
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