1923: The Year of Decision

1923: The Year of Decision ​

March on, Red Soldier! What may have befallen the Jews of Galicia, the Serbs of Belgrade, the benighted peoples of Hungary, without your courageous advance? March on, Red Soldier! Strike dread into the reactionary lords of terror that crush under their heel our European brothers! March, on, Red Soldier! In your hands has been entrusted the fate of the world’s peoples; by the thrust of your bayonet and the sweat of your brow shall long-suffering humanity be at last redeemed! March on, Red Soldier!

-John Heartfield

We have entered a war not simply for the advance of socialism, but for the continued survival of undegraded humanity. We charge the Anglo-American power with nothing less than placing man upon a cross of capital and sacrificing the innocent peoples of Europe to preserve bourgeois power. Not even Marx and Engels could predict the horrors which the bourgeois now bring into the world as they attempt to delay the inevitable end of their class rule.

-Ernst Thalmann

It was not 1919 when the socialists gained ascendancy, but 1923; the cultural hegemony of the capitalist powers, their claim to moral and political legitimacy, was already battered by the war, but it only truly died in the killing fields of Galicia. The old liberal cause of equality, brotherhood, and freedom, what we today call “humanity”, passed over to the new powers. Equipped with this potent weapon, they did not hesitate to employ it.

-Enzo Traverso

The curious thing about being made a soldier of humanity - if one may use such a term - is that one’s enemies cease to be truly human. Has the Pole and Croat truly surrendered their own personhood by dint of their crimes? May humanity truly be saved in a sea of blood? Shall the red terror provide recompense to the victims of the bourgeois, or shall we instead numb our own humanity by such unrepentant violence? I fear that, having grown so drunk on our own self-righteousness, we shall soon enough cease to recognize ourselves.

-Karl Kraus

We have all had enough of the moral hand-wringing of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Was such consideration offered to the countless victims of the reactionary terror? Perhaps if Mr. Kraus had acquainted himself with those who survived the bourgeois ethnocides and atrocities, he would not spout such drivel, but this is likely too much to ask of his genteel sensibilities.”

-Georg Ledebour

Whether they march to the Marseillase or the Ode to Man, the spirit is the same. Whether he be a Napoleonic volunteer or German convert to the latest millenarian creed, I am terrified of the man who engaged in wide-eyed slaughter while intoning his love of humanity. The man who exalts abstract humanity is the same man who hates the actuality of human existence.

-Martin Heidegger.

The British Empire is already tottering - all it requires is a gentle push.

-Yakod Sverdlov

We had best be careful, or within a few years that damned American flag will be hung over Melbourne and Toronto.

-Winston Churchill

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Prelude

What were the essential lineaments of the 19th century world-order, in which Britain secured a leading but not hegemonic role? The British World-system required, first and foremost, a balance of powers across the channel, such that no European coalition could divide the booty of the British empire without first taking on continental challengers. In East Asia, it needed a passive or at least friendly group of powers which would not challenge British commercial supremacy in Malaya and China. And it demanded, if not complete restfulness, than at least comparative tranquility in South Asia, the great backstop of British power. In the First Revolutionary Era, as Japan made a bid for hegemony in East Asia and a German-Soviet alliance looked poised to establish a condominium over Europe, all the essential conditions for British supremacy were called into question.

For much of the 19th century, the great fear of British diplomats was the possibility of an enlarged Russian hyperpower immune to the chastening effects of sea power by virtue of its Eurasian geography. Such a state could batten at the four great doors of the British imperium: the Straits of Dardanelles which connected the mediterranean and black seas, thus far managed by a compliant Turkey; the maritime approaches to the Raj off Persia and its vulnerable Central Asian land frontiers; and, finally, the crucial British commercial grip on China. At the beginning of the 20th century, the disastrous Russian performance in the Russo-Japanese war made the dire prognostications of the Russophobic “Central Asian” lobby appear to be little more than paranoid fantasies. Lacking the economic and industrial might of Britain, Russia was not a serious threat. The 1907 Anglo-Russian convention settled their remaining disputes and prepared the way for an alliance against the burgeoning German power.

For eleven years, defeat after defeat was inflicted upon the weary and bedraggled Russian state. Germany’s shattering victory in the Polish offensive confirmed Russian military weakness, and the 1918 Treaty of Warsaw, which transferred control of the Empire’s western borderlands to Germany, seemed merely another signal of the interminable decline of Russian power. Yet in reality, this marked a nadir before a remarkable resurgence of Russian prestige. Lenin’s Bolsheviks defeated their white opponents in short order, and an isolated Germany was forced to cede back lost territories in exchange for Russian grain. Then, the First Revolutionary Era brought the return of the Baltics and Finland into the Russian domain. Central Asia was pacified, and a friendly regime installed in Mongolia. Turkish weakness allowed a nearly effortless expansion of Western Armenia into Erzerum and Trabzon. Russian arms and military advisors threatened to bring down the British Raj.

Protected on its western flank by its German ally, the Russian military attained an unprecedented freedom of action. Lenin faced steadily mounting criticism from those who believed him to be overly cautious in its use. India’s defeat in the Lucknow offensive brought a flurry of outrage from the left, who urged more direct intervention against the British. Before an early congress called in 1923, though, Lenin contracted the Yankee flu and died. There was little question about his successor. Almost immediately, Yakov Sverdlov became the “First-among-equals” at Sovnarkom. As party-secretary, holder of multiple commissar posts, and crucial intermediary between the party’s left and centre, he had already grown to wield power equivalent to Lenin’s; the upcoming Party Congress would merely confirm his ascendancy.

Sverdlov shared Lenin’s pragmatism and ideological commitment to the communist project, but not his caution. He intended to do whatever was necessary to bolster the position of his Indian allies. This meant, first and foremost, creating difficulties for the British. Under the pretense of intervening in support of an aggrieved Kurdish minority, an invasion of eastern Turkey was launched. Such a plan had several advantages. Firstly, Turkey was at war with Britain’s Greek ally, and it would therefore be politically impossible for England to send it aid. Secondly, the creation of a Kurdish client state and the presence of Soviet troops near Southwestern Persia would force the diversion of British troops into the region. Finally, such a route avoided directly assaulting Persia, which was doing its best to resist British attempts to extend a formal protectorate over the region. The presence of Soviet troops along its border would provide it with an incentive to continue these efforts.

Sverdlov also directed a sizable contingent of soldiers to Bulgaria via the Black Sea. These were not to commence any direct invasion of Constantinople, but they were to quite noisily menace both Greece and the International Zone, forcing additional diversions of British soldiers. In addition to this, a sizable bribe convinced the governor of Xinjiang to allow Soviet troops into the area, ostensibly as protection against Japanese imperialism, a fairly absurd pretense given the distance of Japanese soldiers from the province. Finally, the Soviets began sending raids into Afghanistan, intending to force it to desist from its invasion of the northwestern border provinces and Punjab.

These maneuvers did not determine the details of the year’s struggles, but they did set the stage for them. Soviet advances on the British Empire’s strategically vital flanks were met with predictable alarm by Britain, particularly because it had exhausted the means to counter them without enforcing a prolonged pause on the Indian campaign. In February, Churchill requested American military assistance in Iraq and Constantinople. Commentators rightly noted that this was an epochal development: England was now forced to rely not just on American financial aid, but also American military and industrial power to shore up the defense of its empire. As befuddled American soldiers were sent into Iraq and Constantinople to guard against Soviet incursions, the new, quadripolar world-order was being born, and the long century of British predominance being laid to rest. Perhaps most consequently, realization of the full extent of British weakness prompted the Americans to fully commit to creating a “Eastern European bloc” to counterbalance Soviet-German designs and prevent them from establishing a red condominium over Europe.

The Battles of 1923 - The Opening Blows

Over 1923, the fate of Asia and of Europe was determined on the battlefields of Luzon, Taiwan, Czechia, Bengal, Romania, Punjab, and Poland. As we will see, these military conflicts had become truly globalized, and it is impossible to fully understand the decision-making of political elites in the eastern campaigns without also examining the unfolding situation in the west - and vice-versa. For this reason, they must be considered together, as part of a single global ideological struggle. 1923 continued the pattern that had already begun in 1921 and 1922: the two power-blocs would continue to muster their forces and inch ever-closer into open and unmediated conflict, but would make no overt declaration of war.

In the Asian theater, the American fleet finally achieved its decisive battle in March, defeating an inferior Japanese force and sinking a third of its battleships. The invasion of Luzon began to great fanfare, but ended in great consternation and foreboding as the public learned of the staggering losses of American troops suffered to entrenched Japanese defenders. The internationalists in the state department began to speak of a negotiated peace, something which the easterners believed would only embolden Japan in the long-run. President Root intervened, and funneled additional resources, principally artillery and landships, to the allied Eastern European bloc, prompting the outrage of the generals fighting in the East Asian theater, as well as among Sun Yat-sen, who had been promised generous aid shipments. The Japanese army in China held out against several counteroffensives prosecuted by an undersupplied and frequently under-nourished Chinese Army.

Across the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, British forces made steady advances. An invasion out of Burma seized the province of Assam in February, and in April, Bengal itself faced an assault from the south and the east. The difficult terrain gave the defenders an initial edge here, buying time for many members of the INC government to flee through the Himalayan mountains into Tibet, where they would eventually make their way to the Soviet Union. It would take until September for the British to fully conquer the region, and a good deal longer to “pacify” it. Punjab, with its large and well-trained Sikh army, was defeated by the end of the year; pledges of amnesty for lower-level soldiers eventually provoked mass desertions as news of British success in Bengal spread to the region.

In July, before the campaigns of the Anglo-American powers had reached their conclusion in the Asian theater, war broke out once again in Europe. The arrival of American military advisors, planes and landships into East-Central Europe could not be masked. A steady stream of spies, insurgents, and provocateurs from the socialist bloc streamed into the reactionary states to undermine the adversarial regimes. Germany quietly began a military buildup, and Russia halted its troops along the border of British Baghdad, having waged a successful campaign to take the key city of Mosul. It was not, however, just the exigencies of geopolitics which demanded intervention.

News of the Jewish and Serbian ethnocides had gradually reached the socialist publics of Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. For some time, these three states had maintained a tight leash on their militaries, worried about the potential of pacifist backlash against undue expansion of the army. Roman Dmowski’s coup against Pilsudski’s weakened Polish government had already inflamed relations, and now reports of Anglo-American aid and massacres against Jewish and Serbian minorities provided further resources for a militarist propaganda drive. The reactionary states, now the “Bucharest Pact”, responded to the military build-up by cracking down on perceived fifth columns. New regulations targeted German minorities in the Czech Sudetenland and in Croatian Slovenia. Germany responded by stepping up surveillance against “counterrevolutionary elements” of the Polish community in Posen.

Matters reached a head on July 14th, when the German community in the Czech city of Pilsen began an uprising that successfully won control of around half the city and proclaimed a “German Soviet Republic of Pilsen”. Ironically, many of the participants in the revolt were not workers but middle-class elements in the pay of both German and Soviet intelligence, who had determined that the “socialist devil” to the north was preferable to the intrusive “Czech hydra”. When the Czech authorities crushed the short-lived republic with extreme prejudice, an aggrived Germany sent a note demanding that atrocities against civilians be prosecuted, leading to a Czech denunciation of German involvement in its internal affairs. In border clashes, half a dozen German and Czech soldiers were injured.

What followed can only be described as a pattern of purposeful escalation by the socialist states. Outraged by the temerity of the Czech dismissal, Germany issued another note, informing the Czech government that a failure to protect the remaining German minorities in Czechia would be grounds for war. The military thinking of most of the top brass in Russia and Germany was that the reactionary states had grown overly emboldened by the provision of American aid, and that there was a narrow window to strike before the Pacific and Anglo-Indian wars wound up. What followed was a relentless campaign of vilification - largely not unfounded - against the states of the Bucharest Pact. Socialist leaders who previously believed that reports of atrocities were exaggerated now quickly switched tunes, both in public and in private. In any case, the invasion of Poland would soon reveal the full extent of the tragedy that had transpired under the first seven months of Dmowski’s rule.

In the press and in the official pronouncements of the socialist bloc, the campaign that followed was declared to be a grand crusade against reactionary barbarism and a creeping Anglo-American invasion of Europe. In reality, it was both of these things and more. Military mobilization to match the swelling Anglo-American armies was felt to be a necessity, and such a war provided the perfect opportunity for it. Failure to intervene now might mean that no opportunity for intervention would ever arise - at least, no opportunity that would not provoke the Anglo-American enemy into a repeat of the Great War. It was now or never.

Soviet and German soldiers began the invasion of Poland on July 21st. With its diminished borders and decimated military hierarchy, it had little chance against the combined onslaught. The sizable Romanian army and well-supplied, experienced Czech soldiery waged a much more successful defense of their outlying provinces in the initial weeks of conflict. Warsaw fell in early August, and Galicia, the burial ground of over 600,000 Jews killed in the infamous ethnocide, was mostly captured by the 17th. The Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, and Croatian governments sent a confidential note offering generous peace terms on August 31st, including the cession of border areas, the expulsion of American advisors, and the legalization of banned socialist parties.

This was overwhelmingly rejected by the cabinets in both Russia and Germany. The second, and more brutal phase of the war thus began in September, coinciding with the American invasion of Taiwan. Alarm now spread among the capitalist powers that the red armies would soon sweep across the Balkans, bringing them to the gates of Constantinople and Greece. Several British expeditionary divisions were ferried into Romania, and for a few weeks, Anglo-American air support prevented the Red Army from making any breakthroughs. But then, the unstable Hungarian state, already facing sporadic protest at home, was requested to bring its army into Moravia to shore up Czech lines. Horthy at first equivocated, worried of the domestic implications of such a move, but eventually complied. He was right to be anxious. A patriotic revolt broke out across the army; Horthy was accused of “sacrificing Hungary’s men to Hungary’s butchers”, and red militias under the command of Bela Kun successfully stormed Budapest, executing most of the government’s ministers and proclaiming a soviet republic. The rest of the army almost immediately swore allegiance to Kun, as did the besieged Social Democrats. A war of reconquest soon began: Kun marched his men into Slovakia later that week and met up with advancing German forces, cutting off the remainder of the Czechoslovak Republic from its Romanian and Croatian allies.

A panicked America rushed through a hugely controversial bill that placed a complete embargo on shipments of grain, foodstuffs, and industrial goods to the socialist bloc; Britain did the same a few days later, and wielded its still-considerable financial power over Argentina to force it to pass a similar measure. Yet, crucially, Britain was not able to convince its own dominions to move forward with the embargo. The governments of both Canada and Australia feared that cutting off exports to the socialists would precipitate a farmer’s revolt, and perhaps even bring the rural masses into coalition with domestic labor. Most of British financial leverage over its dominions had been whittled away by the wartime sale of securities and investments, not to mention the considerable loss of moral legitimacy Britain suffered through its use of dominion soldiers as cannon fodder in the campaigns of the western front.

Australia and Canada were two of the largest food exporters in the world, and as a consequence of their refusal to sign onto the blockade, they became some of the prime beneficiaries of rising global grain prices. So too would the Soviet Union, which would use its tremendous “food-power” as leverage in negotiations over the new order in Southeastern Europe. Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands were all immediately forced to reimplement rationing measures, even though the latter two made an only negligible contribution to the war.

The Battles of 1923 - Rising Tensions

Root’s embargo was instituted at a time of acute national anxiety. The invasion of Taiwan had turned into a spectacular debacle. The initial landings, bloody but successful, were not followed up with continued progress. Japanese attritional warfare forced the American advance to a crawl. Despite the best efforts of the Navy, they could not stop the island’s numerous defenders from being resupplied under the cover of darkness, often from Japanese-held China. A report in the Wall Street Journal indicated that there was a systemic undercounting of military deaths, leading the Secretary of War to resign. Popular concern about the war was matched by official consternation. In the state department, many worried that the “Jap War” had become a distraction from the more important European theater. The Hungarian revolution and collapse of Czech lines in Slovakia finally gave the internationalists a decisive upper-hand: the full might of the American military had to be directed at containing the Bolshevik menace.

To the shock of the world, America sent a formal offer of peace to Japan on September 24th. This was telegraphed across the entire nation: at the very least, Japanese refusal would rally public support. It was not a particularly generous offer. Japan would be forced to retreat from its bridgeheads across China and restore the status quo ante. It would have the option to purchase commercial rights in the Shandong Peninsula from the nationalist government in China. Japan would also lose the South Seas possessions it seized from Germany during the Great War, though almost all of these were already occupied by American soldiers. Perhaps the most injurious to Japanese prestige was the demand that it grant a 99-year lease on several naval bases in Taiwan to America. Taiwan was acquired back in the first Sino-Japanese war, and for the military command, losing sovereignty over any portion of it was politically unacceptable.

Negotiations nonetheless began in Honolulu on September 29th. The government of Tanaka Giichi faced economic collapse and spiraling discontent at home, and they feared that without coming to some sort of deal, there would be another eruption of civilian displeasure. Giich hoped for a settlement that would appease the Americans, end the war, and maintain an expanded Japanese Empire that would placade domestic military hardliners. To accomplish this, they would have to ice out the Chinese delegation. In exchange for generous security assurances to the Americans - including a substantial reduction in the size of the navy - they could perhaps be convinced to acknowledge an enlarged zone of Japanese influence in China stretching down from Manchuria through Shandong and Nanjing. Unfortunately, this was a grave miscalculation. Not only did American diplomats resist any move to sideline the Chinese, but they also insisted on a rapid withdrawal of Japanese from core chinese territories. After a week and a half of frustrated negotiations, the war resumed. The “easterners” were temporarily confirmed in their predictions about Japanese intransigence.

In reality, however, the Japanese political elite were bitterly divided against themselves. The civilian legislature had grown tired of the constant depredations of the military cabinet, and feared that the movement for constitutional rule which had gained steam during the Great War was now being brought to a premature end. An unknown source leaked the minutes of the Honolulu diplomacy to the press, prompting massive “peace marches” in major cities. When the military resorted to violent suppression, the Japanese Diet convened and passed an extraordinary resolution expressing its lack of confidence in the Gliichi ministry. At the crucial moment, the new industrial magnates, the Navy, and progressive sections of the old genro came out against a proposed measure to forcibly disband the Diet, sealing the fate of the Giichi government.

Yukio Ozaki, the leading figure behind the Diet’s resistance to government policy, was named the new Prime Minister by the Crown-Regent Hirohito. Ozaki assembled a cabinet of members from all the major parliamentary factions, though the most represented were the liberal elements of the Kensekai, who had been prominent in the push for manhood suffrage. Ozaki immediately re-entered into negotiations to bring an end to the war; a somewhat skeptical American government found the new foreign minister Kijūrō Shidehara to be far more amenable to their proposals. Though hardly an anti-imperialist, Ozaki knew that maintaining a large land empire in China would only provide opportunities to his enemies in the military establishment.

The final details of the peace treaty, now negotiated in San Francisco, required Japanese forces in China to retreat to the Manchurian border and to the city of Qingdao, which they would be allowed to keep in exchange for a small indemnity to China. The Qingdao-Jinan railway would revert entirely to the Chinese. Japan would reserve the right to station one hundred thousand soldiers in its Manchurian zone of influence, ostensibly to guard against Soviet incursions into the area. The Japanese possessions in the South Seas, as well as the islands of Saipan and Iwo Jima, would be ceded to the United States; Taiwan, however, would remain free of American soldiers and ships. Japan would also be obligated to maintain its Naval tonnage at a level slightly below half that of the United States, and to foreswear any alliance with other great powers. In practice, the tonnage agreement solidified Japan’s position as the preeminent power outside of the “Big Four” by confirming that it would have the world’s third-largest navy.

The Japanese “Constitutional Protection Revolution”, as it came to be called by its defenders, was predictably assailed by the military establishment. And yet it proved to be on firmer footing than many expected. To great popular acclaim, the new Ozaki ministry passed laws enshrining manhood suffrage, expanding access to education, and reforming labor law. Relations between Japan and the Soviet Union were formally established later that month, giving it a potent source of leverage in future negotiations with the west. The sharp swing back toward reformist liberalism was vindicated in December elections in which Ozaki’s new “Constitutional Reform and Protection Party” won a decisive popular mandate. The question, of course, was whether the economic rudiments were in place for Ozaki’s long-term political project, which depended upon the further integration of Japan into the slowly recovering global economy.

Peace with Japan was intended to permit a reorientation toward the west, yet in reality the logistical capacity of the United States was insufficient to save the embattled Balkan coalition. Over September and November, the Red Army surged forward into Romania, Czechia, and then, with Italian assistance, into Croatia. Revolutionary terror followed in the wake of this self-styled army of liberation. It is impossible to discern the full scope of the violence which followed in their wake: it was undoubtedly more discriminating than the ethnocidal killing of their right-wing opponents, but it is likely that over 150,000 Poles and Croat civilians lost their lives over the next few months. Many died in revenge killings that are not clearly attributable to the Red Army.

The Red Army’s victories confirmed Soviet-German hegemony in Europe. Provisional socialist governments were constructed in the devastated balkan territories, typically with the support of local social-democratic movements which had radicalized after being subjected to state persecution. A bitter debate began between Sverdlov and Luxemburg about the territorial division of the new states. This was also, at least implicitly, a debate about the future of international socialism. While Sverdlov sought to add the new states as new socialist republics to the USSR, Luxemburg and the Germans hoped for them to either become independent or - if possible - “associated” states of the DSR under a German military umbrella. Kun’s Hungary managed to successfully play off the two powers against one another and won recognition of Hungarian sovereignty over all the lands lost in the previous two years, including many regions which only had minorities of Hungarian-speakers, such as Slovakia.

The bulk of American and British expeditionary forces fled into neutral Albania to avoid capture. After being interned for two weeks, they were permitted to take ocean liners into Constantinople. It was later revealed that the Albanian Prime Minister received two mansions in Southern Connecticut from a shady American financial firm. Contrary to expectations, the Red Army did not move into Greece, Albania, or the British International Zone, which may have set off a real, as opposed to a quasi-war.

This was the first year in which this term - “Quasi-war” - assumed its modern meaning. It was used first in American policy circles, and then in several newspapers of the United States’ Eastern Seaboard. It is unclear if the German word, Scheinbarkrieg - also first dated to late 1923 - was formed in response to its American counterpart or arose independently. In any case, journalists and politicians finally found concepts adequate to the new form of warfare that was emerging between the great powers. Even if their armies frequently encountered each other in foreign battlefields, they were clearly not locked into a conventional war. Naval engagements, including blockades and submarine attacks, were studiously avoided. Significant amounts of trade were permitted to continue. The home fronts of the great power combatants were never attacked, even though by this point, German planes could easily have gone on bombing runs against Southern England from bases in the Netherlands - and vice-versa. Careful diplomatic correspondence prevented escalation, even as the armies of the great powers slaughtered each other in their quest to win influence in foreign lands and spread their ideological creed. Such a situation could only exist because each side feared the economic - and political - consequences of resuming the totalerkrieg of the great war. None of the four great powers believed they had the domestic support to launch another “total mobilization” of society. Hence a quasi-war rather than a conventional war, in which certain military measures were “off the table” and no formal declaration of war was ever made.

Of course, there was real concern that the expanding quasi-war would end up turning into and thereby recapitulating Great War. This is why the Red Army stopped short of advancing on Constantinople, despite the urging of ultra-left hardliners in both Russia and Germany. Predictably enough, they did not demobilize, but were transferred to the relatively quiescent French theater. Soldiers of the French Red Army had just recently marched into Paris after being ordered back onto the offensive; they forced Frossard to sack around half of his ministers, and place delegates from the soldier’s councils in their place. Frossard himself was more than happy to welcome several hundred thousand German and Soviet soldiers, whom he hoped would improve the flagging morale of his own army. First the Americans, and then the British as well sent dozens of divisions to bolster the white army. A furious Elihu Root, stung by the loss of the Balkans, swore to inflict a decisive defeat on the reds. France would soon become the final and largest battleground of the First Revolutionary Era.

Notes

There were a great deal of events elsewhere that I was simply not able to fit into this post. These include developments in Ireland, Spain, South America, Mexico, Laos, Indonesia, Australia, Canada, and Britain. Covering them all here would make make this just a bit too lengthy. I should (hopefully!) have dedicated posts on the following topics before 1924:

The Lumbering Titan: Britain and its Empire, 1919-1923

The Social War in Iberia and South America

Anti-Colonial Nationalism in Southeast Asia

The Red Papacy and The New Millenarianism