Wars and revolutions have always gone hand in hand, with one feeding off the other, snowballing to the point where the eventual outcome of either may well be far different from anything envisaged at the outset. A third aspect that very often features is that of intervention, as ideological power struggles and economic interests cross borders and seek to influence the outcomes of wars and revolutions.
In order to understand the cause of the Russian revolution one needs to see the enormous influence of two major factors, poverty and war, with the latter having exacerbated the former in the Russian Empire.
Sadly, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was incapable of addressing the issue of poverty and democratisation throughout his reign. After three years of a horrific and exhausting war against the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the Russian people had had enough, and the seeds of revolution grew on such fertile ground. Unbeknown to the layman, the revolution actually started in February 1917 and was already largely successful by March 15 with the abdication of the Tsar.
The new provisional government was actually made up of liberal ministers with just one socialist, Alexander Kerenski, who was chosen to head the new Russian republic. This government however made one fatal error in not carrying out the people’s wishes to pull out of the war, thus allowing the rival Mensheviks and Bolsheviks to gain popular support and momentum, and eventually topple the new republic in the second revolution of October 1917, which led to a civil war between the white and red armies and the assassination of the Imperial family in July 1918.
It is thus one of the ironies and forgotten chapters in modern history, that it was not just the Great War that fuelled the Russian Revolution, but also the lack of resolve to pull out of it by the first democratically inclined revolutionaries that came to power in March 1917, that led to the second Bolshevik uprising in October of that year.
It is also one of the greatest historical “quirks” of the last century that the US and its President Woodrow Wilson played a very strange and dangerous hand in actually granting Leon Trotsky an American passport and helping him and others to get back into Russia from New York, where he had already been identified as a “Russian revolutionary in exile” by the New York Times. This initiated a chain of events that still has repercussions a full century later.
Trotsky left New York with his newly acquired US passport on SS Kristianiafjord on March 26, 1917, two weeks after the Tsar had abdicated and Kerensky had formed his new republican government. Why Trotsky was assisted and given a US passport remains a mystery to this very day.
By March, 1917, things were looking pretty dismal on the Entente side. The US suddenly declared war on the Central powers a few weeks later in April, but was not actively involved in the military campaigns before November. The tide started to turn against the Central powers only in the last three months of the war, during the so-called 100 days offensive that started in August 1918.
Meanwhile, what had been set in motion in 1917 was a quid pro quo that culminated in the Balfour Declaration and the entry of the US in what was essentially a fight between European empires that dragged their colonies into the war. Up until then Wilson had argued relentlessly for an end to the war in Europe through a ceasing of hostilities, rather than victory by one side over the other.
The Zionist movement had persuaded the new British government upon Lloyd George’s appointment as Prime Minister in December 1916, that in exchange for exerting its enormous influence on the US to persuade it to enter the war on the British side, Britain would pave the way for the creation of a Jewish “home” in Palestine.
Staring down the barrel of the Teutonic guns, Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour agreed. After all, it would be a small price to pay to turn the course of the war in Britain’s favour, and furthermore Palestine formed part of the Ottoman Empire fighting on the other side. A declaration was finally penned and sent to Lord Walter Rothschild to be forwarded to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain.
Our world leaders keep condemning our nations to repeat history’s mistakes, with their misguided money-driven policies
While Wilson’s government provided support to Kerensky’s government, General Alfred Knox, the British military attachè in Russia, was playing another game, and supported a failed military coup led by the newly appointed head of the Russian army, Lavr Kornilov, to overthrow the Kerensky government in August, 1917, with a view to reinstating the monarchy in Russia.
The embattled Kerensky government, trying to appease its Western allies by staying in the war despite popular uproar, while having to stave off attempted military coups supported by the British, eventually fell to a Bolshevik coup in October.
Having first given Trotsky a US passport to enter Russia after the Kerensky revolution had succeeded, the US joined the British and colonial forces in Russia and sent 13,000 troops, principally to try and protect the Czechoslovak Legion and keep the Eastern Front open. But once the war was over in November 1918, rather than leave Russia, which by then was under the control of the Bolsheviks, the British and American troops who were on Russian soil turned their focus on supporting the white army against the Bolsheviks.
Foreign intervention is always extremely dangerous, and usually leads to very strained international relations for generations, especially when one foments strife, and furthermore intervenes to help an eventually losing side in a civil conflict. And yet, so many leaders fail to learn this obvious historical fact.
For years now we have seen interventions and support for the continued Zionist cause in Palestine, Nato expanding dangerously eastwards, and invasion and political intervention in Iraq, which is now ironically moving closer to the Shia camp. We have seen years of efforts to topple the secular government in Syria, when the chances of it being replaced by a far more dangerous and sinister Isis have been clearly evident. We have seen the constant support and arming by the UK and the US of a ruthless Saudi dictatorship that may one day fall, as did that of the puppet Shah of Iran in 1979.
Opting for a Royal dictatorship over democracy, in those early days of struggle against Western empires and colonialism, the Shah had been installed in Iran after an engineered coup in 1953, led by the CIA, as it admitted in 2013, against the democratically elected government of President Mossadegh. Mossadegh had just nationalised the oil industry following refusal of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to submit to a proper audit of its operations. It was an attempt to put an end to a huge haemorrhaging of national resources to its former colonial masters.
If the Russian and Iranian revolutions, the Entente intervention in the Russian civil war, the assisting of the Menshevik/Bolshevik cause from across the Atlantic in the Trotsky passport case, and the engineered coup in Iran in 1953, are anything to go by, this does not augur well for global peace, prosperity and trust amongst nations.
It seems that our world leaders keep condemning our nations to repeat history’s mistakes, with their misguided money-driven policies, and embark upon the insane pursuit of confrontation, conflict and fomenting of strife, that only serve to keep fuelling revolutions as well as wars, in an endless cycle of hatred, violence, and the settling of old scores.
Such leaders thus take on the garments of the kings and queens of old, playing on a grand chessboard, while the people, their pawns, are sacrificed and brainwashed for geopolitical strategy, and the enrichment of the few oligarchs at the top, until it creates a backlash and fuel for the next, uprising, revolution or war.
Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in international affairs.