New York City (USA), The New York Times, March 26th, 1918, p. 1:
AGREEMENT WITH RUSSIA ON PEACE TERMS
RUSSIA’S FOREIGN MINISTER AXELROD SUPPORTS FOURTEEN POINTS [1] * BAN ON POISON GAS PROPOSED * DEMOCRACY FOR EASTERN EUROPE
Washington * The Department of State has confirmed that full and unambiguous agreement has been established between our government and the People’s Commission of Russia, represented by Foreign Commissar Tobias Axelrod, on the framework for the conclusion of the Great War and the construction of a just and lasting worldwide peace. Mr. Axelrod has conveyed Russia’s full support for the Fourteen Points expressed by President Wilson on January 8th. Elaborating on them, both governments also share the following goals:
- To emphasize that the use of poisonous gas has been forbidden by the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, and to work towards a more explicit formulation in this regard [2]
- To conclude broad international covenants establishing a court which judges violations of the Conventions, determines punishment of those responsible for such violations, as well as compensations for those suffering harm resulting from violations of the Conventions [3]
- To bring before such an international court those responsible for the murderous atrocities committed in Armenia, Belgium, France, and Russia
- To recognize unambiguously the free and democratic decisions of the Estonian, Latvian, Finnish, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Armenian nations to give themselves republican constitutions and join their free states in federation within the Union of Equals
- To ensure that the Polish, Lithuanian, Czecho-Slovak, Yugo-Slav, Albanian, and Kurdish nations will enjoy a fully free and unimpeded process of democratic constitution as well, and that they are entirely free in their pursuit and conclusion of international treaties and treaties of federation [4]
- To apply the goal of a readjustment of frontiers in accordance with clearly discernible lines of nationality to a Rumania liberated from occupation
- To support the development of democracy in the central empires currently oppressed by military dictatorships, and to remove any barrier against the free circulation of democratic ideas and associations whose aims are the fostering of a global order of peace, justice, and legal resolution of international conflicts, without and within these countries. [5]
DUKHONIN’S ARMY DRAWS FIRE ON THEMSELVES
BY THE NEW YORK TIMES MILITARY EXPERT * The Russian Second Army, commanded by General Nikolai Dukhonin, continues to relieve the defenders of Petrograd by drawing German fire on themselves. After raids on German units controlling the railroad links into Petrograd on March 23rd and 24th, two German divisions have begun to engage in fighting against them. But Dukhonin apparently does not seek to frontally assault the besieging army. Instead, his forces have retreated Eastward along the railroad line towards the Wolchow River, drawing the two divisions who pursue them away from the capital. CONT. ON PAGE TWO.
A NIGHTLY FLIGHT OVER THE NEVA
FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT IN PETROGRAD * As bombs and grenades continue to kill, and German regiments are entering one district of Petrograd after the other, thousands of civilians are fleeing every night from Petrograd’s Southern districts across the Neva river, to the North, where it is still possible to leave the capital for the wide, unoccupied Karelian hinterland, or board a train for Vyborg and the Finnish Federative Republic. Last night, I was among them. A crowd of several dozen had assembled on Liteyny Prospekt; mostly men, but also a few families with sleeping or crying infants. We were held up by armed guards, who control all traffic over the bridges and receive information about plane sightings, for over a quarter of an hour. Among the Russians residential licenses or other papers were apparently checked before the gates were finally opened and we poured through. The electric lighting, a special feature of this modern bridge, has been switched off, and while Petrograd has been less lit than usual over the past weeks, here, above the black waters of the Neva, it is eerily dark. The bridge has been damaged in part, and we must tread carefully. CONT. ON PAGE SIX.
BRITISH ADVANCE ON AMMAN
The 60th London Infantry Division, the ANZAC Mounted Division and the Imperial Camel Corps have continued their advance on Amman with the capture of Es Salt. The town was taken from its minimal contingent of Ottoman defenders. The steep way ahead to Amman is open now, and an attack is expected over the course of the next week. [6]
OTTOMAN SPIES INCITING REVOLT APPREHENDED IN BAKU
In Baku, Russian secret police [7] has unveiled and dismantled a conspiratorial group of several dozen persons, aided and abetted by the Ottoman War Minister Ismail Enver [8] to incite revolts among the Mohammedan native populations of Southern Russia. Thirty-seven conspirators are awaiting their trials now, while the situation on the streets of the city on the shores of the Caspian Sea is calming down. [9]
[1] Would Wilson utter the
Fourteen Points ITTL, too? I was not sure; but ultimately, many of the things often ascribed as conducive to their formulation (the Bolshevik publication of the secret treaties) appeared merely circumstantial to me or present ITTL too (the Papal peace message, the negotiations in Brest-Litowsk), whereas the primary development from which they derived, the so-called “
Inquiry”, has begun in September 1917 IOTL under circumstances which did not yet radically diverge from OTL and TTL. So I thought Wilson would still outline his vision in January 1918, while the Russians and the Central Powers negotiated in Brest-Litowsk.
But would the Fourteen Points look similar to OTL’s? I checked every single one of them, and I’d be glad to discuss them in detail if anyone is interested, but I thought neither of them would have been sufficiently affected by the divergences of TTL except for no. VI (concerning the future of Russia). Even here, though, the divergences of TTL should strengthen the core message of Point No. 6 (evacuate Russia, let the Russians sort out where they want to go, they’re welcome in the international community). If Wilson uttered such comparatively Russian-friendly words after OTL’s Bolshevik takeover, I don’t see why he would be more hostile to a Russia which is a few degrees more moderate and digresses less from politico-institutional traditions of the Western world. So, while Point No. 6 would certainly be phrased differently, with less references to political uncertainty and a power vacuum, its core message would be, I reckoned, the same.
[2] The US and Russia were not among the big players in the poison gas game in WW1, so this doesn’t cost them much, and of course Russia is capitalizing on the sympathy bonus now.
[3] Ah, compensations! With the about-face concerning tsarist state debts, the demand of “no indemnities” looks a lot less appealing to Kamkov’s Commission now. To the US, ensuring that war debts are paid off is a pragmatic priority, too, which had not been included in Wilson’s well-meaning wishlist.
The establishment of a court which would give the Hague Conventions teeth and muscle is probably utopian in 1918 or any of the following years.
[4] That is more radical than Wilson’s Point No. X, but the Russians depend on the Czechoslovak and the Romanian Legion to fight on their side.
[5] That basically means the U.S. officially condones propaganda by Russia’s leftist forces, both social democratic and neo-Narodnik, in the Ottoman Empire, in Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, and Germany, and explicit interference by the former to bring about revolutions etc. in these countries. Too big a success for a Russian foreign commissar who only months ago had negotiated for a separate peace, whose army is again being beaten by the Germans, and whose ideology is pretty much of the kind against which IOTL US institutions instigated a witch-hunt in the so-called First Red Scare? On the other hand, at this point in time, the Sedition Act of 1918 has not yet been passed, and neither has the Immigration Act. I see little reason why US domestic policies against far left anti-war activists should be much different ITTL as American war casualties will begin to rise, but then again, foreign policy will certainly look different, and that might have an effect here, too. Russia’s government, for one, has not sent Axelrod to Washington without a reason – Kamkov and Axelrod have evidently identified the U.S. as the Entente partner with the greatest potential for aid and shared goals.
[6] All OTL in Palestine. What looms big here is what is missing from TTL’s newspaper and what was in OTL’s. There is, of course, no big German Spring Offensive on the Western Front. No Michael, no Georgette, and none of the other offensive operations. Static trench warfare continues, and more and more American troops are inserted. German OHL knows the clock is ticking against them, and OTL’s plans have been made throughout TTL’s winter, too, only they’re being delayed so far, in the hope of resolving the Russian problem first. This has implications for the British campaign in Palestine, of course.
[7] Yes, the VeCheKa is still around, and it's not just terrorising bourgeois and aristocratic anti-socialists as well as anarchist pacifists, it has also taken to suppress separatist movements deemed dangerous and uncontrollable by the People's Commission, of which the former Empire's Southern Muslim underbelly has a particularly large number.
[8] IOTL, Enver Pasha and his Third Army under General Wehib Pasha were advancing through Armenian territory around this time. ITTL, they are not: the front has been stagnant for over a year now, with Russian/Union and Armenian troops not collapsing like IOTL, but also neither side having any spare forces to start a large offensive. So, instead of pressing Eastward and coming closer to implementing his Young Turkish dreams of uniting Greater Turan, from Istanbul to the Tarim Basin, through the formation of an
Army of Islam, he must choose more subtle means to subvert Russian/Union control over the Muslim groups in the Caucasus and Central Asia. He begins in Azerbaijan, whose oil fields are of course of vital importance to Russia, too.
[9] Maybe it is, but in the long run, Kamkov is heading for trouble if he doesn't find a satisfactory solution for the Islamic South. The tragedy of OTL, which is even more tragical and ironical ITTL, where the respective worldviews (Jadidism and neo-Narodnichestvo) are even closer than OTL's (Jadidism vs Bolshevism), is that both SRs and Marxist socialists are in great part simply too culturally blind (or, to put it more bluntly: Eurocentrist and of a mindset inherited from colonialist racism) to see that forces like
Musavat and the various
Jadidist reformers among the Tatars, the Kazakhs, the
Young Bukharians, Young Khivans etc. could be their allies in a big, socially-transformational, modernising, anti-imperialist family. Sure, there are socio-economical conflicts and dilemmas to be solved, and the Russian and Cossack settlers throughout Southern Russia, the former of which make up
the greatest portion of the new regime's local face while the latter are still a backbone of the Union Armies, often do not espouse internationalist, universalist and national-self-determinationist views (they rather look down on the native Muslims as backward). Will Kamkov's Commission and the CA wake up in time and find a satisfactory solution (autonomy etc.) for the Muslim South, too? Because if not, there's trouble brewing there, with or without Ottoman interference.