Alternate history: Kerensky edition

Kerensky could have repudiated the deals made by the czarist empire and announced his willingness to accept the Reichstag formula of peace without annexations or indemnities. Perhaps the German High Command would have ignored the offer and continued fighting (as it did when the Bolsheviks offered the same terms after the October Revolution at the end of 1917).

We can’t be certain, naturally, but that’s the way I’d bet. On the other hand …

We cannot tell whether a positive response from Kerensky to the Reichstag peace initiative would have achieved anything. But it is hard to imagine an outcome worse than the one that actually took place.

… although in general it’s always possible to imagine worse outcomes, in particular the Kerensky government could hardly have made things worse by an acceptance of the formula of the Reichstag resolution, even if the German High Command had disregarded it.

What if Kerensky had been a moderate SR, more like Chernov, instead of being a Trudovik? As a political figure, Kerensky was politically closer to a Breshkovskaya or Avksentiev, except more determined to work within the system. Kerensky’s determination to continue the war was not a personal quirk, it was national policy continued. If Kerensky’s personal politics had been more like those of Left SRs like Maria Spiridonova or Mark Natanson, much less Maximalist or Narodnik Communist, he wouldn’t have been acceptable as successor to Lvov. Kerensky was the acceptable choice precisely because of his commitment to continuity in all areas save formal democracy.

His peak power was as the article says, the July days, but that power was achieved by launching perhaps the first anti-Communist crusade. A key element in that campaign was the attempt to “arrest” Lenin (and Zinoviev, at that time one of his most prominent coworkers,) for treason. The treason of course was exemplified in their journey across Germany and the receipt of German funds. It is quite difficult to understand how the same politician whose power was favored by attacks on complicity with the Germans could plausibly be hoped to move his country forward, in a direction he did not want, by undercutting his own anti-German bandwagon. It’s not as if Kerensky didn’t want Russia to win Constantinople etc.

The unexpected thing Kerensky did do was stand up to Kornilov, the general whose August coup was to make him the Russian equivalent of Hindenburg/Ludendorff. There are those of course who believe Kerensky was encouraging Kornilov, in hopes of using his threats to continue the pro-war, pro-property stance of the provisional government. But in the end, whether true or not, Kerensky relented in his political assault on the Bolsheviks. Their help, along with the Mensheviks’ (especially in the Vikzhel, the Russian railway union federation,) broke Kornilov. But it also turned the Bolsheviks on the path to winning the majority in the Petersburg Soviet.

By the way, saying that the end of the civil war enable the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin is a little bit like saying the the Montagnard dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety led to the ascendancy of Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s sort of correct but it leaves an awful lot out. It is fairly reasonable to date Stalin’s dictatorship from Bukharin’s dismissal from the Politburo, which was in 1929. Even if you see Bukharin as something of a self-deluded pawn rather than a true power, Stalin didn’t defeat the United Opposition until 1926. But then, the earlier Stalin’s ascent to power the more mysterious the collectivization campaign, or the later Yezhovshchina. Why does the tyrant wait so long to do his tyrant thing?

In 1965 Kerensky spoke to the modern European history class at my NYC school, and I talked to him a couple of times while doing a term paper on the provisional government. ISTR jejune insights about “unleashed forces” overtaking early leaders, and comparisons with the French Revolution that were an unholy mashup of Burke and Crane Brinton.

I do recall the annexations of Brest-Litovsk making me doubt that the spirit of the Reichstag resolution had reached very far or very deep. Sure, much of the Russian->Red army had melted away in the interval, but you don’t grab that much out of spur-of-the-moment opportunism.

This is more than a bit reductionist. “By its end, the Bolshevik government, launched as a workers’ democracy, was effectively a dictatorship, enabling the ascendancy of a previously obscure Bolshevik, Joseph Stalin, who would become one of the great tyrants of history.”

Kerensky’s continuation of the war did not entail the rise of Stalin. Instead it was another war–the anti-Communist intervention that led to the death of thousands of the most committed revolutionaries on the battlefield and thus an opening for self-seeking individuals who formed Stalin’s bureaucratic social base. Economic ruin caused by the civil war imposed both War Communism and then the NEP on Russia, neither of which were anticipated in Bolshevik thinking before October 1917. The rest, as they say, is history.

My question: What if Kerensky had responded positively to the resolution of the German Reichstag, calling for peace without annexations or indemnities?

I am always uncomfortable with Alternate Histories, as I’m never sure what they are trying to accomplish, but in that particular case, I don’t see that things change much on either side. In early 1917, the German military command was convinced that the Entente would soon seek peace and that it would emerge victorious on both fronts. Beside, as you note, we know that they would have refused a peace offer without annexation, since they refused one several months later with the US already at war. As for the Provisional Government of Russia, I’m not sure it really had that much actual power, so a civil war between right-wing reactionaries and the Bolsheviks likely seems probable even if an early peace is signed.

Now if you stipulate by fiat that peace occurs without annexation on the Eastern front, then the Central powers have a good chance of scoring a decisive win on the Western Front in summer 1917 (and they almost certainly do so on the Italian front). Perhaps the War ends in middle 1917 with a decisive continental victory of Germany, so rather than suffering a humiliating defeat leading to revanchism, German militarism would have achieved its greatest historical success to date. The subsequent rise of Italian Fascism does not make me confident that victory would have prevented the establishment of a fascist super-power on the European continent.

I’ll grant you that it’s hard to imagine something as bad as Nazism and Stalinism stemming out of this scenario, but then again, are the actual turn of events any less surprising?

Interesting counterfactual, but I don’t think the German High Command (OKW) would have offered Kerensky anything better than the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 or the Treaty of Bucharest in May 1918. The peacemaking by both the Central Powers and the Entente tended towards the vindictive. If OWK agreed to an armistice and peace treaty, the Russians would have had to surrender Poland at a minimum plus probably hand over large stocks of food and cattle to feed the Central Powers. Feeding Germans while Russians were starving on the home front would have been a major domestic political fiasco for Kerensky.

Kerensky wasn’t really in the position to take the offer of the Reichstag seriously. It was pretty clear that they were not the ones making policy in 1917. The Bolsheviks were saddled with the exact same problems. They tried to play out all the same strategies with an even weaker hand. The only thing that saved them was the collapse of Germany in November 1918.

Adam Tooze touches on this briefly in The Deluge at 77-79: the Russians

could have seized on the Reichstag peace resolution, and challenged the rest of the Entente to respond. Despite his distaste both for the Germans and the Russian socialists, could Wilson really have refused such an appeal? [My marginal note: “yep.”] What would have been the impact in Britain and France? In the House of Commons, the Independent Labour Party was demanding a positive response to the Reichstag note. … But in Russia neither the Provisional Government nor the majority in the Soviets could bring themselves to take a first step toward Germany. To usher in the new revolutionary era by suing for a separate peace would be a fundamental betrayal. Russian democracy could have no future in isolation.

That’s from an interesting chapter on the failure of Russian democracy, which Tooze blames (like everything else bad) on Wilson’s failure to be a political genius.

As for speculating about the OHL vs the Reichstag resolution, it’s a mistake to consider Germany 1917 as a monolithic entity under complete control of the army. A couple months earlier hundreds of thousands of workers in Berlin and other regions walked out in the April strikes, and not six months later, in January 1918, over a million workers went on strike including in munitions factories. If Entente governments responded positively to the Reichstag resolution, and OHL would have brushed this off, it’s not really clear how this would have impacted internal affairs within Germany.

An examination of the handy ‘Divergence Chronology’ at uchronia.net reveals several published works based on the idea of events taking a different turn in 1917; half a dozen deal with the possible effects of Lenin’s absence from Russian events, for one reason or another, but I can only find two that focus on what Kerensky might have done: ‘If I Had Been … Alexander Kerensky in 1917’, by Harold Shukman, published in If I Had Been …: Ten Historical Fantasies, edited by Harold Snowman, imagines Kerensky working with Kornilov, and ‘Checkmate In Six Moves’, by Olga Ley, published in Beyond Time, edited by Sandra Ley, imagines Kerensky having Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin sent back to Switzerland (and, I suppose, we loop back to the theme of the effects of Lenin’s absence). I can’t find on the list any speculations about the possibility of a negotiated peace in 1917, although some entries have no or scanty descriptions.

It’s also possible, of course, that a liberal revolution in Russia (that survived the inevitable civil war) would have simply been too weak to either modernise the country or resist German revanchism. In which case, the suffering would have been more like China 1911-49.

btw – the claim that Stalin killed more people than Hitler does not count the victims of World War II. War was central to the Nazi project, and every one of the 25 million Soviet citizens, 6 million Poles, one million Yugoslavs and others who died did so as a direct result of Hitler’s policies.

“… I don’t think the German High Command (OKW) would have offered Kerensky anything better than the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 …”

Quite correct, since the OKW did not exist until 1938.

“Brest-Litovsk told the world – notably the Americans – just what sort of people Germany’s rulers were”

Between actual misdeeds & propaganda, no one was under any misapprehensions by 1918.

The Hitler years cast an aura of reasonableness back over Wilhelmine Germany which is quite unjustified by its actual policies or institutions. In much the same way, Trump makes George W Bush look coherent, and Bush made Reagan look competent. I am not sure what could cast a rosy glow over Trump, but I do not want to find out.