THE RUSSIAN FRONT

On May 15^th 2009 I had the opportunity to give a lecture to a group of about 100 members of the History faculty and students at Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, China. The lecture was based on new archival research conducted in support of a recently published two-volume set The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero which I edited along with several colleagues.

After briefly summarizing the operational history of the War, I offered ten reasons why new research findings justify the conclusion that the Russo-Japanese War should be considered World War Zero.

1. Like World War I, the origins of the Russo-Japanese War were rooted in imperialistic competition between world powers

2. As in August 1914, when the Russo-Japanese conflict began, it was fought in a neutral country(s) (China and Korea)

3. In the midst of the conflict and in the area where combat occurred, governmental structures broke down and the emergency was greeted with a response by non-governmental agencies such as the Red Cross

4. The conflict was marked by the use of sophisticated, complicated, and (above all else) lethal industrial weapons such as machine guns, rapid fire infantry assault weapons, rapid fire artillery, mines, and torpedoes. These were accompanied by the logistical infrastructure needed to keep ammunition and other essential supplies flowing to modern fielded armies

5. The natural product of the War’s deadly battlefields — mass casualties — required levels of aid which no medical corps of the period had the ability to help. The sheer numbers of men in need of aid overwhelmed these units.

6. The duration of battles at the beginning of the War lasted two or three days (The Yalu and Nanshan) and were contained to relatively small areas.  By the end of the war the battles of Liaoyang and Mukden lasted weeks and featured battlefields that extended for kilometers.  [NB: In terms of duration and brutality, the six to seven-month siege of Port Arthur foreshadowed what later happened at Verdun in 1916.]

7. The cost of fighting such a technologically demanding war required the formation of international syndicates of bankers simply to derive the credit needed for both the Japanese and Russians to keep purchasing and producing weapons and munitions.

8. Like WWI, the Russo-Japanese War was widely reported on and represented in all forms of visual presentations, from photographs to wood block prints.

9. Like Versailles, the Treaty of Portsmouth occurred only after one belligerent (Japan) ran out of men, materials and credit, and the Russians found themselves in the midst of a Revolution.  Perhaps more to the point, the treaty itself resolved little beyond ending hostilities and, worse, created circumstances that fueled grievances that culminated in future conflict.

10.  When the war concluded and the peace was signed the strengthening of the pan-Asian movement continued to fuel animosities that further destabilized the world.

How well did my Chinese audience accept the logic of the Russo-Japanese War as World War Zero?  While the faculty liked the idea, they accepted it with much circumspection.  More surprising were the questions I received from the students which suggested that they had little knowledge of the conflict in general.  Whatever the case, the students were far more interested in discussing Japan’s role in the Asian world during the first half of the 20^th century.  The students were particularly curious to know my thoughts on to possible re-emergence of Japan as a world power in the 21^st century.

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.  I remain a World War Zero advocate. And I look forward to continuing public discussion of the War’s legacy, especially when that discussion is conducted within a new international frame of reference.

TRF readers looking for more Trotsky content may want to check out the most recent webcast of the Hoover Institution’s interview series “Uncommon Knowledge” where you’ll find the program’s host (and Hoover Fellow) Peter Robinson focusing in on the life and legacy of the Russian revolutionary. Robinson’s guests are the journalist, author, and self-proclaimed Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service — Professor of Russian History at St. Anthony’s College Oxford and author of the forthcoming study, Trotsky: A Biography.

Although specialists may find some of Robinson’s questions insufficiently “nuanced” for academic tastes (”Was Leon Trotsky a good guy, or a bad guy?”) and a good portion of the program is premised on a hypothetical (”What if Lenin had been succeeded not by Stalin, but by Trotsky?”) the responses from the guests are sufficiently informative (Service) and entertaining (Hitchens) to make the thirty-minute program well worth watching. For both video and a transcript of the interview, click HERE.

Next up: What if Superman grew up in Germany, instead of America?

In keeping with the last posting about the provenance of the quote “war is the locomotive of history,” I’ve been looking into another great line of dubious reliability: Trotsky’s supposed claim that “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

It doesn’t take much trolling around the internet to find examples of this idea tied to Trotsky: here, here, here, here, and here.

Terrific line, but there’s not much evidence that Trotsky actually said it. Roger Simon gets closer to the truth when he corrects Newt Gingrich and has the quotation as “You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.”

That isn’t strictly correct, but it’s closer to what Trotsky in fact said.  The interesting commonality with the locomotive line is that in both cases, what was originally an abstruse point of intellectual debate became a much broader claim about what really matters in history.  Marx’s line about “revolution as the driving force of history” began as an explanation of Marxism’s difference from Hegel’s idealism, but soon became in Marx’s own usage a claim about the way that revolution speeds and intensifies social processes.

The same is true for the line in question here.  What Trotsky originally said in December 1939 in “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition? in the Socialist Workers Party” was “Burnham does not recognize the dialectic, but the dialectic recognizes Burnham, that is, extends its sway over him.”

Huh?  The broader context here is noted political theorist James Burnham’s abandonment of Trotsky and Marxism.  He’d been a staunch Trotskyist for most of the 1930s, but by the late 1930s was moving away from Marxism altogether.  In debate over the question of whether anti-Stalin Marxists should support the Soviet Union in World War II, Burnham made it clear that he thought dialectical reasoning wasn’t particularly required to come to worthwhile conclusions, and that orthodox Marxists and non-Marxists could reason effectively together towards congruent conclusions.  Trotsky, naturally, disagreed forcefully.  According to Trotsky, Burnham might think of himself as rejecting dialectical reasoning, but he was in fact caught in a web of dialectical thinking, and his arguments and positions only showed his true standing on issues of the class struggle.

It’s a LONG way from Trotsky’s original claim about dialectical reasoning to a pithy statement about the importance of war in human affairs.  I guess we want short, sharp, clear claims about what really matters.  It’s a shame we don’t get them more often.

A recent query on H-War asked for the source of the quotation “War is the locomotive of history.”  I’ve had problems myself with great lines from historical figures that it seems they didn’t actually say, so I did some digging myself.

The concept as originally expressed is quite different, putting revolution in the place of war, and goes back to Marx himself.  In 1845 in “The German Ideology,” Marx wrote “revolution is the driving force of history.”  His point was to attack Hegelian idealism–the concept that that ideas, not economics, are what really matter.  Fuller context makes this clear: “not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory.”  This is orthodox Marxism: economic structures determine ideas and culture, not the other way around.  No translation problems here–the original German is straightforward: “daß nicht die Kritik, sondern die Revolution die treibende Kraft der Geschichte auch der Religion, Philosophie und sonstigen Theorie ist.”

For the idea of WAR as the driving force, specifically attached to the image of “locomotive,” we have to go to the Austro-German Marxist Karl Kautsky, who in “War and Revolution” in 1912 observed that “wars have always been powerful locomotives of world history.”  Though Kautsky was German, he seems to have first published this in a French newspaper, and I can’t find either German or French versions from my desk.

Kautsky’s formulation, much like Kautsky himself, lacks a certain panache.  Leon Trotsky picked up the idea, and as usual, smartened it up a little.  Trotsky expressed the idea in two ways.  Even before the revolution, in June 1917’s “Farce of Dual Power” Trotsky went back to Marx’s original idea and observed that “Truly, Marx was not wrong when he called revolution the locomotive of history!” Trotsky referred to the same idea using the same concepts (Marx, revolution, locomotives, and history) in 1918 and 1922. On both those later occasions, he was speaking to military audiences, but did not swap revolution for war.

The problem here is that Marx’s “German Ideology” wasn’t published until 1932.  We have to surmise that the basic concept, which was certainly clear enough in Marx’s other works and implied by the philosophy as a whole, was floating around European Marxism at the turn of the century. Given the close relationships among leading European Marxists, Trotsky could easily have gotten the phrase from Marx no worse than second-hand.

By 1922, though, only days after Trotsky quoted Marx that revolution is the locomotive of history, he told a NON-military audience, the Comintern, that “war, Comrades, is a great locomotive of history.”  The irony, of course, is that he was using Karl Kautsky’s idea and metaphor, and by this point Trotsky and the rest of the Bolsheviks had dismissed Kautsky as a sell-out, opportunist, compromiser, capitalist running-dog, etc. Sic transit gloria mundi.

UPDATE: Hat tip to Jonathan Beard, who spotted an 1850 published use of the phrase “Revolutions are the locomotives of history” by Marx, five years after his “driving force” statement in “German Ideology” in The Class Struggles in France. The original German is about as straightforward as German gets: “Die Revolutionen sind die Lokomotiven der Geschichte.”

What strikes me is that there’s a subtle difference between the way Marx uses two very similar phrases.  In 1845, he made revolution the driving force of history in the sense that it determines philosophy, ideas, and culture.  In 1850, his point is more down-to-earth: revolutions speed up processes of social change by revealing how things really work.  In this particular case, Marx says, revolution shows the French peasantry that their true allies are the revolutionary proletariat, as is clear from the full paragraph:

 The condition of the French peasants, when the republic had added new burdens to their old ones, is comprehensible. It can be seen that their exploitation differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgages and usury, the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state taxes. The peasant’s title to property is the talisman by which capital held him hitherto under its spell, the pretext under which it set him against the industrial proletariat. Only the fall of capital can raise the peasant; only an anti-capitalist, a proletarian government can break his economic misery, his social degradation. The constitutional republic is the dictatorship of his united exploiters; the social-democratic, the red republic, is the dictatorship of his allies. And the scale rises or falls according to the votes the peasant casts into the ballot box. He himself has to decide his fate. So spoke the socialists in pamphlets, almanacs, calendars, and leaflets of all kinds. This language became more understandable to him through the counter-writings of the party of Order, which for its part turned to him, and which by gross exaggeration, by its brutal conception and representation of the intentions and ideas of the socialists, struck the true peasant note and overstimulated his lust after forbidden fruit. But most understandable was the language of the actual experience that the peasant class had gained from the use of the suffrage, were the disillusionments overwhelming him, blow upon blow, with revolutionary speed. Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Words cannot do this justice; you have to watch it.  The meaning of World War II to the peoples of the former Soviet Union, animated live, with sand. I note that this is from Ukraine’s equivalent of “America’s Got Talent,” and it’s done in Russian. Hat tip to Warming Glow.