Second, the Bolsheviks from the outset declared that national borders in the era of socialist revolution and global class war had become meaningless. They issued appeals to foreign nationals to rise and overthrow their governments; they allocated state funds for this purpose; and where they were in a position to do, which for the time being was mainly Germany, they actively promoted revolution. By challenging the legitimacy of all foreign governments, the Bolsheviks invited all foreign governments to challenge theirs. If in fact no power chose to avail itself of that right in 1917–18, it was because none of them had an interest in so doing. The Germans found the Bolsheviks serving their purposes and propped them whenever they ran into trouble; the Allies were busy fighting for their lives. The question posed by one historian—“How … did the Soviet government, bereft of significant military force in the midst of what was until then mankind’s most destructive war, succeed in surviving the first year of the revolution?”225—answers itself: this most destructive war completely overshadowed Russian events. The Germans supported the Bolshevik regime; the Allies had other concerns.
Hence, it is misleading to see foreign involvement in Russia in 1917–18 in terms of hostile “intervention.” The Bolshevik Government both invited such intervention and aggressively intervened on its own account. Although the great powers, yearning for a return to normalcy, were reluctant to acknowledge it, the Russian Revolution never was a purely internal affair of Russia, important only insofar as it affected the outcome of the war. Russia’s new rulers made certain that it would reverberate around the globe. The November 1918 armistice offered them unprecedented opportunities to organize revolutions in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and wherever else they could do so. Although these efforts failed for the time being, they ensured that the world would know no respite and no return to pre-1914 life.
One further thing needs to be said about foreign involvement on Russian soil during 1918. In all the talk of what the Allies did in Russia, which really was not very much, it is usually forgotten what they did for Russia, which was a great deal. After Russia had reneged on her commitments and left them to fight the Central Powers on their own, the Allies suffered immense human and material losses. As a result of Russia’s dropping out of the war, the Germans withdrew from the inactive Eastern Front enough divisions to increase their effectives in the west by nearly one-fourth (from 150 to 192 divisions).226 These reinforcements allowed them to mount a ferocious offensive. In the great battles on the Western Front in the spring and summer of 1918—St.-Quentin, the Lys, the Aisne, the Matz, the Marne, and Château-Thierry—the British, French, and Americans lost hundreds of thousands of men. This sacrifice finally brought Germany to her knees.* And the defeat of Germany, to which it had made no contribution, not only enabled the Soviet Government to annul the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and recover most of the lands which it had been forced to give up at Brest but also saved Soviet Russia from being converted into a colony, a kind of Eurasian Africa, which fate Germany had intended for her.
This point is vigorously and persuasively argued by Brian Pearce in How Haig Saved Lenin (London, 1987).
*Izvestiia, No. 22/286 (January 28, 1918), 1, emphasis added. Heraclitus actually said something slightly different: “Strife [not war] is the father and the king of all; some he has made slaves, and some free.”
* Joseph Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, II (Paris, 1933), 57–58; A. Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations Franco-Soviétiques, 1917–1024 (Paris, 1981), 59. Noulens wanted to add a further condition that Allied citizens be granted in Russia “the same advantages, privileges, and compensations” that German nationals had received in the Brest Treaty, but he had to drop this demand: Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations, 59.
*Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 (Vienna-Munich, 1966), 49. There is no basis whatever for Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff’s claim (Les Relations, 60) that it was Noulens who deliberately “ruptured” a looming accord between the Allies and Moscow by giving, at the end of April, an admittedly tactless newspaper interview in which he justified Japanese landings in Vladivostok. The Bolsheviks were not that easily insulted.
†On him, see Wilhelm Joost, Botschafter bei den roten Zaren (Vienna, 1967), 17–63, which is not entirely reliable.
