Spoiler alert: Armenian genocide! Not mentioned as such, but there's some assumption that American readers are just going to know already. And he just sort of says "Welp, we know how things had gone for the Armenians in Turkey" end of story. I thought that was very weird.
The Czech legion is such a bizarre story. I keep meaning to find a book on the subject.
1: The bit about the exchange between the Georgians and the Armenians was pretty sad. Georgians to Armenians: "We know you guys are f*cked. Nothing we can do about it without getting dragged down with you. Sorry. Sucks to be you."
The Czech legion is such a bizarre story. I keep meaning to find a book on the subject.
I have tried, but there are surprisingly few good ones in print, at least in English. There's a few journalistic/memoir ones from the 1920s and a couple of expanded-PhD-thesis ones more recently, and at least one Osprey (of course). But it's in desperate need of a Peter Hopkirk type to write a good approachable English-language history.
It would also make a terrific board game. ARMOURED TRAIN!
Germany's army tried attacking in France on a large scale in the spring, snílek these otevřena eventuálně tok pláče.
DAMN YOU CZECH AUTOCORRECT.
Actually, given the last para, LW should write a book about the Legion. I'd buy it.
I'd never even heard of the Czech thing up until about two years ago. I suspect it was a story largely untold to Western audiences for decades as a result of the Cold War.
Lenin wound up spending a whole bunch of the requisitioned gold in Germany, hoping to start a revolution there, rather than to relieve appalling famine in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Not wishing to whitewash Lenin, but I'm unclear about the timeline. Did the Bolsheviks at this point have sufficient communications with Ukraine to do much about the famine if they had wanted to?
The Czech thing is something else. Pity there isn't a good book.
7 last: the whole Russian Civil war is full of weirdness no-one's ever heard of. Latvian nationalists as the backbone of the Red Army, literal hordes of Cossacks wandering around, an anarchist army in Ukraine, armored trains, this lunatic I'd never heard of until he turned up in a Stross novel. Very strange times
The nice thing about the Cossacks is there are non-metaphorical hordes.
It would also make a terrific board game. ARMOURED TRAIN!
Each turn, move LENIN'S ARMORED TRAIN (die-cast plastic) one tile eastwards. Can you solidify the provisional government's legitimacy in time?
And yeah, the Czech Legion is a 100% What The Fuck. It's like some bullshit they'd have on Game of Thrones that you'd spend all Monday harping on how nonsensical it is.
The link in 9 reminds me that I should read Setting the East Ablaze. The other 2 Peter Hopkirk books were great, but I never got around to that one.
So, I wrote this last night on my phone. This phrase:
"snílek these otevřena eventuálně tok pláče" was actually "while these other events took place"
I understand that a book can't cover everything; also that Tooze is writing a book with a particular focus (my paraphrase: US as hub of an emerging global system). But the selective coverage is sometimes a valuable new-to-me perspective but IMO at others badly off-key.
To expand on a topic covered in ch 8, Masaryk and the CS legion. Tooze writes that Masaryk waited for Wilson's approval before sending orders to the CS legion, I think implying that Wilson was a unitary decider. Surprising for a couple of reasons.
Masaryk's memoir goes into a lot of detail about the financial support that the government in exile and fledgling Czech state received from Czechoslovaks living in the US; these remittances were the majority revenue source for that government. While not as explicit as Morgan buying UK bonds, this was another politically relevant money flow that could have been stopped if it mattered to the US gov't. Tooze doesn't mention either German-americans or their opponents in the US, either as voters or as funders, at all as a political force though. Maybe that's correct, I don't know-- but seeing this missing thread makes me wonder especially about Ireland.
Masaryk and Hašek also give similar descriptions of the shambolic amateurs who were the Bolshevik power structure outside the big cities. Hašek's book about this is called Behind the Lines: Bugulma and Other Stories; comedy not reportage, but both descriptions make clear that Bolsheviks capable of doing much were in the minority.
One of the capable ones was Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin appointed in 1917. The Red Terror wasn't some spontaneous thing that just happened as an expression of popular discontent that someone had shot Lenin, to be described in the passive voice. It was a wave of third-world bloodshed loosely directed by thugs, haphazardly targeted. By the way, I don't think that much is known about who shot Lenin or why-- the woman killed by the Bolsheviks for the crime was nearly blind.
I'm digressing-- Tooze is occasionally interesting on Trotsky, but he's definitely soft on Lenin-- the man had an idealistic vision for a communist future, but was not really clean from the German financing of his trip to Finland station onward, and was definitely much much less good at managing his difficult responsibilities than you'd think from reading his often insightful speeches.
I don't understand how Ukraine was undergoing famine while also holding grain reserves that Austria needed for their famine. Was it your classic "the wealthy sit on grain reserves while the poor starve"?
OP: I was struck by Germany's resort to coercion in getting Ukrainian grain. It meant their sphere in the East could never stick, but they just had to eat. Tooze made a thing about the (liberal civilian) Germans' effort to make a liberal order in the East, but it was never really going to work. The thing about being liberal is you need a budget, and Germany wasn't rich enough to be liberal in 1918. (But maybe America was.) Later Tooze will get into Britain's effort to run the new world order and failing because they just couldn't afford it. I don't remember if he gets into it, but France also tried to build a mutual security system with alliances in Eastern Europe surrounding Germany, and they weren't strong eough to make it work.
13: you definitely should read "Setting the East Ablaze". There are more than two other Hopkirk books, I think: "On Secret Service East of Constantinople", "The Great Game", "Foreign Devils on the Silk Road", "The Quest for Kim" and "Trespassers on the Roof of the World" are all great stuff.
The armed forces museum in Prague has some interesting exhibits on the Legion.
14: Ireland turns up as a big thing later, precisely because of Irish-Americans. Tooze also mentions German-Americans somewhere, but not a big thing IIRC. WWI was definitely major in settling America as an Anglophone country.
17: "The Great Game" and "Like Hidden Fire" are the 2 Hopkirk books that I've read.
16: Right. The whole idea of dealing with Ukraine as anything but occupied territory evaporated remarkably quickly. I was struck by that as well.
17: I don't know about Ukraine. In WWII the Germans were similarly relying on it as granary, and that proved sheer fantasy: there just wasn't enough to feed the farmers, the Ukrainian cities, and the German Army (never mind Germany itself). The result of course was famine and vicious requisitions.
18: I was surprised to learn--not sure if it was this chapter or an earlier one--that the Bolsheviks were using the Easter Rising as an example of what should be going on in Russia.
And as for how German-Americans were affected by WWI, it was an amazing change here in PA. There used to be quite a few German or Pennsylvania Dutch newspapers that were run by people who weren't in the Amish/Mennonite religious orbit; by the end of the war they were all moribund and the "fancy folk" (as opposed to the "plain folk") quickly assimilated.
I'm pretty sure that in WWII the Germans never intended to feed the Ukrainian cities.
Cecil Parrott's biography of Hasek has a lot of good detail about the CS legion-- hard to find though, University library only probably.
The wikipedia page is pretty good-- looks like it's missing a little from the CZ version, I can try to edit the english. In particular, there wasn't much command structure, and the closest to a leader, Gajda, was apparently pretty unpredictable. I think that the uncertain and slow state of communications and the kinds of guys receiveing the orders are something to keep in mind when reading that Masaryk told them "don't take sides." Even so, they managed to steal a passel of gold and use it to buy food and weapons to keep their armored train moving across hostile territory.
Yes, not directly on the Baltic, thanks, but when there's no ice blocking passage as in spring 1918, ships heading to and from there will head to Scandinavian and Baltic ports. But you're right, not controlled by the Latvians.
Each turn, move LENIN'S ARMORED TRAIN (die-cast plastic) one tile eastwards.
No, this distinction is the key to understanding the early 20th century: Lenin's train was SEALED; Trotsky's train was ARMOURED. How Stalin got around at this period has been airbrushed out of history.
22: True. Point is, Ukraine proved a chimera even then, and German strategy in 1918 didn't allow for starving Ukrainians.
15. The famine came later. It turned out that collectivizing the farms and exterminating landowners did not increase crop yield.
24. My timeline is a little fuzzy, but wasn't he robbing banks right around then? I'd guess he moved around about the way Avon Barksdale did.
Even as a concept, an armored train is stupid, right? It's on tracks. If anybody can get close enough to you that your train needs armor to protect you from them, they can just blow up the rails. If they can't blow up the rails, they can't blow up your train.
Didn't the Soviet Union export Ukrainian grain to other regions during the 1930s famine?
24: Ack, yes. Well, fine, we'll give Stalin a STEEL train--I mean, yes, that's redundant but hey, the guy's clearly got a theme--and we can make Trains of the Bolsheviks into the 2017 Spiel des Jahres.
Lenin's train was SEALED; Trotsky's train was ARMOURED. How Stalin got around at this period has been airbrushed out of history.
Did they have ekranoplans back then?
27. I think Stalin's bank robbing days were behind him by then. The Tiflis expropriation was in 1907.
30: Call that guy on Murray to sponsor us.
The guy asking for change in front of the Giant Eagle?
29. Yes, but we are not up to the 1930s yet. In 1918 they were hard put to it to export anything to anywhere, even if they wanted to.
28: I know right!? Yet they existed and where a dominant weapon. Maybe because blowing railway lines in Siberia is something of a suicide pact.
35: Well, see what you can get from him, but I was thinking of the game store.
I bought a chess set there. It has two queens.
While we're on global politics, AB's cousin in Vienna just posted that the Greens defeated the hard right Freedom Party. I see no confirmation at NYT.
28: it's actually fairly difficult to blow up rails in an irrevocable sort of way. A bit of work and you've relaid the ballast, replaced the sleepers and rails, and you're good to go. Plus the opposition might want to leave the rails unharmed.
While we're on global politics, AB's cousin in Vienna just posted that the Greens defeated the hard right Freedom Party. I see no confirmation at NYT.
44: Sherman heated the rails and wrapped them around trees, right?
Also, yay Austria. I was meaning to ask Trapnel about that.
Oh wait, now I see it in the Times. Well that's good news.
If I read the one map correctly, the state of my wife's relatives was the only one outside Vienna that went Green, so that lets me feel better about being there.
Joining threads together, her uncle's town, which is like a 10 minute bike ride from Bregenz (pop. 28k), is so provincial that A. people thought that her Bregenz-born aunt was some big city outsider when they got married, and B. people thought the uncle was putting on airs for driving a Volvo wagon.
40. Up to a point, Lord Copper. Van der Bellen is a former member of the Green Party, but was running as an independent. He did beat the Freedom Party candidate, by 0.6% nationally.
47: You know you're an Austrian redneck when...
28: The real danger for the trans Siberian railway wasn't people blowing up the tracks, it was the pre-historic monsters from outer space brought on board by British scientists played by Christopher Lee.
Back on OP: something lw didn't cover was Wilson's attitude to intervention in Russia. Basically he flip-flops for months (with the whole world riding on his decisions), eventually decides to intervene because Lenin is tilting to Germany, but decides on a half-assed action that will antagonize the Soviets but not be big enough to actually do anything. And then announces publicly that American and Japanese forces will deploy in Siberia without consulting Britain or Japan. Worse than shitty ideology and arrogance, that is stunningly incompetent statecraft.
Wilson emerges from this book as a stunningly incompetent statesman. This is something I have learned from it. I thought he had a lot of bad luck, but it seems he had no judgment whatsoever.
Anybody here read Bulgakov's "The White Guard?" Pretty interesting in terms of what revolution/social collapse feels like for a middle-class family. Also makes it all the more bizarre that Uncle Joe kept him alive for so long.
Ukraine's fortunes were stunningly complicated and not excellently documented - an introduction to White Guard quotes Bulgakov as writing in 1923 "By the accounts of the Kievans, they've had eighteen coups... I can report with certainty that there have been fourteen, ten of which I personally experienced."
An early part of the novel has a government apparatchik signing his name in an abbreviated form to avoid making a decision on spelling it Ukrainian- or Russian-style, to cover his ass under later governments.
Just in time for my London meetup this blog is turning into a perfect confluence between the Unfoggetariat of the Mineshaft and the schlachterbummleriat of Blood and Treasure. The Czech Legion, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, be still my bloody beating heart.
James Palmer who used to do guest posts at B&T wrote a pretty damn good but short book on von Ungern-Sternberg. Favorite anecdote from the book, Ungern-Sternberg while infiltrating a town his men have under siege comes across a sleeping sentry, rather than slit his throat, run him through with a shashka or simply pass him by and leave him unmolested he wakes the poor fellow and berates him for falling asleep on guard duty.
This presumably in German, while in Mongolia.
A photo at Wiki indicates that the train wasn't armored for protection from small arms fire so much as having been made into tanks on rails.
Speaking of treasure, where's Darb GnoLed? He was all big talk in the organizing thread.
54: I feel like behind every decision you can imagine him having childhood flashbacks of Appomattox Courthouse while repeating to himself "never again."
Then on the other side you've got Babel with all his "then we killed some Poles, then we killed some anarchists..." stuff.
The Red Terror wasn't some spontaneous thing that just happened as an expression of popular discontent that someone had shot Lenin, to be described in the passive voice.
On this, and OP on Tooze's approach: I don't think he's soft-pedalling anyone's atrocities, he just has a huge amount of stuff to cover and has to pick his battles. I mean he has this:
By early August, Lenin was calling for 'merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests and White guards' and the establishment of a more permanent apparatus of 'concentration camps' to deal with 'unreliable elements'.And one of the themes of the book is the escalation of violence over the period. Earlier, this:
Finland became the stage for the first of a series of savage counter-revolutionary campaigns that were to open a new chapter in twentieth-century political violence.And, it's a shitty thing to say, but the Armenian genocide really is small potatoes compared to everything else going on.
At a friendly game of Agricola over the weekend, I was losing and called the winner a kulak. No one appreciated that.
That's a dangerous thing to say. Before you know it it'll be reeducation all round.
I considered writing in "Exterminate the kulaks" in response to the recent university survey asking for goals for the next 5 year plan. It's probably best that I didn't.
I have lots of relatives that are probably kulaks by a reasonable cross-time/culture translation.
There's an ointment to take care of that.
66: As I was constantly on the verge of starving, I tried to encourage the more successful players to engage in activities that wouldn't hurt them but would let me get a few extra food (due to various cards I had); I said I was more than happy to include them in the town soviet. My reasoning is that this socialist practice would increase the table's total score relative to other Agricola villages. Alas, this wasn't appreciated, hence my slur. In retrospect, it might have been seen as anti-Semitic, but it was probably just lack of interest in roleplaying.
huge amount of stuff to cover and has to pick his battles
Agreed. I'm enjoying the book overall, and I like much of the detail Tooze's perspective emphasizes. I'm just describing what it is about the book that seems strange to me as I read it. I really liked the description of UK finances, JP Morgan, US treasury, and Wilson's whiplash decisions about finance, among other points.
what it is about the book that seems strange to me as I read it
Interesting. I do think Tooze cares about all those people dying. But I think he can fairly take for granted the reader knows about them already.
57: when's that meetup again? Can we get a FPP?
June 3, 4 or 5. Pick one (or more! I think I'll try to catch a film at BFI or another set house one of those evenings but I'm free for any 2 of the 3.
5 June is the only one that works for me... how does that work for the rest of the London mob?
5th of June should be OK for me, too. 4th is a definite no. 3rd a possible.
Hašek's book about this is called Behind the Lines: Bugulma and Other Stories; comedy not reportage, but both descriptions make clear that Bolsheviks capable of doing much were in the minority.
I recently read this, in French translation. It's pretty great in a tragicomic way - a moment when someone left world history lying around for any clown to have a go, and most of them did.
Capable Bolsheviks were mensheviks.
5 June works for me. Are you thinking early afternoon or evening?
Late afternoon or evening - I'm out of town until about 4 or 5 pm.
Late afternoon or evening, my event ends at 6 put there will probably be no need for me to stay there that long, I can probably cut out around 4 or 5. I'll be near Hyde Park.
84 well there you go.
Email below, just replace the word underscore with an _
Any particular bit of Hyde Park? It's pretty large.
It's only 624 acres. I have relatives with larger farms. Kulaks, but nice people.
Meetup on the Serpentine! Barry, you need to hire a rowing boat and run up the Unfogged ensign. The rest of us will board pedalos and pedal in your direction.
"Mutumbo expects that every man will do his duty".
My hotel is north of it and my venue is just south of it. I intend to cross the Serpentine while doing my best Peter Falk impersonation.
88. I hadn't realised, until I started reading around this thing, that kulak was a term of abuse from the get go. I had thought it was merely descriptive, but apparently it meant "tight fisted" and was coined in the aftermath of the Stolypin reforms, while Stalin was still robbing banks in Georgia.
I didn't realize that either. I thought it just meant a farmer with a good chunk of land but not enough land to be an aristocrat.
I didn't realize that Clemenceau fought a bloodless duel when he was 51. That's pretty intense.
Here's Norman Davies on the strategic question of fighting in Ukraine.
"It is pointless to speak of 'long lines of communications' or Tukhachevsky's 'contempt for space'. These are not explanations. The lines of communication between Russia and Poland cannot be shortened. The vast space of the Borders is a well-known fact, which every general must first accept then ignore; a strategist who treated the expanse of the Borders with due respect would never fight at all."
That's from White Eagle, Red Star - his book on the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, and thus a little bit later than this discussion. But the one flows into the other, and the observation about the distances involved is what's important.
95: Something I think A.J.P. Taylor said: whenever Russia lost (WWI, Crimea, Russo-Japanese War) it wasn't by being invaded, it was by fighting on the border, so the Russians were at the wrong end of those lines of communication.
96: Don't forget the Mongols! Or the Varangians!
The existence of 'Russia' for either of those is disputable. In fact the Varangians claim to have invented the place, right?
Yeah, that's why she married a drifter from Sweden. Slut.