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Dec. 21, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:41:25
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British Aloofness and Rail Agreements 00:08:09
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
History Week continues as we focus today on World War I, better known to some as the Great War.
The war began in 1914 and brought in global powers from across the world, with the Central Powers facing off against the Allied powers, which eventually included the United States.
By the end of the war, over 20 million lives had been claimed, including more than 100,000 American troops.
The impact of the war changed the face of the world, and it's felt even today.
But the reasons behind the start of the war and even the rationale for continuing the fight are nuanced.
Later, we're going to be joined by Doug Brunt.
He is my husband.
He hosts the podcast dedicated with Doug Brunt, which is about authors, but he's also a historian, and he is neck deep in a tome he is writing that is amazing on this exact period.
So he'll join us for a bit.
But first, we start with the historian on this period, American author, professor of history at Bard College, Sean McMeekin.
Sean, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me on, Megan.
It's really great to be here.
My husband, Doug, is a huge fan of yours.
He's read your books.
He's a self-taught student of World War I and was very excited to hear that I was going to be speaking to you.
So I have to pass along his regards.
Great.
Thank you.
All right.
So let's start big picture, because I think a lot of people know a lot about World War II and maybe a little less about World War I. Describe sort of the world as we approached World War I, turn of the century into the 1900s, and like who were the top world powers at that time?
Who was waning?
Who was strong?
Well, the United States was certainly emerging as a world power, but as far as the old world, it was still, I wouldn't say second rate exactly, but for diplomats, it was not necessarily the prestige post.
That is to say, if you were a diplomat, you're ambitious, you probably wouldn't want to get posted to Washington because a lot of the action was still in Europe.
The European powers ruled over something like 85% of the surface of the globe, the great empires.
Britain's was the largest and certainly the most diverse and global.
It was often said the sun never set famously on the British Empire.
But France had a pretty enormous empire as well in both Asia and Africa.
Russia, of course, bestrode the continent of Eurasia, the entire landmass stretching across, as we might put it today, something like 11 odd time zones.
Japan was starting to emerge as a power in Asia, already occupying much of Korea, dating back to a series of wars in the 1890s and early 1900s.
The U.S. was certainly a power.
The U.S. had already begun to emerge as an empire in the Philippines and also in Cuba with interests stretching beyond her borders.
But as far as power politics, the real center of gravity was in Europe and the alliance system, which you alluded to, we had part of what made things so potentially dangerous was that you had two almost equal power blocks.
The core of the blocs were France and Russia.
They were essentially kind of hostile to Germany ever since Germany had been unified in 1871 at the center of the continent.
And then Germany relied mostly on Austria-Hungary or the Habsburg Empire to try to see off the Franco-Russian threat.
Britain was somewhat aloof, although Britain did have agreements with both France and Russia.
They were largely colonial agreements.
That is to say, they were about spheres of influence trying to respect each other's zones where core interests were held, whether in Africa or in Asia.
With France, things had gone a little bit further.
Britain had already started joint conversations regarding the possibility of naval cooperation in either the English Channel or possibly the Mediterranean in the case of a war.
But Britain liked to remain aloof.
The British, they were kind of the top dog, the hegemon.
And they tended to look down their noses just a little bit at some of the other powers.
Yeah, it seems like a lot of people had these alliances where it's like, I'll defend you if you get in trouble and you defend me.
And Great Britain was like, we're good.
That's right.
The British were a little bit aloof.
But you're right.
It was often quite cynical.
Bismarck, who had tried to keep France and Russia from teaming up against Germany until he was sacked in 1890 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who undid a lot of Bismarck's diplomatic design, he actually came up with something called the Reinsurance Treaty in 1887.
So the idea of this was that the reinsurance business being the insurance that insurance companies take out on each other.
So what the Germans tried to do was to give these kind of secret assurances that so long as, let's say, Germany didn't invade France, then Russia more or less had a free hand.
But Russia would not cooperate if France invaded Germany.
And then the same thing would take place in reverse with Austria-Hungary.
There was a lot of secret diplomacy.
And this is the kind of thing that the Americans like to rail against.
Woodrow Wilson would famously rail against it in some of his speeches and the 14 points, that is, that the powers were kind of drawing each other in to some extent at their spheres of influence.
But they had different interests.
And that's the thing.
They didn't necessarily see things the same way.
So there was a potential for conflict.
Let me ask you about, so Great Britain was, I mean, this one, they talk about now on the death of Queen Elizabeth, people talked about, you know, the British Empire and colonialism and all that.
This is the timeframe we're talking about it.
You know, like this is when they really were the British Empire and they controlled India and all these vast landmasses and they were at the very height of their power.
But their isolationism was well-founded, right?
As I understand, because they had this huge, really powerful navy, and that navy had served them very well.
And they were kind of like, we're good as long as we have our big navy.
And as we'll fast forward to in a little while, once Germany started to sort of come at them, right?
They were like, okay, hold on a second.
Now, if you're going to mess with our shores, with our waters, you're going to do anything to threaten our navy and Germany was building up its navy, it's on.
We're talking about a totally different ballgame now.
Well, that's right.
The British definitely saw the Germans as an emerging threat.
For most of the 19th century, Britain had seen Russia as a greater threat over land, the various routes to India.
There was this kind of almost fantasy that the Russians might eventually crash across the northwest frontier through Peshawar and into India.
But since the turn of the century, the Germans had been building this high seas fleet.
And Kaiser Wilhelm II, one of his many alleged blunders, again, the Germans get a lot of bad press for this, that he had been reading, apparently, the work of Admiral Mahan, the influence of sea power on history, allegedly kept it next to his bedside table and was kind of obsessed with the idea that Germany too should have a high sea fleet, just like the British did.
And there were various aspects to this where they often built these ships without necessarily that much capacity for coal storage, in part because they weren't necessarily going to go around the world.
Rather, they were going to go into the North Sea, the English Channel, to fight the British.
It was quite provocative.
The British, though, they really had seen off this threat.
I mean, the thing is, the newer research on the war, and particularly on spending, shows the British were able to outspend the Germans on the Navy, in part because the Germans had to field such a large army.
And by 1911 or 1912, the British really had seen off the German threat.
So I think some of the arguments about the Anglo-German naval race is this prime causative factor of the First World War.
And we've heard a lot about that.
There are many books about that subject.
I think they overdo it just a bit.
I think Britain was arrogant enough to see the Germans as a threat.
But I think by 1914, the threat had been largely contained, at least the threat to British naval supremacy.
All right, so let's go back.
So the war breaks out in 1914, the Great War, World War I.
And officially, we are told it is because some group called the Black Hand, some terrorist group in Serbia assassinated the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, which is basically an alliance between Austria and Hungary that we refer to as Austria-Hungary.
And Austria-Hungary got very mad.
Assassination, Gray Austro, Blank Check 00:14:47
This is the official story.
They got very angry that their archduke had been assassinated and went back to Serbia and wrote this barn burner of a letter.
Like, you will do the following things or it's war.
And as I understand it, one of everybody's favorite characters, Winston Churchill, read this over in England and was like, oh, it's on.
I mean, it's war.
I mean, clearly there's no way they're going to meet these conditions.
They want war.
War is coming.
And Germany is over there behind its friend, Austria-Hungary, like, yes, we want war too.
We got you.
We got your back, Austria-Hungary.
And the alliances went.
This is my, this is the way I talk about history, just to keep it simple.
I know you're way above me on this, but like, is that my, is my dumbed down version essentially correct?
No, there's a lot of truth in this.
I mean, you're alluding, I assume, to the blank check.
That is the Germans give this assurance to Austria-Hungary that effectively we have your back in case Russia intervenes and we're ready to back you up to the hilt.
And the blank check was certainly important.
So was the assassination and so was the Austro-Hungarian response to it.
It wasn't just a pretext, though.
If you actually look at the details, I'm not going to get into the details of what actually happened in Sarajevo, although I do discuss it in great detail in several of my books.
What's fascinating about the dynamics surrounding it is that Franz Ferdinand, you think, okay, he's an archduke.
He's the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary.
Okay, fine.
So you'd think he's not even really sovereign.
He's not a politician.
Why would it matter so much?
But in fact, he was.
He wasn't just heir to the throne.
But Franz Joseph, who had been emperor since 1848, was an octogenarian, expecting 85 days.
This is the guy who was about to take over.
He was staying alive despite his uncle.
That's right.
He was staying alive just because he didn't like his nephew.
But so Franz Ferdinand was actually running military policy.
He was basically running almost a shadow government out of the Belvedere.
And what was significant about his assassination, aside from the kind of provocation of it, was that he himself had been blocking the war party in Vienna.
Konrad von Hitzendorf, the equivalent of the more famous Moltke in Berlin, the chief of staff, effectively in charge of military planning, he had actually advocated going to war with Serbia something like 25 times in 1913 alone.
And Franz Ferdinand had blocked him every single time.
In addition to this, so wait, let me just stop you.
Let me stop you because I want to keep it nice and simple for our listeners who are not experts.
So what you're saying is, I mean, the average person would say, well, why would Serbia assassinate that guy if that's the guy who's stopping the war?
But the question is, well, did this Serbian terrorist group have an interest in stopping the war?
Certainly sounds like maybe not.
And did Serbia itself have an interest in stopping the war?
Because there's a real question about whether this terrorist group was the only one behind it or whether Serbia was actually itself behind the assassination.
Well, I don't think the terrorists were necessarily pacifists.
On the other hand, the people backing them, some of them may well have wanted the war.
If you actually look at the organizer of the Black Hand, Colonel Dmitry Dragutin Dmitrievich, his codename was Apis, a little simpler to call him Apis.
He was actually the head of Serbian military intelligence.
Now, he himself was not necessarily in goods with the prime minister of Serbia, but the hardliners definitely wanted war.
They thought they might actually win, and they were not averse to provoking Austria-Hungary.
So a lot of people overlook Serbia in 1914.
But in fact, we have very clear evidence that the Serbian government, at least some rogue elements of the Serbian government, were complicit in the plot and that the Serbian prime minister refused to renounce the plot or to warn Austria-Hungary about it.
And later on, that Russia gave effectively her own version of a kind of what we might call a blank check to Serbia.
That is to say, we will back you.
We got you.
Go ahead and reject the ultimate.
So if we zoom out on this region at the time, because I think some of our audience may be like, well, why are they fighting to begin with?
Like, why?
Why would there be these provocations?
I mean, as I understand it, you got a situation here at the beginning of the turn of the century there where they're kind of like the Ottoman Empire is weaker and Austria-Hungary is weaker.
And they're kind of looking at the same territory.
All these countries like Russia and Serbia and Germany and Austria-Hungary, they're all kind of looking at these countries in this region like, well, maybe I would like to take over some of that space, you know, that the Ottoman Empire used to encompass.
Maybe I would.
So everyone's getting like a little provocative.
And then the Serbians really poked the bear by this assassination and then it's on.
Well, I'm glad you brought up the Ottomans, Begin, because in fact, I've been trying to popularize the idea of the First World War as the War of the Ottoman Succession.
This isn't kind of homage to all those famous wars of the Austrian or Spanish or English succession dating back to early modern history.
That really is to me kind of what is centrally at issue.
That is to say, the decline of Ottoman power, particularly in Ottoman Europe.
And then by the end of the war, of course, you have the great powers squabbling over the inheritance of the Ottoman Empire with the Entente powers, Russia, France, and Britain all staking their claims.
It's not quite as simple as just to say that everyone went to war in 1914 to try to carve up the Ottoman Empire.
In fact, the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians ended up taking the side of the Ottomans, effectively to try to defend them against the predations of the other powers.
It's a little bit like what people say about slavery in the civil war.
You can't exactly say that the war broke out in 1861 specifically because of slavery, but everyone knew that it was somehow the cause of the war.
In the same way you could say that the decline of Ottoman power is somehow the cause of World War I.
The precise sequence of events was not necessarily predetermined.
Some of it was quite contingent and even accidental, like the assassination, but the clash of interest was real.
That is to say.
Yeah, the neighborhood was getting a little bit more, it was getting more complicated and people were starting to get a little bit more territorial.
And by the way, just so that nobody, so the Ottoman Empire is basically Turkey plus.
It's Turkey plus, just to put a label on it for people.
It used to be much bigger than just Turkey.
Okay, so they're looking at each other.
They're nosing around.
They're looking at the territory around them.
And then Serbia does this provocative thing or a terrorist group called the Black Hand within Serbia does this thing, assassinates the up-and-comer, the next leader of Austria-Hungary, this archduke.
And now everybody starts aligning.
And it's basically Germany, Austria-Hungary.
They're like, okay, let's go.
And the rest of Europe, as we know it, kind of went on the other side.
But there was a question about whether Great Britain was going to get involved.
America's way across the ocean.
Russia, again, is going to back up Serbia at this time, but that would change in the middle of the war.
But what are they officially fighting over?
You know, like, what's the, what are the two demands on their respective sides?
It is a bit hard to explain how a war which is sparked by an assassination in Sara Vievo seems to start with the Germans invading Belgium.
It is a little bit hard to explain, to be really honest.
A lot of that had to do with the factors in German military planning that the Germans had directly on a two-front war against Russia and France.
The interesting question about Britain, one of the what-ifs of July 1914, right before the war breaks out, is had Britain issued a warning sooner to the Germans that Britain did plan to back France and Russia, might that have stayed the hand of Germany in backing Austria-Hungary?
There is actually a key moment on July 29th, and I won't go into clinical forensic detail about it.
I'll just say that the British, His Majesty's Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Gray, who's most famous for his line about the lamps in Europe are all going out and they will not be lit again in our lifetime, which is not just metaphorical.
He was actually losing his eyesight at the time.
Sir Edward Gray was famously elliptical in the way that he would speak and interact with other diplomats.
And so it was really hard to read him.
When the Germans finally got the first slightly ambiguous warning from Britain, this is when Sir Edward Gray, again, in his elliptical way, says that, you know, if events kind of proceeded towards war on the continent, that it would not do to stand aside and wait, which implied that Britain might actually intervene.
This actually forced the German chancellor, Bethmann Holveg, at the last minute, to try to send this note to Austria-Hungary, rescinding the blank check.
It was about eight or ten hours too late because Austria-Hungary had just started shelling Belgrade across the border.
So effectively, hostilities had already broken out.
So had Gray gotten a warning across sooner, some people even will go further and say maybe the U.S. could have done this, perhaps if Theodore Roosevelt had been president instead of Woodrow Wilson.
He was kind of more of an interventionist who was probably more sympathetic to the British and French cause.
Maybe the U.S. could have played a role.
I think that's less plausible in part because the U.S. wasn't as directly engaged on the scene as Britain.
But the Germans, again, in part because of just the ineptitude and kind of lack of imagination of their own military planning, they really thought they had to secure these towns in Belgium on Mobilization Day plus 3.
And it turned out they didn't even succeed anyway.
That's what brought Britain into the war, the violation of Belgian neutrality.
Okay, wait, let me jump in.
Let me jump in.
I want to keep it simple.
So, I mean, it's one thing to have Austria-Hungary slash Germany messing with France.
It's quite another to have them messing with England and Great Britain.
And Great Britain wasn't yet in.
And Great Britain, and you're saying there's this guy, this top Navy guy who's saying maybe this isn't a good idea.
And the two countries might have done well, thanks to the invention of the telephone, to have had a conversation, Germany and Great Britain.
And as I understand it too, Sean, that Germany and Great Britain, you know, England, they had a reason to kind of trust each other or to be allies, I guess.
There was a familial relationship.
Like everybody's related to Queen Victoria or descended from her, and they should have been friends, but they were not friends.
No, you're right.
And there was a real sense of betrayal on the Germans' part.
I mean, when Bettman-Holveg, the chancellor, is finally told that Britain has sent an ultimatum, is about to go to war with Germany.
His own metaphor, he said, this is a little bit like a man who's already being attacked from two directions in a bar fight, and then some other guy comes in and hits him on the head with a bottle, you know, which is perhaps a self-serving way of describing German foreign policy in July 1914, which is foolish in many ways.
But you made a really interesting point about the telephone, because you're right, had Sir Edward Gray simply gotten on the phone, or really anyone in the cabinet, with Betman Holveg or someone else in Berlin, and simply said, you know, look, you're going too far, and you better know that we're serious and we're not messing around, maybe Betman-Holveg would have reigned in the generals.
Interestingly enough, this almost happened between Germany and Russia.
Now, there was another moment.
It was on that same night, July 29th, the night I was talking about where Gray finally got his semi-warning across to Berlin.
That same night, the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, received what he thought was actually a kind of real-time telegraphic answer to a question that he had just posed to the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II.
In fact, it wasn't true.
In fact, because it took so long to transcribe and decode everything, he was responding to another message from about 24 hours previously.
So the Tsar was completely mistaken, but he was so moved, he actually called off general mobilization.
And so it's a really fascinating what if, had they simply been able to talk to one another on the phone.
As you pointed out, they were actually related.
The German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar, the English king, they were all actually related.
Had they simply gotten together on the phone, maybe they could have.
And the curious thing is the monarchs were not really the warmongers.
In nearly every case, they were the ones who were at least trying to put the reins on just a little bit.
The Tsar is the one who kept trying to tell his generals to back down.
The Kaiser, despite his reputation for bellicosity, was actually the one who at the very last minute tried to call it off.
So it's kind of the monarch to get a bad rap, but they were actually probably less guilty than a lot of the generals and politicians were in 1940.
That is interesting.
And the monarchies... across this region would look very, very different at the end of World War I.
I mean, than they did beforehand.
They would, in many cases, be no more soon thereafter.
So one of the problems that Germany foisted upon itself was it decided to attack France, which was weak, and they understood that they could take out France very quickly, same as World War II.
Poor France.
They were like, we got France.
We're going to go and take France.
But they went through Belgium.
And this was a problem for England.
England was like, oh, no, you're not going through Belgium because even though we've been very isolationist and we're like, hey, we're Great Britain.
We don't need to cut these deals with anybody.
Belgium was strategically important to England for a whole bunch of reasons.
And there was a neutrality.
Like they weren't allowed.
They decided that they would defend Belgium.
And the Belgiums, as I understand it, really fought too.
Like they put up one hell of a fight when Germany invaded.
No, that's absolutely right.
And it's a sign of, again, the ineptitude, really, of German military planning, not understanding the strategic dimension.
If you can believe it, the original so-called Schlieffen Plan, which was actually significantly modified by Moltke the Younger, the original plan had the Germans invading the Netherlands as well.
They were actually originally going to violate both the Netherlands and Belgium.
And it was a little bit of common sense told them that perhaps we should at least keep some country neutral, maybe so we can trade in case it turns into a long war.
But it was so foolish.
The French, on the other hand, they originally had looked into the logistics because Belgium, after all, is kind of the cockpit of Europe, the Low Countries.
But the French had realized its strategic importance, that Britain had guaranteed Belgium's integrity and independence by treaty.
And so for the British, this was potentially a Casasbellia cause for war.
And so the Germans really brought it to themselves.
The only thing I would say about this plan, though, it's not that they necessarily thought that defeating France would be easy.
It's that they thought the French were a more formidable and dangerous opponent that it would take the Russians longer to mobilize.
They failed, of course.
They did not actually knock France out in six weeks as they'd expected to do.
They never actually did reach Paris.
And it was the failure of the Germans with this Schlieffen-Moltke plan to subdue France in six weeks that to some extent really turned the war into this horrific war of attrition, particularly on the Western Front.
So England didn't want Belgium invaded because if they get control of Belgium, then they're really close to England, right?
I mean, is that the issue?
Like we're going to protect them because that's our skin.
Yeah, and more broadly, the English, it's not just that they didn't want a hostile power along the English channel on the Belgian coastline, but they also didn't want one single power to dominate Europe, this kind of traditional precept of British foreign policy.
Pro-German Rasputin and Bolshevik Revolution 00:15:48
You can trace it all the way back to the wars of the Sun King or Napoleon.
The British never wanted one single power to dominate the continent because then they would be effectively under its thumb.
Okay.
So you got England, you got France, you got Serbia, you got over on the other side, and ultimately the Russians.
And then on the other side, you got Germany and Austria-Hungary.
And they're fighting and it's complex.
Now let's spend some time on Russia and then we'll spend some time on the United States because they're also big players in all of this and things change.
Things change for each country in a really profound and important way.
If you go up to Russia, as you pointed out, they decided that they would back Serbia.
So they were going to be opposed to Germany and Austria-Hungary.
But what was happening in Russia at the time was fascinating.
And, you know, my husband's told me a little bit about the Tsar and the Tsarina at the time, who at the beginning of the war were kind of wacky.
Like, she was obsessed with Ras Putin.
Her kid had hemophilia.
I'm going off of what Doug has told me.
Forgive me, this is memory, but they had a kid who had hemophilia.
And she was convinced that this guy, Ras Putin, was like this charmer who could save the line.
In any event, the Russians started to question the Tsar and Tsarina, as I understand it.
And before you know it, you've got the revolution, you've got the Bolsheviks, Lenin coming in, taking over.
That was a big game changer in World War I and what the Russians were doing.
So what was happening under the Tsar and the Tsarina the first couple of years of World War I?
Well, it's fascinating about Rasputin.
The reason he was important is just as you said, that it wasn't just any child.
It was the sole male child, the heir to the Romanov throne dating back to 1801.
Although Russia had had empresses in the past, it was no longer allowed for a female to ascend to become empress.
And so this was the only heir and he had hemophilia.
And in part because the whole job of emperor, you're supposed to be autocrat of all the Russians.
I mean, you're supposed to be in charge of everything.
And the idea that an autocrat to be could not actually heal up from minor scrapes and bruises, I suppose, just didn't really wash.
And so they never actually revealed this to the public, which is quite interesting.
Had they done so, I think the Russian people would have actually been quite sympathetic.
Instead, there were just all these vague rumors.
And the rumors started swirling around, not just about the heir, Alexis, but also about Rasputin.
And because he was so close to Alexandra, the reason this mattered politically was that Rasputin himself was actually, if not an out-and-out pacifist, he was not pro-war.
In the years up to 1914, there had been a series of wars in the Balkans involving Serbia, Russia's client.
And although Russia had not in the end gone to war, there were a lot of very strong Pan-Slavic voices that said Russia should intervene.
Rasputin had criticized them all quite bravely, effectively saying that, you know, in the end, it's the little people, you know, it's the peasants who are going to suffer and die for these silly abstractions like Pan-Slavism.
He probably would have counseled the Tsar against war had he actually been in St. Petersburg in July 1914.
He, however, had gone to visit his hometown in Siberia.
And you're not going to believe me, but he was actually stabbed by a woman who cried out, I have killed the Antichrist.
He wasn't killed.
He was actually alive, but he was in a hospital bed as the powers were mobilizing for war.
And so he was unable to exert his influence.
The other reason this mattered, his reputation was already being, if not a pacifist and vaguely anti-war, maybe pro-German.
Again, the atmosphere of the war, being vaguely anti-war means you're suspected of being kind of a German spy.
Well, the Tsarina Alexandra, or as she was known originally, Alex of Hesse, was, of course, German-born, or actually, she was born into territory, later absorbed into the German Reich.
She was actually not pro-German.
She resented Bismarck and Prussia for having absorbed her former home of Hesse into the Reich.
However, most Russians didn't know that.
They simply thought, oh, well, because she's from Germany, she must be kind of pro-German.
And so by, let's say, kind of 1915, 1916, right on the eve of what we know as the Russian Revolution, rumors are swirling around Petrograd.
There's a kind of a spy mania.
There's this anti-German mania.
Some of it's also anti-Jewish.
Oddly enough, Jews were seen as more pro-Germany and Austria-Hungary in the war, in part because Russia had a traditional reputation for anti-Semitism.
So there's anti-Semitism, there's anti-German sentiment, and a lot of it centers around the Tsarina and Rasputin.
And when the Tsar takes over personal command of the armies after Russia suffers a series of setbacks against the central powers in summer 1915, that doesn't just mean that he's going to take kind of all the blame, success or failure on the front, but it also means he's no longer in Petrograd.
And so the rumors swirl and it looks like that Tsarina and Rasputin are kind of running the government.
And there are these other really kind of almost obvious things that the conspiracy theorists settle on.
They appointed a guy called Boris Starmark, chairman of this council of ministers.
He even got has a German name, right?
And so you have a German name running the government.
And then you have allegedly Rasputin, who's supposed to be a pacifist or pro-German and the German-born empress or Tsarina.
Unfortunately, this is kind of what poisoned the political atmosphere quite fatally, I think, in Petrograd in 1916, heading into the winter of 17.
So, but in the beginning, I mean, just to just to dumb it down, so in the beginning, Russia was backing the Serbs and on the opposite side of Germany in this war.
But then something really important happened over in Russia and all that would change and really would set the course for the 20th and now 21st century and the way people were going to be living in Russia.
And that was the revolution and the Bolsheviks and the rise of Lenin.
And then these other countries looking at Lenin like, well, what's he going to do?
Because it wasn't a foregone conclusion that Lenin was going to come in and just keep doing what the Tsar and the Tsarina had been doing.
Well, right.
First of all, because Lenin was actually in Switzerland.
In fact, when we talk about the revolution of 1917, you really have to bracket it out into two.
The February Revolution, which is the one that topped the Tsar, initially seemed, if anything, at least from the perspective of France and Britain, they were quite hopeful.
Yeah, it was more democratic.
Right.
And they thought that, again, the Tsar had been surrounded by these pro-German advisors.
So they thought they were kind of cleaning out the Augustian stables and now Russia would rededicate herself to the war effort.
This is actually what the U.S. president Wilson, I assume we'll talk about that as we go, sees it the same way, right?
Now Russia is a democracy, so we're all on the same side.
And they're hoping that it's actually going to be a positive story for the war effort.
Lenin, of course, as we know, is sent back to Russia by the Germans, you know, who had, shall we say, perhaps slightly nefarious purposes.
They knew about his political program, which was effectively to turn, as he called it, the imperialist war into a civil war, basically to sabotage the war effort, promote mutinies, and take Russia out of the war.
And he didn't do it all at once.
It took him a number of months, but the Bolsheviks flood the Russian armies with propaganda.
And by the fall, opinion is starting to turn against the war.
Although the Bolsheviks, they actually did not win the elections held in Russia.
Amazingly, they held elections even after the Bolsheviks took power and the Bolsheviks got only 24% of the vote.
But in the army, they did well.
That is, they did make a decisive move to shift opinion in the army against the war.
And this really was the key part of Lenin's program, the peace platform.
That's what then allows Lenin to take Russia out of the war.
Effectively, he sues the Central Powers for Peace.
They meet at Brest-Litovsk.
The Allies refused to go because they see Lenin as a German agent, somewhat reasonably.
I mean, he had been sent to Russia by Germany.
The Germans had provided funds for his operations.
There was a lot of controversy about that.
And the Russian provisional government was never able to produce the smoking gun in court, although they actually did.
They arrested the Bolsheviks.
And for a time, Lenin was actually supposed to be arrested for treason.
Wait, but can I just ask you a quick question on that?
Let me clarify just a quick question.
I follow what you're saying, how he had been in Germany, but the Russians are on the other side at this point, right?
They're fighting against Germany.
So like, I don't, why would they be so distrustful?
Because right now they've got the Russians.
Like, I don't know.
Factor that in because I don't understand how they could be so suspicious of him when he's his country.
Yes, he came from Germany, but his country's fighting with the Allies, Allied forces.
He was actually, he came from Switzerland, but to get to Russia from Switzerland in the time when you have these massive armies mobilized on both fronts, the only really practical way for him to get there was through Germany.
So the Germans organized his trip and they paid for it and they sent Lenin to Russia.
And German diplomats were kind of told to stay quiet about it, but it was very much an operation of the German Foreign Office because the Germans wanted Lenin to go to Russia, wreak havoc with the war effort with his kind of anti-war propaganda, spreading mutinous sentiment in the armies.
I mean, literally, they would get together and have these meetings in the armies and denounce the war.
The Bolsheviks ended up printing massive amounts of anti-war propaganda.
As soon as he arrived in Petrograd, yeah, as soon as he arrived in Petrograd, I'll give you an example.
An American historian called Frank Golder was there and he immediately was told, oh, yeah, this guy Lenin has showed up and he's priesting all these kind of damnable doctrines of propaganda and peace and pro-German sentiment.
It was quite widely discussed at the time.
That is the idea that Lenin was, if not a German agent, and somehow working on behalf of...
So the Allies have got to be very unhappy about this development, right?
Because they did have Russia on their side.
And now suddenly you've got Lenin taking over with this Marxist revolution.
And he seems to be much more sympathetic to the Germans, the other side, and ultimately winds up pulling Russia out.
Right.
The Russian armies, they fall apart.
Even before Lenin takes power, they're beginning to disintegrate.
And by the winter of 1917, after the Bolsheviks take power, and it's actually November by our calendar, we usually call it the October Revolution.
After the Bolsheviks take power, they just stop fighting.
In fact, the Germans, at one point in early 1918, the Bolsheviks, Trotsky comes up with this ingenious kind of a slogan when he goes to Brest-Klitovsk.
He calls it no war, no peace.
What he means is we're not going to fight, but we're demobilizing our army.
And so it's sort of like he's telling the Germans, look, if you really want to, you can just go ahead and occupy Russia, but you're going to have to explain to your own people in the world why you're at war with a country that no longer has an army.
Now, as you can imagine, the Allies are not happy about this.
A whole front has just collapsed in the war.
And so they're desperate to get Russia back into the war by whatever means they can.
And they try a lot of different things in 1918.
None of them quite work.
The only thing that does help them in the end is kind of unintentional, is the Germans do get sucked into Russia.
They end up sending about a million troops into Russia, including into Ukraine, where they have nearly 600,000 troops occupying Russia as the war is being decided later that year on the Western Front, particularly after the arrival of U.S. troops, the so-called Doughboys.
All right.
So the Allied forces were not nearly as strong as they would become once they got England on board.
England with its navy and how strong it was.
That was a big, that was a great development for the Allied forces to get England in on this fight.
It was not a great development for them to lose Russia from the war altogether.
But then there's this big country across the sea called the United States of America, which, as you point out, is not yet the United States of America that we would be after World War II, a superpower.
And it was more complicated for us.
You know, we had fought a couple of wars with England in the past hundred years.
And, you know, they're kind of wanting us to come over and help them and join the Allied forces.
And we got the big ocean.
And what was the mood of the American people at this time?
And now, what were like 1914 to 1917, right around there?
And the war, the war just, again, went from 14 to 18.
So keep, so what was the mood of the Americans?
Well, I certainly don't think there was any great desire to get involved in the European war.
I mean, we could judge if by nothing else, the result of the 1916 election.
Woodrow Wilson, who really at that point was actually running more or less on a peace platform of keeping the U.S. out of the war against Charles Hughes.
The Republicans, oddly enough, back then were far more the party of kind of the Northeast and big business and with a lot of ties to Europe.
And they were much more pro-interventionist and pro-Britain and France than Wilson's party, the Democrats, the base of which was still kind of a lot of it was either labor or agrarian populism in the South.
And Wilson himself had not wanted to get the U.S. into the war.
In fact, Wilson gave a speech as late as January 1917, the so-called Peace Without Victory speech, trying to some extent to use the leverage the U.S. now had over France and Britain because they're buying a lot of their arms in the U.S. They're relying on Wall Street for the loans that are now paying for the war because they've effectively run out of gold.
Their gold reserves are running down.
The U.S. had leverage.
In fact, there were a lot of ways in which the U.S. might, and this was kind of what Wilson was trying to do initially with the Peace Without Victory speech, was to step in as a broker, as a mediator, to broker some type of a peace, perhaps of mutual exhaustion.
Britain and France didn't want that, though, in part because Germany was still occupying parts of Belgium and France, and Germany had also occupied part of what had been Russian Poland.
And so the Germans were at the time maybe more willing to parley than the Allies were.
But then the Germans shot themselves in the foot by unleashing what was called unrestricted submarine warfare.
Effectively, this meant after the sinking of the Lusitania and other ships with Americans on board in 1915, the Germans had made the rules of engagement for their U-boat attacks on British merchant shipping and British naval vessels much stricter.
Effectively, kind of you'd have to give prior warning to give time for women and children to get to the lifeboats, proverbially.
Now the Germans was like, you know, basically the gloves were off and they were just going to go ahead and fire because the Germans themselves were suffering by that winter.
Berlin, Vienna, all the cities of the central powers, you know, they're kind of slowly starving because of the British blockade.
And so they thought, again, this kind of almost typical German self-sabotage.
You know, rather than accepting Wilson's professed aims of negotiating a compromise peace at face value, the Germans said, you know what, we don't trust them.
We think the U.S. is going to enter the war anyway.
So we're just going to speed things along.
They provoked us.
They provoked us, both with unrestricted submarine warfare and then with the Zimmermann Telegram, which is just an astonishing.
But wait a second.
Before we get to Zimmerman Telegram, prior to them doing the unrestricted submarine warfare, which I understand, I can understand why Americans were like, no way, that's too much.
You're taking out indiscriminately civilians on boats and so on.
Prior to that, what was the lure to the Americans in getting further involved, right?
Because again, if you look at World War II, we're going to go fight Nazis.
We're going to defeat Hitler.
The Germans bomb.
I'm doing my Animal House line.
The Germans bomb Pearl Harbor.
No, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, right?
We had very clear reasons to get in.
And this war, the way we're talking about it, it's like still remains somewhat amorphous to me why it was started even to begin with, even amongst the powers over there.
Now it's expanding and now they're asking us to get in.
And I just wonder, like, were we like, wait, why are we, why are people calling us before the submarine warfare, the indiscriminate, like before that, what was the reason ostensibly for us to get in?
Well, it's much murkier than the Second World War.
Not just the origins of the war, as you're pointing out, but why the U.S. gets involved on what pretenses, for what purposes.
American Interests Pushed Toward War 00:08:51
I mean, these debates, they didn't die, of course, in 1917, 18.
I mean, they continued to roil American politics on into the 20s and 30s when, in retrospect, it had come to seem like a mistake and people couldn't quite fathom why the U.S. had gotten into the war.
Now, on the moral side, there had been a lot of criticism of the German invasion of Belgium, a lot of what was then called kind of atrocity propaganda.
Obviously, it wasn't all untrue.
A lot of atrocities were committed.
There was a famous library that burned down in Leuven.
There were these kind of sharpshooters who would periodically take out civilians.
There were obviously some genuine crimes committed in the invasion of Belgium.
But that said, the British and the French were just really good at kind of manipulating American public opinion, in part because they had long experience of doing so.
And also by 1916, 1917, there were just a lot of American interests that were increasingly aligned with Britain and France.
But again, it was not a popular upwelling of pro-war sentiment.
Rather, it was a lot of American arms manufacturers and a lot of American bankers, particularly the House of JP Morgan on Wall Street, had just gotten wrapped up in the war effort of Britain and France, in large part because with the British blockade, they couldn't even trade with Germany and the Central Powers.
So almost all that trade had been nullified and wiped out.
In fact, there used to be a critique, the kind of Charles Beard quasi-Marxist progressive critique of the war that, you know, it was all kind of the U.S. got sucked in because of Wall Street.
The real story is much more complicated than that, but there's a little bit of truth in that, in that these interests were increasingly pushing the U.S. towards war.
Wilson, somewhat to his credit, was actually resisting that.
And in fact, for a while in the winter of 1916, 17, the Federal Reserve actually intervened to try to discourage more of this kind of the war finance egging on Britain and France, because Wilson at the time was actually trying to broker a peace.
As I pointed out, though, the Germans kind of shot themselves in the foot.
So then, I mean, I guess it's still hard to convince Americans what they're fighting for.
The freedom of the seas was maybe an issue, but again, Britain's violating that too.
They're blockading Europe.
Perhaps that's less egregious than the German U-boats actually sinking vessels with civilians on board.
But it's still a little bit murky.
So in the end, part of what Wilson is able to come up with, it's not just the Zimmermann telegram, which I bet was when the Germans actually promised effectively the Reconquista of the American Southwest to Mexico if she would keep the Americans busy in case the U.S. entered the war, which is just incredibly stupid because it effectively produces the very thing that the Germans should have most feared, which was U.S. intervention once the U.S. government learned about this.
On top of this, then the February Revolution happens in Russia.
And as we were talking about this before, this gives Wilson this argument.
Well, look, Russia had been an autocracy.
Now she's a democracy.
And so the famous phrase then emerges, it's a war to make the world safe for democracy.
This at least is how Wilson sells it to Congress in April 1917.
Even that, it's a little ambiguous, though.
The U.S. declares war against Germany.
She doesn't declare war against Austria-Hungary until almost eight months later.
And the U.S. never actually did declare war on the Ottoman Empire, which by then was closely allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary.
One of the really interesting anomalies of the 14 points of Woodrow Wilson, which he announced in January 1918, is that point 12 related to the autonomy of the minority peoples of the Ottoman Empire, and particularly Armenians, Greeks, and others, a country or a power with which the United States was not at war.
In fact, by the end of 1918, the Ottomans actually tried to surrender to the United States on the basis of the 14 points, only to be told that they were not at war with the United States.
Yeah, sorry.
We have no contract with you.
I mean, it does raise the question of like you're out there fighting and you encounter a force that you haven't yet declared war on.
What do you do?
Put the arms down.
Let's go back Tu, you mentioned the Lusitania.
That's a really interesting case, a story about the Germans bombing a British ship, and it would precede that unlimited submarine warfare thing that you were talking about.
So can you just talk about how important the Lusitania was and what happened thereafter in terms of our involvement and the Germans really starting to unravel?
Well, so, I mean, the Lusitania, we certainly exaggerate its significance.
It got a lot of press at the time because there were more than 100, I believe, something like 128 Americans on board.
And because they were all almost by definition civilians and even most of the members of the belligerent nationals of the belligerent countries on board were also civilians, we almost certainly know now, even though it was a long-sensitive subject, that there were also at least some weapons on board.
But it got a lot of press.
And so it basically seemed like this kind of, again, a war crime, a crime against humanity, one of this long line of German atrocities.
However, the Germans, as I pointed out earlier, they did respond to it.
They did actually tighten their rules of engagement to try to prevent similar accidents.
There were one or two other accidents in 1915, that is involving American neutral Americans being on board, being sunk in various ships which had been shelled by the U-boats, which didn't get as much press as the Lusitania.
But again, the Germans, for a while, they did strengthen their rules of engagement because they were worried about getting the U.S. into the war.
The same thing actually is true between 1939 and Pearl Harbor.
The Germans actually were quite careful about trying not to violate some of these kind of boundaries in order to draw the Americans into the war.
It's one of the reasons why it was so astonishing how short-sighted it was when the Germans, again, switched things around in early 1917 in January when they moved towards unrestricted submarine warfare.
It also marks the moment as far as internal German politics when the chancellor Beth van Holvegg, the civilian chancellor, effectively gives way to the generals, you know, who effectively kind of take over and overrule his opposition.
And a lot of people date really the unraveling of a kind of a more genuine, broad political front behind the German war effort to January 1917.
It's not that Germany became a military dictatorship exactly, but it took on some of those characteristics, a kind of almost self-sabotaging power, you know, that just couldn't get out of its own way.
Which would wind up being very important to the way we viewed them, the way we wound up World War I and the way that World War II would ultimately start.
On the Zimmermann telegram, I understand this is 1917.
It was basically a deal by which I guess Mexico was going to get back Texas, Arizona, New Mexico if they attacked us and the Germans wanted them to side with them.
Just explain it because why was it a telegram and how was it discovered?
How did it play?
Well, it's a fascinating story.
Aside from just the stupidity of the Germans sending this, they actually sent it through a U.S. diplomatic cable.
Now, it was encrypted, so they thought hopefully the Americans wouldn't read it.
Unbeknownst to them, the British had this team of codebreakers working under the Navy.
This is kind of the World War I equivalent of the more famous Bletchley Park from World War II.
Among other things, they had actually captured a lot of German codebooks, including one used by a German secret agent in Persia or Iran and all places, which helped them to decode this.
The British, though, were then in something of a pickle because, of course, they were reading the U.S. diplomatic traffic between Berlin and Washington, and they didn't want the Americans to know that they were reading the U.S. diplomatic cables.
And so somehow, the way I understand the story, the British, after discovering it, they couldn't just alert the Americans because that would give away the fact that they were spying on the Americans, too.
And so they contrived a way to resend it through another U.S. diplomatic cable in such a way that the Americans could decode it very easily and think that they themselves had discovered it, which actually worked quite well.
And of course, it enraged American opinion.
Even so, it wasn't until really four, I guess even five weeks later that the U.S. declared war.
So even then, Wilson still had to drum up a little bit more public support and kind of troll the halls of Congress to win support for the declaration of war.
And again, even then, only on Germany, not yet on Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire.
So we get involved.
The Russians are out.
The Americans are in.
And net-net, what are the consequences of that?
I mean, what are the unintended consequences of our doing that?
I'm glad you asked that because, of course, the intended consequence was supposed to be a war to make the world safe for democracy and some type of more transparent world with collective security, perhaps League of Nations, with the powers disarming and no more secret diplomacy and all the rest of it.
Unfortunately, what actually happened was that the U.S. entered the war effectively at the same time that Russia was falling out of the war.
So in the first place, it prolonged the conflict.
First Class Arrival and Falling Russia 00:02:46
There might have been momentum in 1917 in favor of a negotiated peace.
With Russia falling out of the war, Britain and France were really desperate and they would have been much more likely to try to accept mediation.
The Germans were obviously in a much stronger position.
But frankly, Berlin, as I pointed out, was starving.
Vienna was starving.
Constantinople, then the Ottoman capital, was starving.
A lot of the Ottoman Empire was even worse shape because the British were blockading the Eastern Mediterranean too, and there had been a locust plague and they were blockading food imports.
Berkeley was absolutely miserable, biblical misery.
Unfortunately, the U.S. intervening effectively prolonged the war at least another year, if not longer.
And if you actually move into 1918 then, it takes a while for the U.S. to rev up its mobilization.
It had really not been a first class.
It was becoming a first-class naval power, but as far as land forces, it took the U.S. a long time to really mobilize and train an army and then, of course, get them over to Europe.
They were really only starting to arrive in strength in the late spring of 1918 after Germany had sort of wagered all her chips on one last offensive to try to break the back of the Western Allies, the so-called Ludendorff Offensive launched in late March 1918, which in the end, although they got pretty close to Paris, it petered out like most of the other offensives in the war.
They outrun their supply lines.
They just get exhausted.
The Allies bring up reserves.
And then the U.S. starts arriving in force over the summer.
And again, military historians continue to debate just how decisive the U.S. role.
Was it more about morale and the fact so many of them were coming?
You know, was it really the fact that the British and the French had begun to master the use of early tanks, for example, which were now being introduced to the battlefield, the creeping barrage, other innovations?
I'm sure all of this factored in, but the arrival of the U.S., you simply can't discount.
If you have roughly equally matched forces on the Western Front where the lines have barely moved in some places, meters or even a few kilometers, or in our terms, not even really a mile in most places, well less than a mile for the last three and a half to four years.
And then you have a force of ultimately nearly 4 million doughboys arriving.
It's obviously going to have a huge impact on morale.
So it does, in the end, help tip the balance in favor of the Allies on the Western Front.
But I think more significantly for the consequences of the war for world history is what happens on the Eastern Front.
Now, I mentioned before the Germans had distracted themselves.
They get sucked in almost by this kind of poisoned chalice of defeated Russia with Lenin, again, just disintegrating, deliberately forcing the Russian armies to disintegrate.
They end up having so many troops in the East that they don't really have enough to hold off the Allies in the West.
Unintentional Collapse of Russian Empire 00:12:54
However, they still have a million troops in Russia.
We shouldn't forget this.
The Bolsheviks, the first year they were in power after Lenin supposedly inaugurates the world's first proletarian dictatorship, communism, they're effectively a kind of a German satellite state.
When a few of the last remaining opposition forces to the Bolsheviks, this group called the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the Left SRs, when they try to launch an uprising against the Bolsheviks in July 1918, they do so by assassinating the German ambassador.
because they see him as the real ruler of the country.
In fact, although it's little known except by specialists, the German general running the war, Erich von Ludendorff, in September 1918, just before the Germans collapsed in the Western Front, he actually issued orders to the German army to go and topple the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, because by then the Germans had sort of had enough of Lenin and his government.
They just saw him as crazy.
So the Germans were actually about to topple and possibly overthrow the Bolsheviks right when the Germans collapsed in the Western Front.
The Germans, by their own terms with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, had forbidden the Bolsheviks from even building an army.
So they weren't even allowed to have the Red Army that they're eventually going to build.
When the Germans collapse, now they can build a Red Army.
Now they're sovereign for the first time.
Now they can actually begin to implement their policies in full, mobilize more than 3 million men under Trotsky.
That's so fascinating.
So effectively, the U.S. intervention makes the world safe for communists.
Right.
I'm following you and I'm kind of slightly horrified.
Wait, pause there in the Russian lane.
Unintentionally, mind you.
Unintentionally.
I mean, we're dealing with the fallout of that to this day, but pause there and go back to the German, just the Germans, because if we hadn't shorn up the British and the French and so on against the Germans and forced a surrender in which, well, I mean, obviously the Treaty of Versailles would leave Germany absolutely powerless, devastated, and humiliated, which would then lead in part to World War II, the rise of Hitler, and, you know, this determination to restore Mother Germany to her former glory.
Do you feel, I mean, the humiliation of Germany might not have happened.
We might have reached a more negotiated peace, you know, if the U.S. had stayed out of it, because England and the Allies would have been forced to come to the table and negotiate with Germany.
Perhaps they wouldn't have been humiliated.
Perhaps Versailles would have been more fair.
I mean, do you make the case that there might not have been a Hitler?
There might not have been a World War II had we stayed out of World War I?
I think had we stayed out of World War I, I think most of that is probably true.
We don't know exactly what the world would have looked like, but you would not have had Germany kind of lying prostrate in 1918 with Hitler famously on the bed hearing about the humiliating terms of the November armistice and railing against the November criminals.
I mean, there are a lot of different points you could look back to.
I already alluded to the idea of Wilson possibly brokering a peace before the U.S. entered the war.
But even after the U.S. entered the war, it took so long for the U.S. to get involved, the U.S. still could have helped to negotiate.
Now, I talked about Brest-Litovsk.
This is where Russia met the Central Powers to negotiate a peace on the Eastern Front.
And this is from basically about...
Just to reiterate, the Central Powers are the opposite of the Allies.
The Central Powers are the same.
Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria had then joined the War II, along with the Ottoman Empire.
And it was quite an interesting affair.
It was actually the first peace treaty or peace conference ever caught on film.
So you can actually watch some of it.
Who met with them?
Who met with the Central Powers?
The Bolsheviks.
So the Bolsheviks, and what's interesting also just socially, is that the Central Powers and the Ottomans and the Bulgarians, they're all sending these kind of old aristocratic diplomats.
And the Bolsheviks are sending these kind of bohemian, scruffy revolutionaries.
They were supposedly representing the workers' and peasants' government.
That's what they initially called it.
They realized they didn't actually have a peasant.
So at the last minute, they just pulled over on the side of the road and they kind of picked up a drunk and they said, hey, where are you from?
And he gave the name of some tiny little village and they said, you know, you'll do.
And so, you know, they bring him along.
You know, there were elements of force to it.
On the other hand, they were genuine in trying to invite the Western allies there.
I pointed out the reason they didn't go.
It's understandable.
They saw Lenin as a German agent, which certainly made a kind of sense.
But what's so fascinating about Brest-Latov is if you actually look at what the Germans did there, that is the German vision for Europe before Germany collapsed, you know, at least in part because of the U.S. intervention.
What they did was they broke Imperial Russia into a number of satellite states, many of which actually exist today.
So the three Baltic states were basically invited to declare independence.
Ukraine was invited to declare independence.
Finland became independent.
So Germany effectively was kind of creating a Europe that actually bears a pretty close resemblance to the Europe that we actually have today, which is not to say that it necessarily would have lasted.
It would have required the Germans to maintain these armies in the field.
Now, the thing is, the war, as we know, ended at least in Europe in fall of 1918.
But the other thing to remember is that no one knew at the time that it was going to end.
The German collapse came as something of a surprise to everyone.
And it happens even on the Ottoman fronts.
Everything just starts to collapse in September 1918.
And you can't ascribe all of that necessarily to the U.S. intervention.
A lot of these battles had required all kinds of complicated interplay of material forces, morale, and so on.
But the U.S. entry into the war, and particularly Wilson kind of entering the arena with the 14 points and this idea of a new and a better world, definitely played, I think, a huge role.
Again, first in extending the war, but also then in helping to ensure that the Germans would lose it.
Oh, it's like, so we won the war, but we may have caused, helped cause the Second World War.
I mean, unintentionally.
I think, yeah, absolutely.
Unintentionally, that's the case.
The U.S., and again, most of this is unintentional.
Woodrow Wilson obviously did not want Britain and France to impose these harsh peace terms on Germany.
I mean, not that he was soft necessarily, but he obviously wouldn't have agreed with all of the terms or the harsh terms they oppose on Austria-Hungary and eventually on the Ottoman Empire and on Bulgaria.
It's not just the Germans who resent all this, by the way.
I mean, if you talk to Hungarians today, they're still angry about the Treaty of Trianon.
That was their version of Versailles.
Or the Turks about the Treaty of Sèvres.
That's their own version of Versailles, which truncates the Ottoman Empire, although they eventually fought back and won back some of the territory they had lost under Mustafa Kemal.
Wilson, and what's so ironic is back in his Peace Without Victory speech in January 1917, he had argued against intervention precisely for that reason.
He wanted a peace without victory, because as he pointed out, victory would have left the defeated powers angry and resentful and anxious to refight the war.
And he wasn't wrong.
It's just, I suppose, in the end, it was partly German blundering and maybe Wilson himself not sticking to his guns, not sticking to his principles.
Man, it makes you wonder about Ukraine today, whether there could be a peace without victory there, where there's no utter humiliation for, let's say, the Russians, so that there's some face-saving so that, you know, I don't know.
This is one of the things we're debating right now.
But let's go back to Russia and how you think Russia in the 20th and 21st century would have been different if we hadn't stepped in and defeated Germany, which had its eyes on Russia, as you pointed out.
Well, it's a great question.
I do think Russia probably would have eventually recovered some of the territory she lost at Brest-Datovsky, but I think it's entirely possible that those countries that became independent briefly in 1918 and are independent today would have actually remained so.
So we're not just talking about the countries of Eastern Europe I mentioned before, but the so-called Transcaucasian Federative Republic, which sounds really complicated, but you're talking about countries like Azerbaijan and Armenia and Georgia and eventually Dagestan.
Well, Dagestan is now in Russia, but a lot of these territories had kind of confederated together to become independent.
So to some extent, again, the Russian Empire, which the Soviets later reconstituted in an even more virulent and aggressive form, might have actually ceased to exist in that form in 1918 when the Germans broke it apart.
But that point about peace without victory, it's so fascinating because, of course, you could draw entirely, diametrically opposed lessons from this.
FDR, for example, in the Second World War, drew the lesson that the mistake that the U.S. and its allies had made in 1918 was not pursuing the war all the way to the end and getting unconditional surrender and marching all the way to Berlin and crushing Germany utterly.
Whereas obviously a lot of Americans disagreed and they thought, in fact, we shouldn't have fought at all along some of the lines that we're talking about now that our intervention didn't actually produce a positive outcome.
And obviously, you could make some of these arguments about Russia and Ukraine today.
The problem is, of course, that if you do want unconditional surrender and you want, let's say, I guess in this case, that would mean Russia withdrawing entirely from the borders of Ukraine as of 2014.
That would require Armageddon.
But what would have happened with, you know, the Bolsheviks took over, you had Lenin, you had Stalin coming up.
And I know you just wrote a book about Stalin.
You know, he was brutal, by the way.
God, good God, Stalin was, I mean, truly the face of evil.
That guy was a deeply disturbed, evil man.
But so what would have happened, do you think, with Lenin, with Stalin, with communism, you know, post-World War I, if we hadn't gotten involved, if there had been a negotiated settlement earlier?
Well, the thing about the Bolsheviks is they didn't expect to last in power very long.
One of my earliest research projects, I actually went to Switzerland.
It's kind of curious because we've all heard about the banking secrecy laws.
I discovered, in fact, most of those laws weren't on the books till the 1930s.
And when the Bolsheviks tried to launder money there in 1918, the Swiss didn't let them.
They actually kicked them out.
The reason they were laundering money there was because they weren't expecting to last in Russia.
They were not a popular group, right?
Most people were looking at the Bolsheviks like, ew, no, we don't want anything to do with them.
They did have, again, they had some support in critical areas of the army.
They did have some support in Moscow and Tyregra.
But in the country at large, more than 75% of the people had voted against them.
In fact, I mean, if not for the peace platform, if they had just been open about their economic policies, you know, which were frankly pretty extreme, probably less than 10% of the public would have voted for them.
And they knew this.
That's why they deposed the Constituent Assembly.
That is, this body, which was elected in November 1917, was actually the largest participation to date, even larger than any U.S. election.
So like 44 million Russians voted.
And again, more than 75% of them voted against the Bolsheviks.
The verdict of which, as one commentator put it, kind of stuck like a bone in the throat.
So what did they do?
Of course, they deposed the parliament violently.
I mean, they arrested some of the deputies.
They actually shot and killed about eight of them.
They just shut it down.
So they made it quite clear, you know, that they had essentially no democratic mandate and they didn't really intend to have one.
They ruled effectively by force.
You know, it took them a while to really secure and then reconquer all the other elements of the empire.
But it was partly because of the collapse of Germany that we were talking about.
They were able to do so.
They were also fortunate in their enemies.
Even after the Germans collapsed, while the Allies got involved on the periphery of Russia's civil war, they never got involved very directly.
They never really threw their support to the opponents of the Bolsheviks, the ones we normally call the whites.
It's a bit of a misnomer.
White basically meant counter-revolutionary.
That's what the Reds called them.
They didn't call themselves whites.
So the Allies didn't really intervene very decisively in Russia's civil war.
The Bolsheviks, some of it was astute diplomacy, some of it was luck, some of it was good fortune.
But effectively, it was a series of accidents, the largest of which was, again, that the U.S. intervention in the war destroyed the power of Imperial Germany.
And Imperial Germany had been both the sponsor and effectively almost the mandatory power overseeing the Bolshevik dictatorship.
The Germans could have toppled the Bolsheviks at any point in 1918 had they simply chosen to do so.
They wanted the Bolsheviks there because they thought they were weakening Russia, that they thought they were going to weaken Russia's power for the long term.
And curiously enough, the Allies didn't completely disagree.
That's part of the reason why Britain and France and the United States, and also Japan, which briefly intervened, did not intervene more decisively and did not really back the whites because they also kind of thought, look, we don't know if we really want the Russian Empire back.
Unfortunately, what they didn't realize was that the Bolsheviks looked weak at the time.
Heroes, Villains, and Senate Questions 00:15:23
But once they had begun to reconquer the old Russian Empire and they could absorb its population base and its resources, they were just about the most ruthless rulers that had ever existed on planet Earth.
That's the worst.
So they were able to leverage this power in the end and create an even more menacing and aggressive power than the Russian Empire had ever been.
All right.
So we talked a bit about the Treaty of Versailles and the end of World War I and the position, as you put it, Germany in a prostrate position.
Exactly right.
Can you just expand on the League of Nations, which would ultimately become the United Nations?
There are a lot of people in our country now who have mixed feelings about that group.
Certainly the Republicans aren't big fans of the UN and the sort of globalist approach to, well, foreign policy and other things.
And they think they're rather feckless when it comes to things like human rights, though they claim to be these moral arbiters of us all and so on.
So, I mean, that was a Wilson thing at the end of World War I. Can you talk about it?
Well, sure.
I mean, it was not his original idea.
He glommed onto this idea originally proposed by some kind of British quasi-pacifist intellectuals.
But then he kind of made it his idea at Versailles.
He started backing it more and more strongly.
The idea that rather than this alliance system with the powers constantly arming, instead you would have this League of Nations and some type of collective security arrangement.
They didn't have a security council like the UN would later have.
So in some ways, it wasn't entirely practical.
But the idea was supposed to be that the member states, that they would kind of guarantee their territorial integrity and there would be some type of a collective will on the part of the great powers to enforce the settlement and to adjudicate disputes and so on.
The great irony, of course, is that Wilson ended up forfeiting a lot of his other objectives in order to back the League of Nations at Versailles.
And then as we know, the League of Nations, along with Versailles, they end up going down to defeat in the U.S. Senate, which fails to ratify the treaty.
And by then, Wilson, I mean, he also, I think some of the mistakes he made, simply going across to Paris and Versailles.
He was the first U.S. president to visit Europe in that official capacity.
And he exhausted himself.
And he may have even forfeited some of his leverage.
You know, had he stayed behind, maybe he could have just kind of ruled on disputed points using his vast leverage almost because of the mystery of distance.
Instead, he started just squabbling along with everyone else.
And he wasn't particularly good at it.
He often got manipulated.
A great example of this is when the British tell him that Italy is making a claim on Turkey, what is now Antalya, the southern coast of Turkey, and their only claim is that it used to belong to the Roman Empire.
And because Wilson believes in self-determination and there aren't a lot of Italians there, the Brits tell him, oh, but there are Greeks living there, and so we should have Greece invade Turkey.
And Wilson says, okay, and this actually leads Greece to invade Turkey in 1919.
And there's a brutal war fought for three years between Greece and Turkey, what is now Anatolia.
So he kind of gets, he gets, he gets really just rolled by everyone.
He doesn't really quite understand the nature of geopolitics.
His principles of self-determination, they're very difficult to apply to the map of Europe in practice because the peoples are all mixed together.
And in the end, he kind of largely just gives up and allows the more experienced diplomats to negotiate.
But so the U.S., to some extent, backs the idea of the League of Nations and then doesn't even join it.
So effectively, that just kind of rendered it superfluous and impotent from the get-go.
So, I mean, how would this How would this wind up playing out?
Like if Wilson hadn't done this, if that hadn't been one of the terms, do you think we'd have a United Nations today?
Do you think we'd have any of that?
That's a really good question.
If you look at the Republican opposition to Wilson in the Senate in 1919 and 1920, that is, as they were debating the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, there were some amendments proposed.
Henry Cabot Lodge in particular had this vision of a slightly more practical and less grandiose idea, effectively that the U.S. would simply have treaties with some of its allied powers, perhaps a little bit like the Security Council, but not officially so.
That the League of Nations was not necessarily practical, or as it was to be created, then at the very least, Congress needed to retain its authority over the deployment of troops.
That is to say, that the League of Nations would not have the ability to override the U.S. Congress.
It is quite interesting that those debates really did, I think, redound on down through the 20th century.
You know, Congress, after the declaration of war on Japan and Germany in December 1941, although Germany actually declared war first on the United States then, after those declarations, Congress has not declared war again, so far as I know.
Congress has effectively abdicated its own power, the war powers enumerated in the Constitution.
And I think to some extent, again, even though Wilson failed to get the U.S. to enter the League of Nations, he already injected out the idea that some type of supernatural body might in the end be able to, you know, as you're pointing out, this kind of globalist idea, that is, that in the end, they can make the decisions that will be binding on the United States, a little bit like, let's say, the European Union does today, or perhaps NATO does in other contexts.
I think had the U.S. ratified the League of Nations in 1919, then we probably would have ended up with something like the United Nations.
But in the end, I mean, this is, I suppose, both the promise and the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson is he did have a lot of big and grand ideas, but in the end, they all failed.
Some of it was because, again, he had a stroke.
I mean, he came back from Paris and Versailles, and he actually traveled back and forth once or twice while he was there.
He's utterly exhausted and broken, and he kind of had a stroke out in the Hustings as he was trying to promote the treaty.
And in the end, he was on a hospital bed as the Senate was debating it, largely invalid and effectively incapacitated, at least according to some accounts, though he wouldn't allow himself to be declared incompetent.
And so in the end, you also had a very ineffective, if not impotent, U.S. president.
Not for the last time either in the 20th century.
There's some interesting comparisons made to, let's say, Nixon during Watergate, that you had a U.S. president effectively unable to even exercise his own constitutional authority.
Well, let me know.
Eventually, maybe.
Yeah.
When you look at World War I, who are the heroes?
You look at World War II and it seems kind of clear who the heroes were and who the villains were.
You look at World War I, who are the heroes?
Well, it's really hard to say.
I sometimes ask my students which countries they think won this or that conflict.
Great example is Vietnam.
And my usual answer is who won the Vietnam War, Thailand, because Thailand didn't fight in it.
And Thailand ended up doing really well economically because everyone would go there for R ⁇ R and to buy supplies and this sort of thing.
The countries that stayed out of World War I did really well for themselves.
Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, they all did fine, even if Spain had some difficulties in the 20s and the 30s.
Now, as far as which country, again, you have maybe like the moral side who's a hero.
It's really hard to say which countries did well for themselves.
You could say, well, Serbia in the end of the war was given this miniature empire we call Yugoslavia.
Some emergent nation states like Poland, which hadn't existed before, arrive on the map, Czechoslovakia.
You got a few countries in the Middle East emerging out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.
But as far as heroes...
It's really difficult to say.
Again, the Allies obviously tried to make themselves out to be the protagonists in the story, standing up against German aggression, putting forward this idea of German war guilt.
But it was really hard to convince people.
The Bolsheviks obviously tried to make a claim in the same way Wilson had tried to make the war about principles.
The Bolsheviks also denounced secret diplomacy, and Trotsky embarrassed the Allies by publishing their secret treaties regarding things like the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire between France, Britain, and Russia.
And that did embarrass the Allies.
But again, it's hard to make the Bolsheviks out to be heroes.
No.
They did it for their own reasons, I suppose.
You could say some of the principled anti-war activists, many of whom went to jail opposing the war, maybe in retrospect, should be treated with more respect than they were treated at the time.
And I think in the end, you might say, if you're looking at the United States, perhaps you could say there was some good sense of those Americans who were wary of getting drawn into this conflict, which didn't actually turn out well.
You know, where in most wars, they tend to get denounced.
And in fact, a lot of them were actually arrested.
We forget that the Woodrow Wilson administration put through the Alien and Sedition Acts, and they actually arrested a lot of political prisoners.
Perhaps we should give them a little bit of belated respect for raising questions about the U.S. intervention in the war.
So fascinating.
You've written so much on World War I and World War II too, as well.
So you know about the respective roles and so on.
I mean, I think, well, do you agree with me that we have a more clear and heroic role in World War II, that the United States would clearly emerge as a hero of that conflict?
People like Winston Churchill would emerge as having great respect and people believe that he saved the future of the Western world, of the free world, that he had a major hand in it in any event.
I never really stopped to think about how clear the morality and the lines around it were drawn in World War II versus the First War.
I never really, I've seen the t-shirts and the sort of the back-to-back world champion memes, and I like it.
It makes me feel pro-America.
And if you start drilling down a little deeper, it gets more complicated.
Well, it's clearer, I would say, comparatively speaking, the Second World War.
We obviously have a very clear villain in Hitler.
And even to some extent, although he was on our side, Stalin is something of a villain.
It's hard to make Roosevelt and Churchill out to be villains, certainly.
They have a much clearer case for heroism and leadership in the war.
But some of what I actually do in Stalin's war is to make the story a little bit more complicated.
And even to some extent, again, to revisit some of the critiques made at the time of things like the Lend-Lease Act, which really did help to draw the U.S. into the war even before the U.S. was ready, when a lot of the U.S. public was still quite wary of intervention.
And even some of the arguments, I know it's a kind of an explosive subject these days.
The America First Movement, who were usually just dismissed as kind of fascist or Nazi sympathizers, Charles Lindbergh for anti-Semitism and all this.
We shouldn't forget it was actually a very broad movement.
And even if in the end they did largely dissolve themselves after Pearl Harbor and after most of the country got behind the war effort, some of the questions that they raised were not without merit.
That is to say, about the consequences of the U.S. intervention.
On the positive side, yes, in the end, Nazi Germany was defeated utterly.
So was Imperial Japan.
But perhaps in the negative side of the ledger, Stalin massively expanded his empire in Eurasia.
There were a lot of unintended consequences of U.S. intervention.
And another point that those critics made at the time was that once the U.S. would enter the war, the U.S. itself would change.
The U.S. government, and particularly the executive branch of the U.S. government, would assume massive new powers.
Civil rights and civil liberties would be suspended.
And to some extent, we're still kind of living in the legacy of both of the world wars.
There are some laws that actually date all the way back to 1917.
Some of the president's emergency powers date all the way back to 1917.
That's fascinating.
For example, the executive branch was meant to be very small.
And slowly but surely, especially over the course of the 20th century, we expanded it to a place where I think a lot of us are having real questions about whether we're comfortable with its size now.
It was never meant to be this big, but fascinating to look at it through the eyes of the world wars and how it happened then.
And again, unintended consequences.
Of course, yes, we liberated Europe.
We got Hitler.
Who would argue that you shouldn't have stopped him?
However, let's get real about the other consequences of our intervention and the still lingering effects it's had on the United States.
It's amazing to think about.
And you know what?
I mean, it's very timely because again, back to the fact that right now we're in this kind of proxy war with Russia.
And there's a lot of saber rattling from Vladimir Putin right now that may turn really problematic for us very soon.
And we're going to have big decisions to make.
And the country's divided right now on just how interventionalist we should be over there, just how appropriate our past interventions in Ukraine have been, what role, if any, we had in setting up this conflict, right?
I mean, there are a lot of layers to this.
And right now in the country, there's sort of a shut up if you're not completely pro-Ukrainian and money and arms and anti-Putin.
No one here is pro-Putin.
But it's more complex because these wars, as you've outlined so well, have real consequences and they can last centuries.
They absolutely can.
There's even new discussion of the Lend-Lease Act as one of the many ways in which the U.S. might get involved without getting directly involved, that is on the side of Ukraine, where once again, again, the critics are, just as you point out, they're all being kind of tarred and feathered to some extent and public as Putin apologists.
But the questions they're raising, they're real ones, not just about the consequences for Ukraine and possibly prolonging the war.
I mean, we talked about that with the U.S. intervention in 1917 and 1918, almost certainly prolonging the First World War, along with the agony for so many of the people swept up in it.
So you have that angle to it, but you also have, of course, the long-term economic consequences.
And we barely scratched the surface of those, but the Great Depression, for example, cannot really be understood without the legacy of the First World War and the way that it simply destroyed so many of the webs of international trade and finance.
And right now what we're seeing in Ukraine, of course, is economic devastation, not just in Ukraine, but across Europe.
So I do think it's important to raise these questions, to study the lessons of history, not because they tell us exactly what to do, but rather because I think they help to add context and enrich our discussions of these vital questions of national security and foreign policy.
I've been reading a book on Churchill, and he's a good figure through which to learn a lot about the 20th century and the wars because he appears in both, right?
He was a young, he was head of the Navy in World War I over in Great Britain, and then, of course, would wind up being the prime minister.
But, you know, such a towering figure to take you through these massive conflicts.
And he was very bellicose, both in his language and in his actual approach to these situations.
You've studied it all.
Now, listen, I want people to understand.
You've got eight award-winning books.
The most recent one is Stalin's War, A New History of World War II, published last year.
What's your best book on World War I, if people want to read about all of this in more detail?
Well, I have done a number of them.
I would say in the origins of the war, the book that I would recommend is July 1914, Countdown to War.
I did a book on the Ottoman fronts in the Middle East called The Ottoman Endgame.
And the more recent study of the Russian Revolution, which, despite its title, which makes it sound like it's just about a political revolution, is actually at root about the First World War and its consequences.
And so I would recommend really that depending on Raiders' interests, they would choose one of those.
Oh, it's great stuff.
Stalin's War is a great choice for the Second World War as well.
Spencer Clavin is one of my favorite commentators.
King George, Lenin, and Allied Thinking 00:16:29
He's only 31 years old, but he's brilliant and has read everything.
And he's the son of Andrew Clavin.
He's an expert in the classics.
And he's just written a new book.
And it talks about how if you study the classics and you read Plato, you read Socrates, you read all these great thinkers that came before, there are a lot of answers in there for modern day problems.
I would submit that your hard look at world history and these wars has the same conclusion.
You can help, you can, as you point out, the exact answer may not be in there, but the tools to come to a smart opinion on today's problems, those are in there.
And so that's why it's so helpful reading your stuff and talking to you.
Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise with us.
Thanks for having me on, Megan.
It was really great fun.
Great pleasure to be here.
For me too.
All the best to you.
Hope I get to be a fly on the wall in one of those classes one of these days.
I hope so.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, coming up, my pal and husband, and father of my children, Doug Brunt, comes on to continue the conversation.
You won't want to miss that.
My next guest is Doug Brunt.
He is author of best-selling books.
He is the host of Dedicated with Doug Brunt, where he interviews top authors.
It's fascinating.
It's doing really well.
And he is one self-taught expert on World War I, in which a period in which he has found himself immersed for years now as he works on a nonfiction book that is coming out soon.
Can't reveal much more than that, although there's a couple of teasers in this segment.
So the reason I wanted you to come on is because you've become your own World War I expert, World War II too, but also World War I.
And this line of what happened with the Russians is very interesting to me.
And I think it does relate very much to what's going on today.
And so let's go back to the Tsar and Tsarina and just set the scene for us because you and I recently saw an episode of The Crown in which that whole situation was featured.
And the Tsar and the Tsarina were in Russia.
They wanted help from England.
England gave them back of the hand.
Things went downhill from there.
So put it in perspective for us what went down and why it's important.
It's important because that chaos of World War I and the internal chaos in Russia in those period, that period of years, 1916, 17, is the whole reason that we got Lenin and Stalin and communism in the 20th century at all.
At the outside of the war, nobody wanted Lenin or the Bolsheviks.
He was basically arguing for a violent workers' revolution.
And he envisioned that as a global thing.
He wanted a Bolshevik uprising for each nation.
And so in the war around 1917, Lenin has already been in exile.
And in 1917, there are two revolutions, only eight months apart.
In February, there's the initial revolution in which the Tsar is overthrown.
In early March, he abdicates, first in favor of his son, who's just a boy, a 12-year-old boy with hemophilia.
And then he decides, you know what, if I leave and he takes over, he'll never survive it.
So then he advocates in favor of his younger brother.
And the younger brother's like, I don't want anything to do with this.
And so he says no.
So basically, this provisional government is in charge.
And they are still in favor of staying in the war against the Germans, which the Allies are thinking, that's great.
We need this Eastern Front to occupy Germany.
And the government looks more democratic.
So also great.
And Germany is thinking, well, we got to get Russia out of the war.
And they know that Lenin is over in Switzerland.
And Lenin was campaigning basically on three things, saying, I'll give you peace, land, and bread.
The first thing he wants to do upon taking power is pull Russia out of the war.
And so Germany, this, I think Sean mentioned this, there's a train that they put Lenin on in Switzerland.
And it's Lenin and about 20 other of his revolutionary friends.
And the train drops him off in Russia.
And this is in April of 17.
By October, you have the second revolution, so eight months after the first one, in which basically Lenin takes over.
The Bolsheviks take over.
And as Sean mentioned, they had only minority support.
About 20% of the people were voting for a Bolshevik takeover.
There were three other socialists, there are three total socialist factions.
There were the Mensheviks, who had more support than the Bolsheviks, and the socialist revolutionaries.
But the Bolsheviks were the most extreme and the most violent.
The Mensheviks were thinking, well, maybe we can do this in sort of a legal way.
We'll have trade unions and things like that.
And the Bolsheviks were far more brutal in their tactics and started gaining more popular support.
Even Trotsky was initially a Menshevik and he came over to be one of the top lieutenants of Lenin by 1917.
And so the Tsar at this point is a prisoner.
And initially, after he abdicated back in March, he was offered amnesty by Great Britain.
And he, you know, he's cousins with King George V of Great Britain.
He writes him a letter saying, you know, this is where we need to go.
And that initial provisional government was thinking exile might be the way, but he's imprisoned at this time.
But King George V is Queen Elizabeth's grandpa, right?
That's right.
Yeah.
So then there's King George V, then the VI, who was the Colin Firth and the King's speech, and then Elizabeth.
So it's Elizabeth's grandfather.
And, you know, everyone's worried about this sort of Bolshevik anti-monarchy sentiment that's really a global thing.
And so he has a conversation with his ministers, and they're a little skittish.
You know, if the Tsar comes over here, that could lead to popular unrest.
And as our favorite line from Braveheart, that could be my head in a basket.
So King George V is like, let's not.
So they withdraw their invitation for him to live in exile back in Great Britain in April.
So in March, he's invited.
In April, the invitation's pulled and he's stuck in Russia.
That was an important invitation to seize in the moment.
He needed to get out of there, but that was the crazy thing.
All of the industrialists, all the capitalists in Russia were thinking, we're good.
This Lenin guy is a flash in the pan.
He's crazy.
He's not going to have popular support.
He already doesn't have popular support and it's not going to grow.
They'll get rid of this guy because he's also fighting the Japanese in the East.
He's fighting the Czech Legion, the Poles.
He's fighting the Mensheviks, the socialist republics.
And there's the White Army, which is loyal to the Tsar, which is still a very powerful army.
So Lenin's fighting on like six different fronts at this point.
And he is, however, gaining more control.
So the Tsar at this point is a prisoner.
And Lenin is worried that he's sort of a rallying point for the White Army that's loyal to the Tsar.
And by July of 1918, he and his family are executed in a really gruesome way, you know, bullets and bayonets, the Tsar and his whole family, wife and kids.
And Lenin's off to the races.
And the relationship, as you described it, between Lenin and Stalin, you know, it's like Stalin, he was looking at Lenin.
Lenin was looking at Stalin.
And, you know, when you talk about these two, you talk about Stalin as possibly one of the worst people who ever walked the face of the earth.
And Lenin saw it.
And like he knew, it wasn't like Lenin was all that great, but Stalin was uniquely evil.
So talk about that and sort of what happened between the two of them.
Stalin is one of the worst figures of the 20th century.
I think there's some stat on who has responsible for the most deaths in the 20th century.
And Hitler's up there at around six or seven million.
Mao is number one.
Stalin was like 20, 25, and Mao is like 40 million people they're responsible for killing in the 20th century.
It's just insane.
Stalin's about eight years younger than Lenin and was a real disciple from afar.
He was born in Georgia in southern Russia, spent a lot of time around the Caspian Sea and the oil regions in Azerbaijan of southern Russia.
And he was sort of a thug for Lenin down there raising money for the Bolshevik cause.
So he was basically a gangster and he would have extortion rackets going on.
He was a bank robber.
It was almost like the Wells Fargo train in the wild west of America that would be hijacked.
He staged huge bank robberies, robbing wagons full of payroll cash, and then he'd send it up to Lenin to support the Bolshevik cause.
And he became one of Lenin's top lieutenants and military advisors and leaders.
And then after, so there's the red terror from, you know, in the years immediately after the Great War, when the Bolsheviks finally secure power and this bloody Russian civil war ends.
And in 1922, Lenin has his first stroke, and he's a little bit incapacitated from that, but he's still this heroic figure to the Russian people.
And then in 1924, he has his third and final stroke in which he dies.
Only some people believe that he didn't die of a stroke.
He may have been poisoned by Stalin because in the weeks prior to Lenin finally dying of this alleged stroke, he wrote a letter to the Soviet, basically the political body beneath him, saying that it cannot be Stalin who succeeds me.
He's a madman.
It should be somebody else.
And most people thought it'd be Trotsky or one of the others or about four or five guys who were in that level down.
Stalin was one of those five, but most people thought it would be Trotsky.
But as soon as Lenin dies, Trotsky, it happens when Trotsky's away, suspiciously.
And by the time Trotsky gets back, Stalin has already solidified all of his alliances and threatened those who were not initially with him.
So when Trotsky gets back, it's kind of a done deal.
And Stalin is in charge.
He promotes the cult of personality around Lenin.
And, you know, he knows Lenin as this very popular figure who's a very charismatic speaker.
He was only about five foot five, but he was a huge personality.
And so Stalin is saying all great things about Lenin.
They renamed St. Petersburg Leningrad and promote this cult because Stalin's saying, well, if people are behind Lenin, I'm going to say I'm behind Lenin and that will all continue.
But by the 30s, he changes his tune and he selectively releases some things from Soviet archives that show all the bad things that Lenin did in those years immediately after World War I and sort of dinged Lenin up a little bit and his legacy because now Stalin is firmly in charge and is more concerned about building the cult of Stalin, which he does and names the city Stalingrad and sort of fibs a little bit about the heroic things that he did in those early years too.
We only know this because after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s, many of these countries opened up their own archives.
We just recently, in the last 20 years, learned a lot more about the early years of Stalin.
So was there an opportunity for us to avoid Lenin and avoid Stalin and avoid the Bolsheviks in a way that could have changed the entire trajectory of the 20th century and 21st?
Absolutely.
Even in the absence of Western intervention, in the years 1819, Stalin and Lenin and the Bolshevik movement almost collapsed.
They almost lost to the White Army and to other forces.
In February or March of 1919, Great Britain pulled out its final troops.
They only had a small force there, and the Americans got out too.
They were interested in some of the oil regions and other resources around Russia.
But Churchill, among others, was in Great Britain saying, We have got to deal with this problem right now.
It's amazing.
I mean, Churchill said this after World War I and World War II.
But he said, This Lenin guy and these Bolsheviks are going to be a real problem.
We need 100,000 troops.
We can go in there and route this thing and establish a more democratic form of government.
But after the four and a half years of slaughter of the Great War, nobody had the appetite to do that in America or Great Britain.
And they also took that non-interventionist slant of, okay, if this is who the Russian people have selected to be in charge, they should do it.
Because not only is it going to be difficult to send troops in there and fight this war, but then we're going to have to fight the peace.
We're going to have to stick around and help these people establish a more democratic form of government.
And nobody wanted to get involved in that.
And so Lenin was able to thread the needle because during the war, you know, the Germans hated this guy too.
It was only that he wanted to pull Russia out of the war that they sent him in there.
They weren't looking for some workers' revolution either.
Monarchs and democratic forms of government wanted nothing to do with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but they had to deal with the primary threat.
And for the central powers and the Allied powers, that was each other.
And so the Germans thinking, even if he pulls out of the war, you know, he's got all these resources too.
And the Allies were thinking, well, if we go get rid of Lenin, you know, this is back during the war years, if we go fight Lenin and get rid of him, try to get rid of him, we could push him into the arms of the Germans.
And even if he doesn't declare war against us, he has all these guns, oil, wheat, copper that he could offer up to the German war machine.
So everyone kind of treated him with kid gloves, even though he was viewed and identified as a threat early on.
No one could really take him on.
So he was able to kind of thread the needle through those post-war years.
Let me ask you about Churchill because he's this crazy figure who played a big role in World War I and not just World War II.
We all know him from World War II, but he was very present during World War I and sort of trying to become the military leader that we would later know him as.
Not with total success, as you just alluded to.
But talk about Churchill during World War I.
He was put into the post of first Lord of the Admiralty in 1911.
And he was young then.
He was like a 37-year-old guy.
And that's the top post in the British Navy, which, you know, for the Brits, the Navy is a bigger deal than the Army.
So he was a huge figure in the pre-war military apparatus.
And he brought in as his first sea lord Jackie Fisher, who was this legendary admiral.
And he was much older.
He was more like 70.
So these two old guys, these two guys got along with this one old admiral and the young Churchill.
And he was very aware of the German threat early on, more so than most.
And so he was working very hard to update the military and the technology of the ships.
He was sort of a technophile.
So he because you've told me before, at this point, England had the navies, and that was extremely important for them to have a strong navy.
But most of the other powers didn't really have a strong navy.
But then Germany was like, we're going to have one.
We want one.
And Churchill saw it coming.
He did.
And that set off this naval arms race.
So Britain controlled the seas at that point.
Ever since defeating Napoleon in the early 1800s, they were the dominant sea power.
And they controlled the sea lanes for merchant shipping and for military purposes as well.
And Germany, they were expanding, but they were really a continental power.
They had the largest and most powerful army and land-based force.
But in order to grow, Kaiser Wilhelm II thought we need an international system of colonies and an empire in the way that Britain does so that we can bring natural resources in from the corners of the globe and fuel our industrial growth.
But the only way to have an international empire and colonies around the world is to have strong navies that we can protect it, protect our sea lanes.
So he starts building a navy, and then Britain starts getting very nervous about the strength of the German Navy.
And that set off this big arms race between the two.
Okay, so back to Churchill.
So he's there.
He's working on building up, well, preserving the strength of the British Navy, staving off anybody else from getting too strong.
And in World War I, he's got his partnership with this older guy, but it doesn't actually work out very well.
Right.
So he's got this idea.
By the way, he's done a ton of work to update the military and the naval ships from coal to oil.
And he secures access to oil from the Middle East, which was sort of the founding of British Petroleum and things like that.
But he has this idea, and this ended up being his downfall.
But he had an idea to end the war quickly because Russia had basically been tapped off.
They have their only warm water port in the Black Sea.
That's how they get wheat and natural resources out and how they get guns and war supplies in.
But in order to get to the Black Sea, you have to go through this long strait called the Dardanelles that goes right by Constantinople and Turkey.
And it's all controlled by the Ottoman Empire, which is with Germany.
So they control access to Russia's warm water port.
Churchill has this thought that we can send a big force, not only naval ships, but ground troops as well.
Ancient Fortifications and Ottoman Disaster 00:02:24
And it's not that well protected at the moment.
We can swarm in there.
We can take the strait and we can open up Russia and then basically hit Germany right in the belly from beneath and win the war quickly.
And they have this whole back and forth.
Lord Kitchener is the head of the army and he's the guy like in America, it's Uncle Sam wants you.
Well, in Great Britain, it was a poster of Lord Kitchener basically doing the same thing that, you know, we want you in the military.
So they're back and forth on how to do this.
They end up sort of like splitting the baby and they send only some naval ships and no ground troops.
So when they get there, what years they have, this is in 15, 1915.
And so the ships go and they're fighting.
It's like this ancient strait, you know, that's like where the Persians and the Greeks used to fight.
So there's ancient fortifications up there and there are some Turkish troops there, but they're very poorly supplied.
They've mined the strait a little bit, but the British ships are making some progress.
And as we found out later, the Turks were almost out of bullets.
There were very few troops, almost no ammunition.
The English had basically gotten through, but it stalled a little bit.
And they thought, well, maybe we better stop.
We've just lost a couple of battleships to some sea mines.
Let's wait and see what goes on.
And maybe we'll get another ship up here.
So they stall it out.
And in that time, more Turks come down and the Germans think this could be a disaster.
And they send troops down there and resupply it.
By the time the Brits get some more ships and some land troops in there, now it's on.
Like it's a full-on battle.
Both sides are supplied and the whole thing bogs down and it turns into this very bloody mess that is prolonged.
Lots of people die.
It was made into a movie with Mel Gibson sort of portraying what an ugly, grisly disaster it was.
And Churchill's blamed for the whole thing.
But had they gone in with his initial plan with ground troops, with more ships, they would have easily taken this.
You know, his history has sort of gone back to resurrect Churchill's reputation and the disaster, which ended up getting him fired from the Admiralty.
And he spent a couple decades sort of out to pasture until he came back to power closer to World War II.
You know, I mean, not to reduce it to, you know, life lessons and a self-help therapy session, but it is a good reminder that you can have massive failure.
Like I prevented World, I failed to prevent World War I.
And you can still come back.
I mean, think about Churchill.
I know we both admire him so much, but the opportunities that he had, that he sees, that he tried for, and that he did have some failure achieving, only to never give up, to never give up.
Books, Weird Era, and Churchill's Failures 00:03:00
That's right.
I mean, if you have the talent, if you have the goods, you can always come back, which he clearly does.
And he, you know, it took him some time, but he rose to the top again.
So what do you think?
Is World War I more interesting than World War II or the other way around?
It's funny.
I used to think World War II was more interesting.
And I watch all those, as you know, the videos in color and this sort of weird mysticism that the Nazis got.
The only thing on our television, if it has to do with the world wars, Doug is into it.
And if you sprinkle an alien in there, so much the better.
But they were there.
What do you mean?
They're absolutely responsible for almost everything.
Pyramids, Nazis, all of it.
But I was sprinkling necessary.
They were everywhere.
They're there.
Yeah.
Everywhere you look, right under the surface.
I find World War I more interesting, actually.
It's more nuanced.
It's this incredible, crazy battle.
And then at the end of it, we were all like, why did we even do that?
It seemed like these petty things between monarchs and shifting alliances.
And it's just way more complex and nuanced than World War II, which is more of this good and evil story.
So in Doug's other life, because you may know him as a podcast host now, host of Dedicated with Doug Brunt, in which he goes in depth with the best and best known authors of our time.
Go ahead and download it now and follow and subscribe and you'll be glad you did.
But in his other life, he writes books and he's working on a nonfiction piece right now, which is amazing.
It's got this big mystery in it, but it's based on, it's historical, but it's like unearths a big mystery and I think solves it.
And that is one of the reasons, that is really the main reasons why you became such an expert.
How many books do you think you read in preparation for this book?
He doesn't want to talk about the name.
He's like keeping it under wraps.
It'll come out soon.
Soon.
But how many books do you think?
Okay.
Oh my gosh, 100.
And that's not counting the small articles and weird journals and things from the era.
So as you mentioned, the book that I wrote, 90% of it takes place in the 25 years leading up to World War I, 1890 to 1915 is really the time for this book.
And it's a great era of, it's like I was actually talking to an archivist in Germany to get some things out.
I was like, you know, I need something.
I'm looking for something on this guy.
And he's like, this is the golden age of letter writing.
Everybody wrote, unlike today where things are happening in tweets and texts of six or nine words or something, in that era, everybody wrote letters.
And the whole period is documented.
It's amazing.
It's really fun to read through it.
But I do worry, I was talking to Anna Quinlan about this in our episode coming up.
We're not really documenting our time.
You know, what are the archives going to have in them?
You know, 100 years from now when people look back on the year 2022, nobody's writing letters to anybody.
Covefe.
That's about it.
They're going to try to figure it out.
Well, I'm excited.
Love Letters from the Great War 00:00:49
I'm excited for the book.
That's going to be huge.
It's amazing.
And the podcast, everybody should go and download now because Doug has this wealth of expertise.
This is not what he brings to you on the podcast, occasionally, occasionally, but he makes it about the other person, which is what is so enjoyable about the show.
You get to know big, big authors who you know and love and sometimes big, big stars like David DuCofny.
And, well, I love the one with Penn Teller.
That was, that was fascinating.
And, you know, Paulina Porotskova, we could go on.
So in any event, check it out.
Dedicated with Doug Brunt, and we'll bring you more on the book at a later date when Doug's ready to talk about it.
Thanks, honey.
Thank you, honey.
Tomorrow, we conclude History Week with a deep dive on one of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson.
You're going to love that one.
Talk to you then.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
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