It may seem that a counterfactual essay on early twentieth-century Russia that concentrates on the international context should focus on the key event of the era, namely the outbreak of the First World War. After all, endless exam questions have asked the question, 'No War, no Revolution?' This might seem all the more pressing because the current trend in historiography of the First World War's causes is to stress contingency and suggest that the war could well have been avoided. I agree up to a point. If Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated then war would probably not have occurred in 1914. The initial decision for war was made in Vienna. Facing geopolitical decline and growing nationalist challenges, Austria's rulers reacted with a combination of desperation, arrogance and miscalculation. One can find parallels with other imperial elites in similar circumstances. In many ways the Suez crisis was the '1914 moment' for the British and French empires. The key difference between 1914 and 1956 was that, whereas Washington vetoed London's adventure, Berlin not merely allowed but encouraged Vienna to strike. Once the Germans had given their 'blank cheque' to Austria on 22-23 June 1914 then war was the probable outcome.
The deeper background to the war was the struggle of empires and nationalisms, which in various forms was one of the key elements in twentieth-century history. In that sense the First World War was by no means the bolt from the blue depicted in much of the literature. At the very moment in 1914 when this struggle was spilling over into war in south-eastern Europe, it was also paralysing British government and threatening civil war in Ireland. The First World War erupted as a result of the huge and very difficult issues raised by the decline and possible fall of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. The only way that this process could have been managed peacefully was through cooperation between Russia and Germany. The so-called 'pro-Germans' in the Russian leadership urged a return to alliance with Berlin but the growing antagonism between Germany and Russia before 1914 had many causes and would have been difficult to withstand.
A war avoided in 1914 could have occurred in the following years but it could also very easily have been a different war, with Britain remaining neutral. By 1914, there were many signs of growing British detente with Berlin, and growing distrust of Russia. All of which brings us back to a big counterfactual question: what if Germany had won the war? Had Britain remained neutral, as is likely in this scenario, Germany probably would have done so. But to imagine this, it's not necessary to envisage Britain staying out of a European conflict since Germany very nearly won the First World War in any case.
The winter of 1916-17 was a decisive moment in history. Had the Germans not brought the United States into the conflict at the very moment when revolution was heralding the disintegration of Russian power then they would have had every chance of winning the First World War, with enormous implications for Russia, and Europe. So a key counterfactual question is: what if the German leadership had not opted for unrestricted submarine warfare in the winter of 1916-17 thereby bringing the United States into the conflict? The key point to bear in mind is that in order to win the First World War the Germans did not need outright victory on the western front. All that was required was stalemate in the west and victory in the east. Victory would have boiled down to something like the pre-war status quo in the west and the survival of the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the east, which ended the Russo-German war in March 1918. If the Germans had not brought the Americans into the war then this outcome was almost certain.
Without American or Russian assistance the French and British could never have defeated Germany. By the winter of 1916 there was a strong chance that the United States would not continue to allow Britain and France to finance their war effort by floating ever-greater loans on the American market. On its own that might not have forced a compromise peace with Germany but combined with the disintegration of Russia it would have made Allied victory impossible. American intervention made a huge difference to Allied finances but also to Allied morale in the dark days of 1917 and early 1918. By the second half of 1918 the American army was playing a major role on the western front. Even more important, the knowledge that an almost unlimited flow of American manpower would join the fight if it continued beyond 1918 was crucial to the decisions made by the German high command in 1918 and to growing German pessimism about the war's outcome.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk created a 'German order' in east-central Europe. This had huge implications for all Europeans. In the twentieth century Germany and Russia were always, at least potentially, continental Europe's greatest powers. The two world wars in Europe more than anything revolved around their competition. If either Germany or Russia were decisively weakened then the other power must dominate all of eastern and central Europe unless - as happened after 1945 but was unthinkable before then - the Americans remained fully committed to sustaining the European balance of power. In 1918 Russia's disintegration allowed Germany to dominate east-central Europe and therefore inevitably become by far the most powerful state in Europe. In 1945 the pattern was reversed. In 1989-91 a second collapse of Russian power led to German reunification. Partly as a result we are now facing - for the moment still in less dangerous circumstances - the task of feeling our way towards adapting to a German leadership in Europe which will be moderated by other powers and acceptable to Europeans and to the German people too. For reasons of both history and contemporary political economy this is a very difficult challenge and this explains many of contemporary Europe's problems.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took from Russia all the territories it had acquired since the reign of Peter the Great. In other words it was confined to its present-day borders. But the key to Brest-Litovsk lay much less in Russia's loss of the lands acquired by Peter and his successors than in the independence of Ukraine, which had become tsarist territory already in the seventeenth century. Without Ukraine, early twentieth-century Russia would cease to be a great power. Ukraine furnished most of the empire's exported grain at a time when the Russian Empire was competing with the United States to be the world's greatest grain exporter. Grain exports were the key to Russia's favourable trade balance and to the government's strategy of economic development, which in the short to medium term relied on importing foreign capital and technological know-how in exchange for grain exports. Ukraine also produced most of the empire's coal and iron, and was the centre of its metallurgical industry. Ukraine's vital economic role was enhanced by the fact that the Urals region, which Peter the Great had developed as the centre of Russia's metallurgical and defence industries, had been in decline for a century and would not recover until Stalin's industrialisation drive of the 1930s.
If Russia lost Ukraine then Germany must become Europe's hegemon. This was all the more certain because any notionally independent Ukraine could only exist as a German satellite. No Russian government would willingly tolerate Ukrainian independence and only Germany could protect Ukraine against its eastern neighbour. On top of geopolitical vulnerability Ukraine also suffered from great internal weaknesses. An independent Ukraine confronted by Bolshevik Russia could be sure of the disloyalty of Communists, Russian workers in the eastern cities and mines, and most Jews. This constituted a very sizeable part of the population, and in many eastern regions even a majority. Still worse, Ukrainian nationalism was very much a minority cause even in core central areas of Ukraine. Most of the region's peasants had no sense of Ukrainian identity. In most cases they thought of themselves as belonging to their village and to the Orthodox Church. Traditionally, to the extent that they possessed a wider sense of political identity and loyalty, this was to the tsar as protector of the Orthodox community. In the pre-war decades an increasingly bitter conflict was waged among the region's intelligentsia over the question of whether Ukrainians were a separate nation or a branch of the greater Russian community. This conflict was fought on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border since over one quarter of what we now call Ukrainians were subjects of the Habsburg emperor. The heartland of Ukrainian nationalism was in Austrian Galicia. Both Vienna and Petersburg understood the immense potential geopolitical importance of this struggle to define Ukrainian identity and to instil this definition into the Ukrainian masses as they evolved from illiterate villagers into modern citizens. The Ukrainian issue was an increasing thorn in Russo-Austrian relations, though one very little noticed in English-language historiography on the origins of the First World War.