In the years following the blood-soaked carnage of the First World War, a spectre stalked Europe, the spectre of Bolshevism. But try as they may, the ruling classes could not exorcise it. To their dismay, like Banquo’s ghost at the banquet, it cast an eerie shadow over their proceedings.
Lloyd George remarked to the French Premier Clemenceau in March 1919:
The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution…
The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the mass of the population from one end of Europe to the other. (Quoted in E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 3, p. 136.)[1]
This fear of Bolshevism was not isolated and even stretched across the Atlantic. The American President Woodrow Wilson, again in March 1919, echoed the threat: “We are running a race with Bolshevism, and the world is on fire.” (Quoted in A. Read, The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism, p. 160.) The flames were lapping at their heels, threatening to consume them. “Every day the situation grows worse, until many people are ready to declare that the United States will be the next victim of this dangerous malady,” wrote the New York Times. (ibid., p. 51.)
A few years later, the Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, concurred with their ‘ungodly’ fears. “Those were the days of panic, the days of a truly insane fear of Bolshevism, which then loomed as an extremely misty and therefore terrifying apparition.” (L. Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 1, p. 176.)
For the bourgeois representatives, the apparition was real enough, and the world was truly ablaze. Monarchies were reduced to ashes, consumed in the revolutionary inferno following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, and the German Revolution of November 1918. The flames of revolution were sweeping away everything in their path and transforming the course of European and world history. Not one stone upon another would remain of the old Empires.
We should begin by dispelling a myth, however. It was not the Generals and Admirals who put an end to the slaughter and bloodshed of the First World War – in which more than 17 million lost their lives and more than twice that number were wounded, gassed and maimed – but the revolutionary uprising of the heroic soldiers, sailors and workers of Germany. The General Staffs on both sides were quite prepared to continue the war to the last drop of someone else’s blood. The real unsung heroes – the revolutionary masses – are not mentioned in any official celebrations or even histories.
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Lloyd George went on to stress: “If Germany goes over to the Spartacists it is inevitable that she should throw in her lot with the Russian Bolsheviks. Once that happens all Eastern Europe will be swept into the orbit of Bolshevik revolution, and within a year we may witness the spectacle of 300 million people organised into a vast Red Army under German instructors and German generals, equipped with German cannon and German machine guns… The news which came from Hungary yesterday shows that this is no mere fantasy.” (Quoted in A. Read, The World on Fire, p. 160.)