Sunday Business Post, Ireland
February 17, 2008
When grand statesmen ran scared of red menace
The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism. By Anthony
Read, Jonathan Cape, 37
‘The War of the Giants has ended. The wars of the pygmies begin,"
declared Winston Churchill rather wickedly.
Whether Turks or Slavs appreciate being called pygmies any more than
Irish people, the fact is that the ”war to end all wars” did no
such thing. The armistice between the Allied and Central powers
created the space for an explosion of ethnic rivalries, from
Tipperary to the Black Sea.
In the two months from the British, French and German signatures
being appended in the railway carriage, to the Paris Peace Conference
convening, Poland, Latvia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia all declared
their independence. The soon-to-be Kingdom of Yugoslavia was also
proclaimed.
The Freikorps violently extinguished the Spartacist uprising in
Berlin. Estonia courageously fought Russian annexation, with Allied
assistance. Even little Iceland became self-governing. Nationalist
Ireland was slower off the mark. The Giants – the American president,
the British, French and Italian premiers – had already discussed
matters great and small for three days at Versailles before the First
Dail met and two RIC constables were ambushed outside Soloheadbeg,
heralding the start of yet another war.
The usual depiction of the participants at Versailles is of
obstinately short-sighted and foolish men unable to rise to the
occasion. This is unfair. They faced problems that often defied
solution.
The war had devastated Europe. Twenty million had died; twice as many
again were wounded. There was a real sense that Europeans had
destroyed not just much of their civilisation’s infrastructure and
all those lives, but their political, social and economic structures.
Russia had started down the path to revolution in 1917 and, as the
old regime collapsed, the empire withered. In the Caucasus, the
Armenians, the Azerbaijanis and the Georgians tried to set up
independent states. Ukraine briefly gained its sovereignty. Finland
and the Baltics fought for their freedom.
An atmosphere of fear then surrounded the peacemakers – fear that
they would never be able to recreate European civilisation, but fear
too that worse was to come. An image often used at Versailles was of
being on the edge of a volcano about to erupt. It was not an
unreasonable apprehension.
The Russian Revolution was still working itself out. The Civil War –
between the Bolsheviks on the one hand, and a collection of
anarchists, liberals, nationalists of various stripes, and the
Tsarist remnants – was ongoing. It was not at all clear yet who would
triumph.
The Bolsheviks – still a tiny force of perhaps 15,000 – called on the
left-wing forces of the world to rise up against their rulers.
Remarkably, their call was briefly successful.
The fall of the monarchies in Austria-Hungary and Germany was marked
by revolutionary upheavals. In a number of cities, even in deeply
Catholic Bavaria, Soviets, consciously named after the Russian model,
took power. Hungary had a communist government for several months in
the spring and summer.
Depending on your perspective – there were genuine grounds for
despair or for hope – the revolution was spreading westward as
France, Italy, Britain (including Belfast) and even North America
experienced rioting and syndicalist strikes.
In an otherwise fact-filled but dull study short on ideas and
analysis, Anthony Read (author of The Devil’s Disciples, a celebrated
history of the Nazi elite) is strong on this often neglected aspect
of 1919.
The fearful climate suited some countries’ aims in Paris. Queen Marie
of Romania, for example, demanded huge territorial gains, including
half of Hungary, for her country.
When leaders such as Woodrow Wilson demurred, she warned that a
disappointed Romania might well experience violent revolution,
bringing the Red Terror much closer to the heart of Europe. The
French, in particular, insisted it was necessary to have robust
states as a cordon sanitaire and the Transylvanian Hungarians were
sacrificed accordingly.
In the new democratic age, public opinion also was an important
consideration for the peacemakers. There was a very strong feeling
that someone must pay for the greatest catastrophe of modern times
but also, contradictorily and confusingly, a desire for a better
world. Many felt that the sacrifices would only make sense if
capitalist societies found ways of preventing future wars and
building fairer societies.
It was not going to be that easy. The situation in 1919 was different
from that in 1945. Austria-Hungary had gone; Bulgaria was completely
defeated; and the Ottoman Empire was tottering, its Arab territories
breaking off. But if Germany was defeated, it was not in away that
was going to make peace easy.
Versailles ultimately failed, not least because the Giants frequently
had polar ambitions. But Versailles – and the Poles’ repulse of
Lenin, the ‘miracle of the Vistula’ – at least kept much of eastern
Europe free from the designs of the German eagle and the Russian bear
for a generation. For some, these golden years inspired the
democratic revolutions of 1989. If for no other reason, therefore,
1919 deserves better – and more holistic – histories than this.