The Russian Revolution

13

Brest-Litovsk

The party’s agitators must protest, time and again, against the foul slander, launched by capitalists, that our party allegedly favors a separate peace with Germany.

—Lenin, April 21, 1917¹

The Bolsheviks’ main concern after October was to solidify their power and to expand it nationwide. This difficult task they had to accomplish within the framework of an active foreign policy, at the center of which stood relations with Germany. In Lenin’s judgment, unless Russia promptly signed an armistice with Germany, his chances of keeping power were close to nil; conversely, such an armistice and the peace that would follow opened for the Bolsheviks the doors to world conquest. In December 1917, when most of his followers rejected the German terms, he argued that the party had no choice but to do the Germans’ bidding. The issue was starkly simple: unless the Bolsheviks made peace, “the peasant army, unbearably exhausted by the war, … will overthrow the socialist workers’ government.”² The Bolsheviks required a peredyshka, or breathing spell, to consolidate power, to organize the administration, and to build their own armed force.

Proceeding from this assumption, Lenin was prepared to make peace with the Central Powers on any terms as long as they left him a power base. The resistance which he encountered in party ranks grew out of the belief (which he shared) that the Bolshevik Government could survive only if a revolution broke out in Western Europe and the conviction (which he did not fully share) that this was bound to happen at any moment. To make peace with the “imperialist” Central Powers, especially on the humiliating terms which they offered, was to his opponents a betrayal of international socialism; in the long run, it spelled death for revolutionary Russia. In their view, Soviet Russia should not place her own short-term national interests above the interests of the international proletariat. Lenin disagreed:

Our tactics ought to rest… [on the principle] how to ensure more reliably and hopefully for the socialist revolution the possibility of consolidating itself or even surviving in one country until such time as other countries joined in.³

On this issue the Bolshevik Party split in the winter of 1917–18 straight down the middle.

The history of Bolshevik Russia’s relations with the Central Powers, notably Germany, during the twelve months that followed the October coup is of supreme interest because it is on this occasion that the Communists first formulated in theory and worked out in practice the strategy and tactics of their foreign policy.

Western diplomacy traces its origins to the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century. From there diplomatic practices spread to the rest of Europe and in the seventeenth century received codification in international law. Diplomacy was designed to regulate and peacefully resolve disputes among sovereign states; if it failed and arms were resorted to, its task was to keep the level of violence as low as possible and to bring hostilities to an early end. The success of international law rests on the acceptance by all parties of certain principles:

1. Sovereign states are acknowledged to have an unquestioned right to exist: whatever disagreements divide them, their existence itself can never be at issue. This principle underpinned the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. It was violated at the end of the eighteenth century with the Third Partition of Poland, which led to that country’s demise, but this was an exceptional case.

2. International relations are confined to contacts between governments: it is a violation of diplomatic norms for one government to go over the head of another with direct appeals to its population. In the practice of the nineteenth century, states normally communicated through the ministries of foreign affairs.

3. Relations among the foreign offices presume a certain level of integrity and goodwill, including respect for formal accords, since without them there can be no mutual trust, and without trust diplomacy becomes an exercise in futility.

These principles and practices, which evolved between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, assumed the existence of a Law of Nature as well as that of a supranational community of Christian states. The Stoic concept of the Law of Nature, which theorists of international law from Hugo Grotius onward applied to relations between states, posited eternal and universal standards of justice. The concept of a Christian community meant that, whatever divided them, the countries of Europe and their overseas offspring belonged to one family. Before the twentieth century, the precepts of international law were not meant to apply to peoples outside the European community—an attitude which justified colonial conquests.

Obviously, this whole complex of “bourgeois” ideas was repugnant to the Bolsheviks. As revolutionaries determined to overthrow the existing order, they could hardly have been expected to acknowledge the sanctity of the international state system. Appealing over the heads of governments to their populations was the very essence of revolutionary strategy. And as concerned honesty and goodwill in international relations, the Bolsheviks, in common with the rest of the Russian radicals, regarded moral standards to be obligatory only within the movement, in relations among comrades: relations with the class enemy were subject to the rules of warfare. In revolution, as in war, the only principle that mattered was kto kogo—who eats whom.

In the weeks that followed the October coup, most Bolsheviks expected their example to set off revolutions throughout Europe. Every report from abroad of an industrial strike or of a mutiny was hailed as the “beginning.” In the winter of 1917–18, the Bolshevik Krasnaia gazeta and similar party organs reported in banner headlines, day after day, revolutionary explosions in Western Europe: one day in Germany, the next in Finland, then again in France. As long as this expectation remained alive, the Bolsheviks had no need to work out a foreign policy: all they had to do was repeat what they had always done—namely, fan the flames of revolution.

But these hopes waned somewhat in the spring of 1918. The Russian Revolution had as yet found no emulators. The mutinies and strikes in Western Europe were everywhere suppressed, and the “masses” continued to slaughter each other instead of attacking their “ruling classes.” As this realization dawned, it became urgent to work out a revolutionary foreign policy. Here, the Bolsheviks lacked guidelines, since neither the writings of Marx nor the experience of the Paris Commune were of much help. The difficulty derived from the contradictory requirement of their interests as rulers of a sovereign state and as self-appointed leaders of world revolution. In the latter capacity they denied the right of other (“non-socialist”) governments to exist and rejected the tradition of confining foreign relations to heads of state and their ministers. They wanted to destroy root and branch the entire structure of national, “bourgeois” states, and to do so they had to exhort the “masses” abroad to rebellion. Yet, inasmuch as they themselves now headed a sovereign state, they could not avoid relations with other governments—at least until these had been swept away by the global revolution—and this they had to do in accordance with traditional standards of “bourgeois” international law. They also needed the protection of these standards to ward off foreign intervention in their own internal affairs.

It is here that the dual nature of the Communist state, the formal separation of party and state, proved so useful. The Bolsheviks solved their problem by constructing a two-level foreign policy, one traditional, the other revolutionary. For purposes of dealing with “bourgeois” governments, they established the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, staffed exclusively with dependable Bolsheviks and subject to instructions from the Central Committee. This institution functioned, at least on the surface, in accord with accepted norms of diplomacy. Wherever permitted to do so by host countries, the heads of Soviet foreign missions, no longer called “ambassadors” or “envoys,” but “political representatives” (polpredy), took over the old Russian Embassy buildings, donned cutaways and top hats, and behaved much like their colleagues from “bourgeois” missions.* “Revolutionary diplomacy”—strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms—became the province of the Bolshevik Party acting either on its own or through the agency of special organs, such as the Communist International. Its agents incited revolution and supported subversive activities against the very foreign governments with which the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs maintained correct relations.

This separation of functions, which reflected a similar duality inside Soviet Russia between party and state, was described by Sverdlov at the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party in the course of discussions of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Referring to the clauses of the treaty which forbade the signatories to engage in hostile agitation and propaganda, he said:

It follows inexorably from the treaty we have signed and which we must soon ratify at the Congress [of Soviets] that in our capacity as a government, as Soviet authority, we will not be able to conduct that broad international agitation which we have conducted until now. But this in no wise means that we have to cut back one iota on such agitation. Only from now on we shall have to conduct it almost always in the name, not of the Council of People’s Commissars, but of the Central Committee of the party …⁴

This tactic of treating the party as a private organization, for whose actions the “Soviet” Government was not responsible, the Bolsheviks pursued with rather comical determination. For example, when in September 1918 Berlin protested against the anti-German propaganda in the Russian press (which by then was entirely under Bolshevik control), the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs archly replied:

The Russian Government has no complaints that the German censorship and German police do not prosecute [their] press organs for … malicious agitation against the political institutions of Russia—that is, against the Soviet system.… Considering fully admissible the absence of any repressive measures on the part of the German Government against German press organs which freely express their political and social opposition to the Soviet system, it deems equally admissible similar behavior in regard to the German system on the part of private persons and unofficial newspapers in Russia.… It is necessary to protest in the most decisive manner the frequent representations made by the German Consulate General that the Russian Government, by means of police measures, can direct the Russian revolutionary press in this or that direction and by bureaucratic influence instill in it such and such views.⁵

The Bolshevik Government reacted very differently when foreign powers interfered in internal Russian affairs. As early as November 1917, Trotsky, the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, protested Allied “interference” in Russian matters after Allied ambassadors, uncertain who the legitimate government of Russia was, had sent a diplomatic note to the Commander in Chief, General N. N. Dukhonin.⁶ The Sovnarkom never let an occasion pass without voicing objections to foreign powers violating the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of its country, even as it repeatedly violated this very same principle with its own conduct.

As stated, Lenin was prepared to accept any terms demanded by the Central Powers, but because of widespread suspicions that he was a German agent, he had to proceed with caution. Instead of entering immediately into negotiations with Germany and Austria, therefore, as he would have preferred, he issued appeals to all the belligerent powers to meet and make peace. Actually, general peace in Europe was the last thing he wanted: as we have seen, one reason for his urgency in seizing power in October was fear of just such an eventuality, which would foreclose the chances of unleashing a civil war in Europe. Apparently, he did not feel afraid to call for peace since previous appeals had fallen on deaf ears, including the proposals of President Wilson of December 1916, the peace resolution of the German Reichstag in July 1917, and the papal proposals of August 1917. Once the Allies rejected his offer, as he had every reason to expect they would, he would be free to make his own arrangements.

The curiously named “Decree on Peace,” which Lenin had drafted and the Second Congress of Soviets adopted, proposed to the belligerent powers a three-month armistice. This proposal it coupled with an appeal to the workers of England, France, and Germany with their

many-sided decisive and selflessly energetic activity [to] help us successfully complete the task of peace and, at the same time, the task of liberating the toiling and exploited masses of the population from all slavery and all exploitation.⁷

George Kennan has labeled this “decree” an act of “demonstrative diplomacy,” intended “not to promote freely accepted and mutually profitable agreements between governments but rather to embarrass other governments and stir up opposition among their own people.”* The Bolsheviks issued other proclamations in the same spirit, urging the citizens of the belligerent powers to rise in rebellion.⁸ As head of state, Lenin could now advance the program of the Zimmerwald left.

The Bolsheviks transmitted their Peace Decree to the Allied envoys on November 9/22. The Allied governments rejected it out of hand, following which Trotsky informed the Central Powers of Russia’s readiness to open negotiations for an armistice.

The policy of cultivating the Bolsheviks now paid generous dividends for the Germans. Russia’s quest for a separate peace reminded some of them of the “miracle” of 1763, when the death of the pro-French Elizabeth and the accession of the pro-Prussian Peter III led to Russia’s withdrawal from the Seven Years’ War, which saved Frederick the Great from defeat and Prussia from destruction. Russia’s defection from the alliance promised two benefits: the release of hundreds of thousands of troops for transfer to the west and a breach in the British naval blockade. The prospect made a German victory seem once again within grasp. On learning of the Bolshevik power seizure in Petrograd, Ludendorff drew up plans for a decisive offensive on the Western Front in the spring of 1918, with the help of divisions transferred from the Eastern Front. The Kaiser endorsed the plan.⁹ At this stage, Ludendorff heartily approved of the policy of the Foreign Office, pursued by the architect of the pro-Bolshevik orientation, Richard von Kühlmann, to obtain a quick armistice with Russia followed by a dictated peace.

In the battle of wits between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers, the latter appeared to enjoy all the advantages: stable governments with millions of disciplined troops, as compared with a regime of amateurs and usurpers whom few recognized, with a ragtag army in the process of dissolution. In reality, however, the balance of power was much less one-sided. By the end of 1917, the economic situation of the Central Powers had become so desperate that they were unlikely to stay in the war much longer. Austria-Hungary was in a particularly precarious condition: its Foreign Minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, told the Germans during the Brest negotiations that his country probably could not hold out until the next harvest.¹⁰ The Germans were only marginally better off: some German politicians believed that the country would run out of grain by mid-April 1918.¹¹

Germany and Austria also had problems with civilian morale, for the Bolshevik peace appeals aroused great hopes among their peoples. The German Chancellor advised the Kaiser that if talks with the Russians broke down, Austria-Hungary would probably drop out of the war and Germany would experience domestic unrest. The leader of the German Majority Socialists (who supported the war), Philipp Scheidemann, predicted that the failure of peace negotiations with the Russians would “spell the demise of the German Empire.”¹² For all these reasons—military, economic, and psychological—the Central Powers needed peace with Russia almost as much as Bolshevik Russia needed peace with them. These facts, of which the Russians could not have been fully aware, indicate that those Bolsheviks who opposed Lenin’s capitulationist policy in favor of stringing the Germans and Austrians along were not as unrealistic as they are usually depicted. The enemy also negotiated with a gun to his head.

The Bolsheviks enjoyed a further advantage in that they had intimate knowledge of their opponent. Having spent years in the West, they were familiar with Germany’s domestic problems, her political and business personalities, her party alignments. Nearly all of them spoke one or more Western languages. Because Germany was the main center of socialist theory and practice, they knew Germany at least as well as if not better than their own country, and if the occasion presented itself, the Sovnarkom would have gladly assumed power there. This knowledge enabled them to exploit discords inside the opponent’s camp by pitting businessmen against the generals or left socialists against right socialists, and inciting German workers to revolution in readily understandable language. By contrast, the Germans knew next to nothing of those with whom they were about to enter into negotiations. The Bolsheviks, who had just emerged into the limelight, were to them a gaggle of unkempt, garrulous, and impractical intellectuals. The Germans consistently misinterpreted Bolshevik moves and underestimated their cunning. One day they saw them as revolutionary hotheads, whom they could manipulate at will, and the next as realists who did not believe their own slogans and were ready for businesslike deals. In their relations during 1917–18, the Bolsheviks repeatedly outwitted the Germans by assuming a protective coloring that disoriented the Germans and whetted their appetites.

To understand Germany’s Soviet policy a few words need to be said about her so-called Russlandpolitik. For while her immediate interest in making peace with Russia derived from military considerations, Germany also had long-range geopolitical designs on that country. German political strategists had traditionally shown a keen interest in Russia: it was not by accident that before World War I no country had a tradition of Russian scholarship remotely approaching the German. Conservatives regarded it as axiomatic that their country’s national security required a weak Russia. For one, only if the Russians were unable to threaten Germany with a second front could her forces confidently take on the French and the “Anglo-Saxons” in the struggle for global hegemony. Second, to be a serious contender in Weltpolitik, Germany required access to Russia’s natural resources, including foodstuffs, which she could obtain on satisfactory terms only if Russia became her client. Having established a national state very late, Germany had missed out in the imperial scramble. Her only realistic chance of matching the economic prowess of her rivals lay in expanding eastward, into the vastness of Eurasia. German bankers and industrialists looked on Russia as a potential colony, a kind of surrogate Africa. They drafted for their government memoranda in which they stressed how important it was for victorious Germany to import, free of tariffs, Russian high-grade iron ore and manganese, as well as to exploit Russian agriculture and mines.¹³

To transform Russia into a German client state, two things had to be done. The Russian Empire had to be broken up and reduced to territories populated by Great Russians. This entailed pushing Russia’s frontiers eastward through the annexation by Germany of the Baltic provinces and the creation of a cordon sanitaire of nominally sovereign but in fact German-controlled protectorates: Poland, the Ukraine, and Georgia. This program, advocated before and during the war by the publicist Paul Rohrbach,¹⁴ had a strong appeal, especially to the military. Hindenburg wrote the Kaiser in January 1918 that Germany’s interests required Russia’s borders to be shifted to the East, and her western provinces, rich in population and economic capacity, to be annexed.¹⁵ Essentially this meant Russia’s expulsion from continental Europe. In the words of Rohrbach, the issue was whether “if our future is to be secure, Russia is to be allowed to remain a European power in the sense that she had been until now, or is she not to be allowed to be such?”¹⁶

Second, Russia had to grant Germany all kinds of economic concessions and privileges that would leave her open to German penetration and, ultimately, hegemony. German businessmen during the war importuned their government to annex Russia’s western provinces and subject Russia to economic exploitation.¹⁷

From this perspective, nothing suited Germany better than a Bolshevik Government in Russia. German internal communications from 1918 were replete with arguments that the Bolsheviks should be helped to stay in power as the only Russian party prepared to make far-reaching territorial and economic concessions and because their incompetence and unpopularity kept Russia in a state of permanent crisis. State Secretary Admiral Paul von Hintze expressed the consensus when in the fall of 1918 he stood up to those Germans who wanted to topple the Bolsheviks as unreliable and dangerous partners: eliminating the Bolsheviks “would subvert the whole work of our war leadership and our policy in the East, which strives for the military paralysis of Russia.”¹⁸ Paul Rohrbach argued in a similar vein:

The Bolsheviks are ruining Great Russia, the source of any potential Russian future danger, root and branch. They have already lifted most of that anxiety which we might have felt about Great Russia, and we should do all we can to keep them as long as possible carrying on their work, so useful to us.¹⁹

If Berlin and Vienna agreed on the desirability of quickly coming to terms with Russia, in Petrograd opinions were sharply divided. Setting nuances aside, the division pitted those Bolsheviks who wanted peace at once, on almost any terms, against those who wanted to use the peace negotiations as a means for unleashing a European revolution.

Lenin, the leading advocate of the first course, found himself usually in a minority, sometimes a minority of one. He proceeded from a pessimistic estimate of the international “correlation of forces.” While he, too, counted on revolutions in the West, he had a much higher opinion than his adversaries of the ability of “bourgeois” governments to crush them. At the same time, he was less sanguine than his colleagues about the staying power of the Bolsheviks: during one of the debates that accompanied the peace talks, he caustically observed that while there was as yet no civil war in Europe there was already one in Russia. From the perspective of time, Lenin can be faulted for underestimating the internal difficulties of the Central Powers and their need for a quick settlement: Russia’s position in this respect was stronger than he realized. But his assessment of the internal situation in Russia was perfectly sound. He knew that by continuing in the war he risked being toppled from power either by his domestic opponents or by the Germans. He also knew that he desperately needed a respite to transform his claim to power into reality. This called for an organized political, economic, and military effort, possible only under conditions of peace, no matter how onerous and humiliating. True, this entailed sacrificing, for the time being, the interests of the Western “proletariat,” but in his eyes, until the Revolution had fully succeeded in Russia, Russia’s interests came first.

The position of the majority opposed to him, headed by Bukharin and joined by Trotsky, has been summarized as follows:

The central powers would not permit Lenin so to use the respite: they would cut off Russia from the grain and coal of the Ukraine and the petrol of the Caucasus; they would bring under their control half the Russian population; they would sponsor and support counterrevolutionary movements and throttle the revolution. Nor would the Soviets be able to build up a new army during any respite. They had to create their armed strength in the very process of the fighting; and only so could they create it. True, the Soviets might be forced to evacuate Petrograd and even Moscow; but they had enough space into which to retreat and gather strength. Even if the people were to prove as unwilling to fight for the revolution as they were to fight for the old regime—and the leaders of the war faction refused to take this for granted—then every German advance, with all the accompanying terror and pillage, would shake the people from weariness and torpor, force them to resist, and finally generate a broad and truly popular enthusiasm for revolutionary war. On the tide of this enthusiasm a new and formidable army would rise. The revolution, unshamed by sordid surrender, would achieve its renaissance; it would stir the souls of the working classes abroad; and it would finally dispel the nightmare of imperialism.²⁰

This division of opinion led in the early months of 1918 to the worst crisis in the history of the Bolshevik Party.

On November 15/28, 1917, the Bolsheviks again called on the belligerents to open negotiations. The appeal stated that since the “ruling classes” of Allied countries have failed to respond to the Peace Decree, Russia was prepared to open immediate talks on a cease-fire with the Germans and Austrians, who had responded positively. The Germans accepted the Bolshevik offer immediately. On November 18/December 1, a Russian delegation departed for Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German High Command on the Eastern Front. It was headed by A. A. Ioffe, an ex-Menshevik and close friend of Trotsky’s. It also included Kamenev and, as a symbolic gesture, representatives of the “toiling masses” in the persons of a soldier, sailor, worker, peasant, and one woman. Even as the train carrying the Russian delegation was en route to Brest, Petrograd called on German troops to mutiny.

The armistice talks opened on November 20/December 3, in what used to be a Russian officers’ club. The German delegation was headed by Kühlmann, who regarded himself as something of an expert in Russian affairs and in 1917 had played a key role in making arrangements with Lenin. The parties agreed on a cease-fire to begin on November 23/December 6 and remain in force for eleven days. Before it expired, however, it was extended, by mutual agreement, to January 1/14, 1918. The ostensible purpose of this extension was to give the Allies an opportunity to reconsider and join the talks. Both sides knew, however, that there was no danger of the Allies complying: as Kühlmann advised his Chancellor, the German conditions for an armistice were so onerous the Allies could not possibly accept them.²¹ The true purpose of the extension was to allow both sides to work out their positions for the coming peace talks. Even before these got underway, the Germans violated the terms of the cease-fire by transferring six divisions to the Western Front.*

How eager the Bolsheviks were for normal relations with Germany is seen from the fact that immediately after the cease-fire they welcomed to Petrograd a German delegation under Count Wilhelm von Mirbach. The delegation was to arrange for an exchange of civilian prisoners of war and the resumption of economic and cultural ties. Lenin received Mirbach on December 15/28. It is from this delegation that Berlin received the first eyewitness accounts of conditions in Soviet Russia.† The Germans first learned from Mirbach that the Bolsheviks were about to default on Russia’s foreign debts. On receipt of this information, the German State Bank drafted memoranda indicating how this could be done with the least harm to German interests and the greatest to those of the Allies. A proposal to this effect was outlined by V. V. Vorovskii, Lenin’s old associate and now Soviet diplomatic representative in Stockholm, who proposed that the Russian Government annul only debts incurred after 1905: since most German loans to Russia had been made before 1905, the major burden of such a default would fall on the Allies.²² *

86. The Russian delegation arrives at Brest-Litovsk. In front, Kamenev. Speaking to German officer, A. Ioffe.

81. The signing of the Armistice at Brest (November 23’December 6, 1917). Sitting on the right, Kamenev and behind him (concealed), Ioffe. On the German side sitting fourth from left, General Hoffmann.

The talks at Brest resumed on December 9/22. Kühlmann again headed the German delegation. The Austrian mission was chaired by Count Czernin, the Minister of Foreign Affairs; present were also the foreign ministers of Turkey and Bulgaria. The German peace proposals called for the separation from Russia of Poland as well as Courland and Lithuania, all of which at the time were under German military occupation. The Germans must have thought these terms reasonable, for they had come to Brest in a hopeful and conciliatory mood, expecting to reach agreement in principle by Christmas. They were quickly disappointed. Ioffe, under instructions to drag out the talks, made vague and unrealistic counterproposals (they had been drafted by Lenin) calling for peace “without annexations and indemnities” and “national self-determination” for the European nations as well as the colonies.²³ In effect, the Russian delegation, behaving as if Russia had won the war, asked the Central Powers to give up all their wartime conquests. This behavior raised among the Germans first doubts about Russian intentions.

The peace talks were carried out in an atmosphere of unreality:

The scene in the Council Chamber at Brest-Litovsk was worthy of the art of some great historical painter. On one side sat the bland and alert representatives of the Central Powers, black-coated or much beribboned and bestarred, exquisitely polite.… Among them could be noted the narrow face and alert eyes of Kühlmann, whose courtesy in debate never failed; the handsome presence of Czernin, who was put up to fly the wilder sort of kite, because of his artless bonhomie; and the chubby Pickwickian countenance of General Hoffmann, who now and then grew scarlet and combative when he felt that some military pronouncement was called for. Behind the Teutonic delegates was an immense band of staff officers and civil servants and spectacled professorial experts. Each delegation used its own tongue, and the discussions were apt to be lengthy. Opposite the ranks of Teutondom sat the Russians, mostly dirty and ill-clad, who smoked their large pipes placidly through the debates. Much of the discussion seemed not to interest them, and they intervened in monosyllables, save when an incursion into the ethos of politics let loose a flood of confused metaphysics. The Conference had the air partly of an assembly of well-mannered employers trying to deal with a specially obtuse delegation of workmen, partly of urbane hosts presiding at a village school treat.²⁴

On Christmas Day, carried away by the spirit of the occasion, Count Czernin, to the great irritation of the Germans, offered to surrender all the territories Austria had conquered during the war if the Allies would join in the peace negotiations: he was under instructions to avoid at all costs a breakdown of the armistice and to be prepared, if necessary, to sign a separate treaty.²⁵ The Germans felt in a stronger position, since they were counting on the coming spring offensive in the West to bring them victory. In response to the Russian demand that the Central Powers give the inhabitants of Poland and other Russian areas occupied by them the right to self-determination, Kühlmann tartly responded that these areas had already exercised this right by separating themselves from Russia.

Having reached a stalemate, the talks were adjourned on December 15/28, but the less publicized negotiations between “expert” legal and economic commissions went on.

Assessing the results, some Germans began to wonder whether the Russians desired peace or were merely playing for time to unleash social unrest in Western Europe. Certain Russian actions lent support to the skeptics. German intelligence intercepted a letter from Trotsky to a Swedish collaborator in which the Commissar of Foreign Affairs wrote that “a separate peace involving Russia is inconceivable; all that matters is to prolong the negotiations so as to screen the mobilization of international Social-Democratic forces promoting general peace.”²⁶ As if to demonstrate that such indeed was its intention, on December 26, in an action without precedent in international relations, the Soviet Government officially allocated 2 million rubles to foreign groups supporting the Zimmerwald-Kiental platform.* Nor were German suspicions assuaged by Ioffe’s demand that the German Government emulate the Soviet example by publishing the stenographic records of the political talks at Brest, which were designed, on the Russian side, to carry Bolshevik propaganda to German workers.

At this point, the German military stepped in. In a letter to the Kaiser on January 7 (December 25), which was to exert on him a strong influence, Hindenburg complained that the “weak” and “conciliatory” tactics pursued by the German diplomats at Brest had given the Russians the impression that Germany needed peace as badly as they did. This had a detrimental effect on army morale. Without spelling out what he had in mind, Hindenburg was alluding to the alarming effects of the policy of “fraternization” of Russian and German troops, promoted by the Bolsheviks along the armistice front. It was time to act forcefully: if Germany did not show determination in the east, how could she expect to impose on the Western Allies the kind of peace that her world position required? Germany should redraw the borders in the east in a manner that would prevent wars in the future.²⁷

The Kaiser, who was also losing patience with the diplomatic shillyshallying at Brest, agreed. As a result, the German position appreciably hardened: the pretense of a negotiated peace was given up in favor of a dictated one.

82. Russian and German troops fraternizing: Winter 1917–18.

The Brest talks resumed on December 27/January 9. This time Trotsky headed the Russian delegation: he came with the intention of continuing to play for time and broadcasting propaganda. Lenin agreed to this strategy only reluctantly. Trotsky had to promise that if the Germans saw through it and presented an ultimatum, the Russian delegation would capitulate.²⁸

On his arrival, Trotsky had the unpleasant surprise of learning that during the recess in the negotiations, the Germans had established separate channels of communication with Ukrainian nationalists. On December 19/ January 1, a Ukrainian delegation, composed of young intellectuals, had arrived in Brest at the Germans’ invitation to open separate talks.²⁹ The German objective was to detach the Ukraine and make it into a protectorate. In December 1917, the Ukrainian Council, or Rada, had proclaimed Ukrainian independence. The Bolsheviks refused to recognize this act and, in violation of the right of “national self-determination” which they had officially proclaimed, sent a military force to reconquer the region.³⁰ The Germans estimated that Russia received one-third of her food and 70 percent of her coal and iron from the Ukraine: her separation would appreciably weaken the Bolsheviks, making them even more dependent on Germany, and, at the same time, go a long way toward meeting Germany’s own pressing economic needs. Assuming the role of a traditional diplomat, Trotsky declared that the German action was interference in his country’s internal affairs, but that was all he could do. On December 30/January 12, the Central Powers recognized the Ukrainian Rada as that country’s legitimate government. This was a prelude to a separate peace treaty with the Ukraine.

Then came the presentation of German territorial claims. Kühlmann advised Trotsky that his country found the Russian demand for a peace “without annexations and contributions” unacceptable and intended to detach territories under German occupation. As concerned Czernin’s offer to give up all conquests, this lost its validity since it had been conditional on the Allies joining in the peace talks, which they had not done. On January 5/18, General Max Hoffmann unfolded a map which showed the disbelieving Russians the new border between the two countries.³¹ It called for the separation of Poland and German annexation of extensive territories in western Russia, including Lithuania and southern Latvia. Trotsky responded that his government found such demands absolutely unacceptable. On January 5/18, which happened to have been the very day when the Bolsheviks were dispersing the Constituent Assembly, he had the temerity to say that the Soviet Government “adheres to the view that where the issue at stake is the destiny of a newly formed nation, a referendum is the best means of expressing the will of the people.”³²

Trotsky communicated the German terms to Lenin, following which he requested an adjournment of the political talks for twelve days. He departed for Petrograd the same day, leaving Ioffe behind. How nervous the Germans were about this postponement may be gathered from the fact that in informing Berlin, Kühlmann urged that the Bolshevik request for an adjournment not be treated as a rupture of negotiations.³³ The Germans had reason to fear that a collapse of the peace negotiations could set off civil disturbances in the industrial centers of Germany. On January 28, a wave of political strikes organized by the left wing of the socialist movement and involving more than one million workers did break out in various parts of Germany, including Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Kiel, Leipzig, Munich, and Essen. Here and there “workers’ councils” sprang up. The strikers called for peace without annexations and contributions and self-determination for the nations of Eastern Europe—that is, for the acceptance of Russian peace terms.³⁴ While there exists no evidence of direct Bolshevik involvement, the influence of Bolshevik propaganda on the strikers was obvious. The German authorities responded with vigorous, occasionally brutal repression: by February 3 they had the situation under control. But the strikes were troublesome evidence that, whatever happened at the front, the situation at home could not be taken for granted. People longed for peace and the Russians seemed to hold the key to it.

The German demands split the Bolshevik leadership into three contending factions, which subsequently merged into two.

The Bukharin faction wanted to break off the talks and continue military operations, mainly by means of partisan warfare, while fanning the flames of revolution in Germany. This position enjoyed great popularity in Bolshevik ranks: both the Petrograd and Moscow bureaus of the party passed resolutions in this spirit.³⁵ Bukharin’s biographer believes that his policy, later labeled “Left Communism,” reflected the wishes of the majority of Bolsheviks.³⁶ Bukharin and his adherents saw Western Europe on the brink of social revolution: since such a revolution was acknowledged as essential to the survival of the Bolshevik regime, peace with “imperialist” Germany struck them as not only immoral but self-defeating.

Trotsky headed a second faction, which differed from the Left Communists only in tactical nuances. Like Bukharin, he wanted the German ultimatum rejected, but in the name of an unorthodox slogan of “neither war nor peace.” The Russians would break off the Brest talks and unilaterally declare the war at an end. The Germans then would be free to do what they wanted and what the Russians could not prevent them from doing in any event—annex vast territories on their western and southwestern frontier—but they would have to act without Russian complicity. This procedure, Trotsky maintained, would free the Bolsheviks from the burden of carrying on an unpopular war, reveal the brutality of German imperialism, and encourage German workers to revolt.

Lenin, supported by Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin, opposed Bukharin and Trotsky. His sense of urgency and his belief that Russia was in no position to bargain received reinforcement from a report submitted to the Sovnarkom on December 31/January 13 by Krylenko, the Commissar of War. On the basis of responses to questionnaires distributed to delegates at the All-Army Conference on Demobilization, Krylenko concluded that the Russian army, or what was left of it, retained no combat capability.³⁷ Without an army worthy of the name, Lenin reasoned, one could not stand up to a disciplined and well-equipped enemy.

Lenin formulated his views on January 7/20 in “Theses on the question of the immediate conclusion of a separate and annexationist peace.”³⁸ Here he made the following points:

1. Before its ultimate triumph, the Soviet regime faced a period of anarchy and civil war: it needed time for “socialist reorganization.”

2. Russia required at least several months, “in the course of which the regime must have a completely free hand to triumph over the bourgeoisie, to begin with, in its own country” and to organize its forces.

3. Soviet policy must be determined by domestic considerations because of the uncertainty whether a revolution would break out abroad.

4. In Germany, the “military party” had gained the upper hand: Russia will be presented with an ultimatum demanding territorial concessions and financial contributions. The government has done everything in its power to prolong the negotiations but this tactic has run its course.

5. The opponents of an immediate peace on German terms wrongly argue that such a peace would violate the spirit of “proletarian internationalism.” If the government decided to continue fighting the Germans, as they wished, it would have no alternative but to seek help from the other “imperialist bloc,” the Entente, which would turn it into an agent of France and England. Continuing the war thus was not an “anti-imperialist” move, because it called for a choice between two “imperialist” camps. The task of the regime, however, was not to choose between “imperialisms,” but to consolidate power.

6. Russia indeed must promote revolutions abroad, but this cannot be done without account of the “correlation of forces”: at present Russian armies are powerless to stop a German advance. Furthermore, the majority of Russia’s “peasant” army favored the “annexationist” peace demanded by Germany.

7. If Russia persisted in its refusal to accept current German peace terms, it would eventually have to accept even more onerous ones: but this would be done not by the Bolsheviks but by their successors, because in the meantime the Bolsheviks would have been toppled from power.

8. A respite will give the government the opportunity to organize the economy (nationalize the banks and heavy industry), which “will make socialism invincible in Russia and the entire world, creating, at the same time, a solid economic basis for a powerful worker-peasant Red Army.”

Lenin had another reason in mind which he could not spell out because it would have revealed that, notwithstanding his protestations, he really desired the World War to continue. He felt certain that as soon as the “bourgeoisie” of the Central Powers and the Entente made peace, they would join forces and attack Soviet Russia. He hinted at this danger during the debates on the Brest Treaty: “Our revolution was born of the war: if there were no war, we would have witnessed the unification of the capitalists of the whole world, a unification on the basis of a struggle against us.”³⁹ Projecting his own political militancy, he gave his “enemies” much too much credit for astuteness and decisiveness: in fact, no such “unification” would occur after the November 1918 Armistice. But believing in the danger, he had to prolong the war in order to gain time for building an armed force able to withstand the expected “capitalist” assault.

On January 8/21, 1918, the Bolsheviks convened a conference of party leaders from three strongholds: Petrograd, Moscow, and the Ural region. Lenin presented a resolution calling for the acceptance of the German ultimatum: it received a bare fifteen votes out of sixty-three. Trotsky’s compromise resolution in favor of “neither peace nor war” won sixteen votes. The majority (thirty-two delegates) voted for the resolution of the Left Communists, demanding an uncompromising “revolutionary war.”*

The discussion next shifted to the Central Committee. Here, Trotsky moved for an immediate, unilateral suspension of hostilities and the concurrent demobilization of the Russian army. The motion carried with the barest majority, 9–7. Lenin responded with an impassioned speech in favor of an immediate peace on German terms,⁴⁰ but he remained in the minority, which dwindled still further the next day when the Bolshevik Central Committee met in joint session with the Central Committee of the Left SRs, who strenuously opposed Lenin’s peace proposals. Here again Trotsky’s resolution carried the day.

With this mandate in hand, Trotsky returned to Brest. The talks resumed on January 15/28. Trotsky continued playing for time with irrelevant remarks and propagandistic speeches, which now began to irritate even the self-possessed Kühlmann.

While Russo-German negotiations bogged down in rhetoric, the Germans and Austrians settled with the Ukrainians. On February 9, the Central Powers signed a separate peace treaty with the Ukrainian Republic which made it a de facto German protectorate.⁴¹ German and Austrian troops moved into the Ukraine, where they restored a certain degree of law and order. Their price for this welcome action was massive shipments westward of Ukrainian foodstuffs.

The deadlock in the Russo-German political talks was broken by a cable which the Kaiser, under the influence of his generals, sent to Brest on February 9. In it he ordered an ultimatum to be given to the Russians:

Today, the Bolshevik Government has addressed my troops en clair [klerom] by radio, and urged them to rise and openly disobey their military superiors. Neither I nor His Excellency Field Marshal von Hindenburg can accept and tolerate any longer such a state of affairs! This must be ended as soon as possible! Trotsky must sign by 8 p.m. tomorrow, the 10th [of February] …, without procrastination, peace on our terms.… In the event of refusal or attempts at procrastination and other pretexts, the negotiations are broken off at eight o’clock on the night of the 10th [and] the armistice terminated. In this event, the armies of the Eastern Front will move forward to the preassigned line.⁴²

The next day, Kühlmann advised Trotsky of his government’s ultimatum: he was to sign, without further discussions or other delays, the German text of the peace treaty. Trotsky refused to do so, saying that Soviet Russia was leaving the war and would proceed to demobilize her armies.⁴³ The economic and legal discussions, however, which had in the meantime moved to Petrograd, could continue, if so desired. Trotsky then boarded his train and left for Petrograd.

Trotsky’s unorthodox move threw the German rank into complete confusion. By now, no one doubted any longer that the Russians were using the peace talks as a diversion. But this conceded, it was by no means obvious how Germany should respond. Continue the fruitless negotiations? Compel the Bolsheviks by military action to accept her ultimatum? Or remove them from power and put in their place a more acceptable regime?

German diplomats counseled patience. Kühlmann feared that German workers would fail to understand the resumption of hostilities on the Eastern Front and would cause trouble. He further worried that Austria-Hungary would be forced out of the war.⁴⁴

But the military, who in the winter of 1917–18 dominated German politics, had different ideas. Massing forces in the west for the decisive campaign scheduled for mid-March, they had to have perfect certainty that the Eastern Front was secure or they could not continue shifting troops to the Western Front. They also needed access to Russian foodstuffs and raw materials. Military intelligence from Russia indicated that the Bolsheviks had the worst intentions toward Germany but also that they were in a most precarious position. Walther von Kaiserlingk, the Admiralty’s Chief of Operations, who went to Petrograd with Mirbach’s mission, sent back alarming reports.⁴⁵ Having observed the Bolshevik regime at close quarters, he concluded it was “insanity in power” (regierender Wahnsinn). Run by Jews for Jews, it presented a mortal threat not only to Germany but to the entire civilized world. He urged that the German-Russian frontier be shifted far to the east, to shield Germany from this plague. Kaiserlingk further proposed the penetration of Russia by German business interests: for the second time in her history (an allusion to the Normans) Russia was ready to be colonized. Other firsthand reports depicted the Bolshevik regime as weak and despised. Lenin was said to be exceedingly unpopular and protected from assassins more assiduously than any tsar. Kühlmann’s sources indicated that the Bolsheviks’ only support came from the Latvian Riflemen: if they were bought off, the regime would collapse.⁴⁶ Such eyewitness accounts strongly impressed the Kaiser and inclined him toward the generals’ point of view.

Combining the information he received on the instability of the Bolshevik regime with evidence of its systematic campaign to demoralize the German army, Ludendorff, with Hindenburg’s backing, urged that the Brest negotiations be broken off, following which the army would march into Russia, remove the Bolsheviks, and install in Petrograd a more acceptable government.⁴⁷

The recommendations of the Foreign Ministry and the General Staff clashed at a conference at Bad Homburg on February 13 which the Kaiser chaired.⁴⁸ Kühlmann pressed the conciliatory line. The sword, he argued, could not eliminate “the center of the revolutionary plague.” Even if German forces occupied Petrograd, the problem would not disappear: the French Revolution demonstrated that foreign intervention only inflamed nationalist and revolutionary passions. The best solution would be an anti-Bolshevik coup carried out by Russians with German assistance: but whether he favored such policy, Kühlmann did not say. The Foreign Minister received support from the Vice-Chancellor, Friedrich von Payer, who spoke of the widespread desire for peace among the German people and the impossibility of overthrowing the Bolsheviks by military force.

Hindenburg disagreed. Unless decisive steps were taken in the east, the war on the Western Front could drag on for a long time. He wanted to “smash the Russians [and] topple their government.”

The Kaiser sided with the generals. Trotsky had come to Brest not to make peace, he said, but to promote revolution, and he did so with Allied support. The British envoy in Russia should be told that the Bolsheviks are enemies: “England should fight the Bolsheviks alongside the Germans. The Bolsheviks are tigers, they must be exterminated in every way.”⁴⁹ In any event, Germany had to act, otherwise Britain and the United States would take over Russia. The Bolsheviks, therefore, “had to go.” “The Russian people have been turned over to the vengeance of Jews, who are connected with all the Jews in the world—that is, the Freemasons.”*

The conference decided that the armistice would expire on February 17, following which German armies would resume offensive operations against Russia. Their mission was not clearly spelled out. The military plan to overthrow the Bolsheviks was soon given up, however, because of the objections of the civilian authorities.

In accord with these instructions, the German staff at Brest informed the Russians that Germany would recommence military operations on the Eastern Front at noon, February 17. The Mirbach mission in Petrograd was ordered home.

Despite their bravado, it is by no means clear that the Germans knew what they wanted: whether to compel the Bolsheviks to accept their peace terms or to remove them from power. Neither then nor later were they able to decide on their priorities: whether they were primarily interested in seizing more Russian territory or installing in Russia a more conventional government. In the end, territorial greed prevailed.

The German notification of impending military action reached Petrograd on the afternoon of February 17. At the meeting of the Central Committee, which convened immediately, Lenin renewed his plea to return to Brest and capitulate, but he again suffered a narrow defeat, 6–5.⁵⁰ The majority wanted to wait and see whether the Germans would carry out their threat: if they indeed marched into Russia and no revolution broke out in Germany and Austria, there would still be time to bow to the inevitable.

The Germans were true to their word. On February 17, their troops advanced and occupied Dvinsk without encountering resistance. General Hoffmann described the operation as follows:

This is the most comic war that I have ever experienced—it is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece, and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks, entrains another detachment, and moves on. The procedure has in any event the charm of novelty.⁵¹

For Lenin, this was the last straw. Though it was not entirely unexpected, he was appalled by the passivity of Russian troops. Given their unwillingness to fight, Russia lay wide open to the enemy’s advance. Lenin seems to have been in possession of the most sensitive decisions of the German Government, possibly supplied by German sympathizers through Bolshevik agents in Switzerland or Sweden. On the basis of this information, he concluded that the Germans contemplated taking Petrograd and even Moscow. He was infuriated by the smugness of his associates. As he saw it, there was nothing to prevent the Germans from repeating their coup in the Ukraine—that is, replacing him with a right-wing puppet and then suppressing the Revolution.

But when the Central Committee reassembled on February 18, he once again failed to win a majority. His resolution in favor of capitulation to the German demands received six votes against seven cast for the motion jointly presented by Trotsky and Bukharin. The party leadership was hopelessly deadlocked. There was a danger that the division would split the party’s rank and file, destroying the disciplined unity which was its main source of strength.

At this juncture, Trotsky came to Lenin’s assistance: switching sides, instead of supporting his own resolution he voted for Lenin’s. Trotsky’s biographer believes that he did so partly in fulfillment of a promise to Lenin to give in if the Germans invaded Russia and partly to avert what could have been a disastrous cleavage in the party.⁵² When another vote was taken, seven members voted in favor of Lenin’s motion and six opposed it.⁵³ On the basis of this slenderest of majorities, Lenin drafted a cable informing the Germans that the Russian delegation was returning to Brest.⁵⁴ Several Left SRs were shown the text, and when they approved it, it was transmitted by wireless.

Then came the shock. The Germans and Austrians, instead of immediately suspending their offensive, kept on advancing into Russia’s interior. In the north German units entered Livonia, while in the center they moved, still unopposed, on Minsk and Pskov. In the south the Austrians and Hungarians also went forward. On the face of it, these operations, carried out after the Russians had signaled their readiness to accept German terms, could have only one meaning: Berlin was determined to seize the Russian capitals and topple the Bolsheviks. This was where Lenin drew the line: according to Isaac Steinberg, he said on February 18 that he would fight only if the Germans demanded of his government to give up power.⁵⁵

Days passed and there was still no response from the advancing Germans. At this point, panic seized the Bolshevik leaders: they passed emergency measures, one of which was to have especially grave consequences. On February 21–22, still without a word from the Germans, Lenin wrote and signed a decree entitled “The socialist fatherland in danger.”⁵⁶ Its preamble stated that the actions of the Germans indicated they had decided to suppress the socialist government of Russia and restore the monarchy. To defend the “socialist fatherland” urgent measures were required. Two of these turned out to have lasting consequences. One called for the creation of battalions of forced labor made up of “all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class” to dig trenches. Resisters were to be shot. This initiated the practice of forced labor, which in time would affect millions of citizens. Another clause read: “Enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, German spies, are to be executed on the spot.” The provision introduced irrevocable penalties for crimes which were neither defined nor on the statute books, since all laws had by then been annulled.⁵⁷ Nothing was said about trials or even hearings for the accused liable to capital punishment. In effect, the decree gave the Cheka the license to kill, of which it soon made full use. The two clauses marked the opening phase of Communist terror.

Lenin had warned his colleagues that if the Germans resumed military operations, the Bolsheviks would have to seek French and English help, which is what they now proceeded to do.

Although the Germans could not decide which to give precedence, they at least drew a distinction between their short-term interests in Russia, connected with the war, and Russia’s long-term geopolitical importance to them. The Allies had only one interest in Russia, and that was to keep her in the war. Russia’s collapse and the prospect of a separate peace were for the Allies calamities of the first order, likely to lead to a German victory, for with dozens of divisions transferred to the west, the Germans could crush the exhausted French and British forces before the Americans arrived in significant numbers. For the Allies, therefore, the uppermost priority in regard to Russia was reactivating the Eastern Front, with Bolshevik cooperation, if possible, and if not, then with any other force available: anti-Bolshevik Russians, Japanese, Czech prisoners of war interned in Russian camps, or, as a last resort, their own troops. Who the Bolsheviks were, what they stood for, was of no concern to them: they showed interest neither in the internal policy of the Bolshevik regime nor in its international objectives, which increasingly preoccupied the Germans. Bolshevik “fraternization” policies, their appeals to workers to strike and soldiers to mutiny, found as yet no response in Allied countries and hence gave no cause for alarm there. The Allied attitude was clear and simple: the Bolshevik regime was an enemy if it made peace with the Central Powers, but a friend and ally if it stayed in the fight. In the words of Arthur Balfour, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, as long as the Russians fought the Germans their cause was “our cause.”⁵⁸ The U.S. Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, expressed the same sentiments in a message of January 2, 1918, meant for transmittal to Lenin’s government, although never sent:

If the Russian armies now under the command of the people’s commissaires commence and seriously conduct hostilities against the forces of Germany and her allies, I will recommend to my Government the formal recognition of the de facto government of the people’s commissaires.⁵⁹

Because of their lack of interest in the subject, the Allies possessed very inadequate information on the internal conditions in Bolshevik Russia. They were not particularly well served by their diplomatic missions there. George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, was a competent but conventional foreign service officer, while Francis, a St. Louis banker, was, in the words of a British diplomat, “a charming old gentleman” but presumably no more than that. Neither seems to have been aware of the historic importance of the events in the midst of which they found themselves. The French envoy, Joseph Noulens, an ex-Minister of War and a socialist, was intellectually better prepared for his job, but his dislike of Russians and his brusque, authoritarian manner reduced his effectiveness. To make matters worse, in March 1918, the Allied missions lost direct contact with the Bolshevik leaders because they would not follow them to Moscow: from Petrograd they moved first to Vologda, and from there, in July, to Archangel.* This obliged them to rely on secondhand reports provided by their agents in Moscow.

The latter were young men who threw themselves body and soul into the Russian drama. Bruce Lockhart, a onetime British Consul in Moscow, served as a link between London and the Sovnarkom; Raymond Robins, head of the U.S. Red Cross mission to Russia, did the same for Washington; and Captain Jacques Sadoul, for Paris. The Bolsheviks did not take these intermediaries terribly seriously, but they realized their utility: they cultivated and flattered them, and treated them as confidants. In this manner they managed to persuade Lockhart, Robins, and Sadoul that if their countries offered Russia military and economic aid, the Bolsheviks would break with the Germans and perhaps even return to the war. Unaware that they were being used, the three agents adopted these views as their own and championed them vigorously with their governments.

Sadoul, a socialist, whose mother had taken part in the Paris Commune, felt the strongest ideological attraction for the Bolsheviks: in August 1918 he would defect to them, for which he would be condemned to death in absentia as a deserter and traitor.†

Robins was a devious individual who in his communications with Lenin and Trotsky expressed enthusiasm for their cause but on returning to the United States pretended to oppose Bolshevism. An affluent social worker and labor organizer with socialist leanings, the self-styled colonel, on the eve of his departure from Russia, sent Lenin a farewell note in which he wrote:

Your prophetic insight and genius of leadership have enabled the Soviet Power to become consolidated throughout Russia and I am confident that this new creative organ of the democratic life of mankind will inspire and advance the cause of liberty throughout the world.*

He further promised, on his return, to “continue efforts” in interpreting “the new democracy” to the American people. However, testifying soon afterward before a Senate committee on conditions in Soviet Russia, Robins urged economic assistance to Moscow on the disingenuous grounds that it was a way of “disorganizing Bolshevik power.”†

Lockhart was ideologically the least committed of the three, but he, too, allowed himself to be turned into an instrument of Bolshevik policy.^‡

Sadoul and Robins had met occasionally with Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Communist leaders after the Bolshevik coup. These contacts multiplied in the second half of February 1918, during the interval between the Bolshevik acceptance of the German ultimatum (February 17) and the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (March 14). During these two weeks, the Bolsheviks, afraid that the Germans wanted to remove them from power, put out urgent appeals to the Allies for help. The Allies responded positively. The French were especially forthcoming. They abandoned now the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army being formed in the Don Region, which Noulens had supported financially because of its anti-German stand: on his recommendation the French Government had previously contributed 50 million rubles to General Alekseev to help organize a new Russian army. At the beginning of January 1918, General Henri Niessel, the new head of the French military mission in Russia, advised cutting off Alekseev on the grounds that he headed a “counterrevolutionary” force. The advice was adopted: assistance to Alekseev was terminated and Niessel received authority to open negotiations with the Bolsheviks.^§ Lockhart similarly opposed support for the Volunteer Army, which he, too, depicted in dispatches to the Foreign Office as counterrevolutionary. In his judgment, the Bolsheviks were the most reliable anti-German force in Russia.⁶⁰

During the hectic days that followed the resumption of German offensive operations, the Bolshevik high command decided to seek Allied help. On February 21, Trotsky communicated, through Sadoul, with Niessel to inquire whether France would be willing to help Soviet Russia stop the German offensive. Niessel contacted the French Ambassador, and received an affirmative response. That day Noulens cabled Trotsky from Vologda: “In your resistance to Germany you may count on the military and financial cooperation of France.”⁶¹ Niessel advised Trotsky on the measures Soviet Russia should take to impede the Germans and promised military advisers.

The French response was discussed by the Central Committee late in the evening of February 22. By this time Trotsky was in possession of a memorandum from Niessel outlining the measures which France was prepared to take to help the Russians.⁶² The document, said to be lost, contained concrete proposals of French monetary and military aid. Trotsky urged acceptance and moved a resolution to this effect. Lenin, who could not attend, voted in absentia with a laconic note: “Please add my vote in favor of taking ’tatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.”⁶³ The motion barely passed, with six votes for and five against, because of the opposition of Bukharin and the other advocates of “revolutionary war.” After he was defeated, Bukharin offered to resign from the Central Committee and the editorship of Pravda, but did neither.

As soon as the Central Committee had ended its deliberations—it was during the night of February 22–23—the issue was Put before the Sovnarkom. Here Trotsky’s motion carried as well, over the objections of the Left SRs.

The following day, Trotsky informed Sadoul of his government’s readiness to accept French help. He invited Niessel to Smolnyi to consult with Podvoiskii, General Bonch-Bruevich, and other Bolshevik military experts on anti-German operations. Niessel was of the opinion that Soviet Russia had to form a fresh military force with the assistance of former tsarist officers, secured by appeals to patriotism.⁶⁴

The Bolsheviks now positioned themselves to switch sides in the event the Germans tried to topple them. They knew that the Allies paid little attention to their policies at home and abroad and would give them generous help in return for a reactivation of the Eastern Front. There can be little doubt that if the Germans had followed through on the recommendations of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the Bolsheviks, in order to stay in power, would have made common cause with the Allies and allowed them the use of Russian territory for military operations against the Central Powers.

It is indicative of how far along Russo-Allied cooperation had progressed that late in February Lenin dispatched Kamenev to Paris as Soviet “diplomatic representative.” Kamenev traveled by way of London, arriving already after his government had ratified the Brest Treaty. He had a chilly reception. France refused him entry, following which he headed back home. En route to Russia he was intercepted by the Germans, who detained him for four months.⁶⁵

Whether the Germans had gotten wind of Bolshevik negotiations with France or by mere coincidence, it so happened that their impatiently awaited response arrived on the very morning the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom had voted to seek Allied help.⁶⁶ It confirmed Lenin’s worst fears. Berlin now demanded not only the territories that its troops had seized in the course of the war but also those they had occupied in the week following the breakdown of the Brest negotiations. The Russians were to evacuate the Ukraine and Finland, as well as demobilize; they were to pay a contribution and make a variety of economic concessions. The note was phrased as an ultimatum requiring an answer within forty-eight hours, following which a maximum of seventy-two hours was allowed for the treaty to be signed.

The next two days, the Bolshevik leadership sat in virtually continuous session. Lenin found himself time and again in a minority. He eventually prevailed only by threatening to resign from all posts in the party and government.

As soon as he had read the German note, Lenin convened the Central Committee. Fifteen members turned up.⁶⁷ The German ultimatum had to be accepted unconditionally, he said: “The politics of revolutionary phrasemongering have come to an end.” The main thing was that the German demands, humiliating as they were, “did not affect Soviet authority”—that is, they allowed the Bolsheviks to stay in power. If his colleagues persisted in their unrealistic course of action, they would have to do so on their own, because he, Lenin, would leave both the government and the Central Committee.

He then presented three cleverly worded resolutions: (1) that the latest German ultimatum be accepted, (2) that Russia make immediate preparations to unleash a revolutionary war, and (3) that the soviets in Moscow, Petrograd, and the other cities be polled on their views of the matter.

Lenin’s threat to resign worked: everyone realized that without him there would be neither a Bolshevik Party nor a Soviet state. On the first and critical resolution, he failed to win a majority, but because four members abstained, the motion carried 7–4. The second and third resolutions presented no problem. The tally over, Bukharin and three other Left Communists once again went through the motions of resigning from all “responsible posts” in the party and government so as to be free to agitate against the treaty inside and outside party circles.

Although the decision to accept the German ultimatum still required approval from the Central Executive Committee, Lenin felt sufficiently confident of the outcome to instruct the operators of the wireless transmitter at Tsarskoe Selo to keep one channel open for a message to the Germans.

That night Lenin gave the CEC a report on the situation.⁶⁸ In the voting that followed he won a technical victory for his resolution to accept the German ultimatum, but only because the Bolshevik members who opposed it had walked out and a number of the other opponents abstained. The final count was 116 for Lenin’s resolution, 85 opposed, and 26 abstaining. On the basis of this far from satisfactory, but formally binding outcome, Lenin drafted in the early hours of the morning, in the name of the Central Executive Committee, an unconditional acceptance of the German ultimatum. It was at once communicated by wireless to the Germans.

In the morning of February 24, the Central Committee met to choose a delegation to go to Brest.⁶⁹ Now numerous resignations from state and party posts were handed in. Trotsky, who had already quit as Commissar of Foreign Affairs, now gave up his other posts as well. He favored a closer relationship with the French and British on the grounds that they were anxious to collaborate with Soviet Russia and had no designs on her territory. Several Left Communists followed the example of Bukharin and turned in their resignations. They spelled out their motives in an open letter. Capitulation to German demands, they wrote, dealt a heavy blow to the revolutionary forces abroad and isolated the Russian Revolution. Furthermore, the concessions which the Russians were required to make to German capitalism would have a catastrophic effect on socialism in Russia: “Surrender of the proletariat’s position externally inevitably paves the way for an internal surrender.” The Bolsheviks should neither capitulate to the Central Powers nor collaborate with the Allies, but “initiate a civil war on an international scale.”⁷⁰

Lenin, who had gotten what he wanted, pleaded with Trotsky and the Left Communists not to act on their resignations until after the Soviet delegation had returned from Brest. Throughout these trying days he displayed brilliant leadership, alternately cajoling and persuading his followers, never losing either patience or determination. It was probably the hardest political struggle of his life.

Who would go to Brest to sign the shameful Diktat? No one wanted his name associated with the most humiliating treaty in Russian history. Ioffe flatly refused, while Trotsky, having resigned, removed himself from the picture. G. Ia. Sokolnikov, an old Bolshevik and onetime editor of Pravda, nominated Zinoviev, whereupon Zinoviev reciprocated by nominating Sokolnikov.⁷¹ Sokolnikov responded that if appointed he would quit the Central Committee. Eventually, however, he let himself be talked into accepting the chairmanship of the Russian peace delegation, which included L. M. Petrovskii, G. V. Chicherin, and L. M. Karakhan. The delegation departed for Brest on February 24.

How intense the opposition to the decision to capitulate to the Germans was even in Lenin’s own ranks is indicated by the fact that on February 24 the Moscow Regional Bureau of the Bolshevik Party rejected the Brest Treaty and unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in the Central Committee.⁷²

Notwithstanding the Russian capitulation, the German armies continued to move forward, toward a demarcation line drawn up by their command and intended as the permanent border between the two countries. On February 24 they occupied Dorpat (Iurev) and Pskov and positioned themselves some 250 kilometers from the Russian capital. The following day they took Revel and Borisov. They kept on advancing even after the Russian delegation had arrived in Brest: on February 28, the Austrians seized Berdichev, and on March 1, the Germans occupied Gomel, following which they went on to take Chernigov and Mogilev. On March 2, German planes dropped bombs on Petrograd.

Lenin took no chances—“there was not a shadow of doubt” that the Germans intended to occupy Petrograd, he said on March 7⁷³—and ordered the evacuation of the government to Moscow. According to General Niessel, the removal of matériel from Petrograd was done with the help of specialists provided by the French military mission.⁷⁴ Without an official decree to this effect being issued, at the beginning of March the commissariats began to transfer to the ancient capital. An article titled “Flight” in Novaia zhizn’ of March 9 depicted Petrograd in the grip of panic, its inhabitants jamming railway stations and, if unable to get on a train, escaping by cart or on foot. The city soon came to a standstill: there was no electric power, no fuel, no medical service; schools and city transport ceased functioning. Shootings and lynchings were a daily occurrence.⁷⁵

Given the exposed position of Petrograd and the uncertainty regarding the intentions of the Germans, the decision to transfer the capital of the Communist state to Moscow made good sense. But one cannot quite forget that when the Provisional Government, for the same reasons, contemplated evacuating Petrograd half a year earlier, no one accused it of treason more vehemently than the same Bolsheviks.

The transfer was carried out under heavy security precautions. Top party and state officials were the first to go, including members of the Central Committee, Bolshevik trade union officials, and editors of Communist newspapers. In Moscow they moved into requisitioned private properties.

Lenin sneaked out of Petrograd at night on March 10–11, accompanied by his wife and his secretary, Bonch-Bruevich.⁷⁶ The journey was organized in the deepest secrecy. The party traveled by special train, guarded by Latvians. In the early hours of the morning, having run into a trainload of deserters whose intentions were not clear, it stopped while Bonch-Bruevich arranged to have them disarmed. The train then went on, arriving in Moscow late in the evening. No one had been told of the trip, and the self-styled leader of the world’s proletariat slunk into the capital as no tsar had ever done, welcomed only by a sister.

Lenin established his residence as well as his office in the Kremlin. Here, behind the stone walls and heavy gates of the fortress constructed in the fifteenth century by Italian architects, was the new seat of the Bolshevik Government. The People’s Commissars with their families also sought safety behind the Kremlin walls. The security of this fortress was entrusted to the Latvians, who expelled from the Kremlin many residents, including a group of monks.

Although it was taken out of considerations of security, Lenin’s decision to transfer Russia’s capital to Moscow and install himself in the Kremlin had deep significance. It symbolized, as it were, the rejection of the pro-Western course initiated by Peter I in favor of the older Muscovite tradition. Though declared “temporary,” it became permanent. It also reflected the new leaders’ morbid fear for their personal safety. To appreciate the significance of these actions one must imagine a British Prime Minister moving out of Downing Street and transferring his residence and office as well as those of his ministers to the Tower of London to govern from there under the protection of Sikhs.

The Russians reached Brest on March 1 and two days later, without further discussion, signed the German treaty.

The terms were exceedingly onerous. They give an idea of the kind of peace treaty that awaited the Allies had they lost the war, and demonstrate how baseless were German complaints about the Versailles Diktat, which was in every respect milder than the treaty that they had forced on helpless Russia.

Russia was required to make major territorial concessions which cost her most of the conquests made since the middle of the seventeenth century: in the west, northwest, and southwest her borders now shrank to those of the Muscovite state. She had to give up Poland and Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Transcaucasia, all of which either became sovereign states under a German protectorate or were incorporated into Germany. Moscow also had to recognize the Ukraine as an independent republic* These provisions called for the surrender of 750,000 square kilometers, an area nearly twice that of the German Empire: by virtue of Brest, Germany tripled in size.⁷⁷

The ceded territories, which Russia had conquered from Sweden and Poland, contained her richest and most populous lands. Here lived 26 percent of her inhabitants, including more than one-third of the urban population. By contemporary estimates,⁷⁸ these areas accounted for 37 percent of Russia’s agricultural harvest. Here were located 28 percent of her industrial enterprises, 26 percent of her railway tracks, and three-quarters of her coal and iron deposits.

But even more galling to most Russians were the economic clauses spelled out in the appendices which granted Germans exceptional status in Soviet Russia.⁷⁹ Many Russians believed that the Germans intended to avail themselves of these rights not only to gain economic benefits but to strangle Russian socialism. In theory, these rights were reciprocal, but Russia was in no position to claim her share.

Citizens and corporations of the Central Powers received de facto exemption from the nationalization decrees which the Bolshevik authorities had passed since coming to power, being allowed to hold in Soviet Russia movable and immovable property as well as to pursue on her territory commercial, industrial, and professional activities. They could repatriate assets from Soviet Russia without paying punitive taxes. The ruling was retroactive: the real estate and the rights to exploit land and mines requisitioned from citizens of the signatory powers during the war were to be restored to their owners; if nationalized, the owners were to be adequately compensated. The same rule applied to the holders of securities of the nationalized enterprises. Provisions were made for the free transit of commercial goods from one country to the other, each of which also granted the other most favored nation status. Setting aside the January 1918 decree which repudiated Russian public and private debts, the Soviet Government acknowledged the obligation to honor such debts in regard to the Central Powers and to resume payments of interest on them, the terms to be determined by separate accords.

These provisions gave the Central Powers—in effect, Germany—unprecedented extraterritorial privileges in Soviet Russia, exempting them from her economic regime and allowing them to engage in private enterprise in what was increasingly becoming a socialized economy. The Germans, in effect, became co-proprietors of Russia; they were in a position to take over the private sector, while the Russian Government was left to manage the nationalized sector. Under the terms of the treaty it was possible for owners of Russian industrial enterprises, banks, and securities to sell their holdings to Germans, in this manner removing them from Communist control. As we shall see, to foreclose this possibility, in June 1918 the Bolsheviks nationalized all large Soviet industries.

Elsewhere in the treaty the Russians committed themselves to demobilize their army and navy—in other words, to remain defenseless; to desist from agitation and propaganda against the governments, public institutions, and armed forces of the other signatories; and to respect the sovereignty of Afghanistan and Persia.

When the Soviet Government made the terms of the Brest Treaty known to its citizens—and it did that with some delay, so fearful was it of the public reaction—there was outrage from the entire political spectrum, from the extreme left to the extreme right. According to John Wheeler-Bennett, Lenin became the most vilified man in Europe.⁸⁰ Count Mirbach, the first German Ambassador to Soviet Russia, cabled the Foreign Office in May that the Russians to a man rejected the treaty, finding it even more repugnant than the Bolshevik dictatorship:

Although Bolshevik domination afflicts Russia with hunger, crimes, and silent executions in a horror for which there is no name, no Russian would even pretend to be willing to purchase German help against the Bolsheviks with the acceptance of the Brest Treaty.⁸¹

No Russian government had ever surrendered so much land or allowed a foreign power such privileges. Russia had not only “sold out the international proletariat”: it had gone a long way toward turning herself into a German colony. It was widely expected—with glee in conservative circles and with rage in radical ones—that the Germans would use the rights given them in the treaty to restore free enterprise in Russia. Thus, in mid-March rumors circulated in Petrograd that the Germans were demanding the return to their owners of three nationalized banks and that before long all banks would be denationalized.

The constitutional law of the new state called for the treaty to be ratified by the Congress of Soviets in two weeks. The congress which was to do this was scheduled to convene in Moscow on March 14.

Although he had met all their conditions, Lenin still did not trust the Germans. He was well informed about the divisions within the German Government and knew that the generals insisted on his removal. He felt it prudent, therefore, to maintain contact with the Allies and to hold out the promise of a radical shift in his government’s foreign policy in their favor.

After the Brest Treaty had been signed but before it was ratified, Trotsky handed Robins a note for transmittal to the U.S. Government:

In case (a) the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets will refuse to ratify the peace treaty with Germany, or (b) if the German Government, breaking the peace treaty, will renew the offensive in order to continue its robbers’ raid, or (c) if the Soviet Government will be forced by the actions of Germany to renounce the peace treaty—before or after its ratification—and to renew hostilities—

In all these cases, it is very important for the military and political plans of the Soviet power for replies to be given to the following questions:

1. Can the Soviet Government rely on the support of the United States of North America, Great Britain, and France in its struggle against Germany?

2. What kind of support could be furnished in the nearest future, and on what conditions—military equipment, transportation supplies, living necessities?

3. What kind of support would be furnished particularly and especially by the United States?

Should Japan—in consequence of an open or tacit understanding with Germany or without such an understanding—attempt to seize Vladivostok and the Eastern Siberian Railway, which would threaten to cut off Russia from the Pacific Ocean and would greatly impede the concentration of Soviet troops toward the east about the Urals—in such case what steps would be taken by the other allies, particularly and especially by the United States, to prevent a Japanese landing on our Far East and to insure uninterrupted communications with Russia through the Siberian route?

In the opinion of the Government of the United States, to what extent—under the above-mentioned circumstances—would aid be assured from Great Britain through Murmansk and Archangel? What steps could the Government of Great Britain undertake in order to assure this aid and thereby to undermine the foundation of the rumors of the hostile plans against Russia on the part of Great Britain in the nearest future?

All these questions are conditioned with the self-understood assumption that the internal and foreign policies of the Soviet Government will continue to be directed in accord with the principles of international socialism and that the Soviet Government retains its complete independence of all non-socialist governments.⁸²

The last paragraph of the note meant that the Bolsheviks reserved the right to work for the overthrow of the very governments from which they were soliciting help.

On the day when he handed the above note to Robins, Trotsky talked with Bruce Lockhart.⁸³ He told the British agent that the forthcoming Congress of Soviets would probably refuse to ratify the Brest Treaty and would declare war on Germany. But for this to happen, the Allies had to offer Soviet Russia support. Then, alluding to proposals circulating in Allied capitals of massive landings of Japanese expeditionary forces in Siberia to engage the Germans, Trotsky said that such a violation of Russian sovereignty would destroy any possibility of a rapprochement with the Allies. Informing London of Trotsky’s remarks, Lockhart said that these proposals offered the best opportunity of reactivating the Eastern Front. U.S. Ambassador Francis concurred: he cabled Washington that if the Allies could prevail on the Japanese to give up their plans for landings in Siberia, the Congress of Soviets would probably turn down the Brest Treaty.⁸⁴

There was, of course, not the remotest possibility that the Congress of Soviets, packed with the customary Bolshevik majority, would dare to deprive Lenin of his hard-won victory. The Bolsheviks used the bait to prevent something they genuinely feared—namely, occupation of Siberia by the Japanese and their intervention in Russian affairs on the side of the anti-Bolshevik forces. According to Noulens, the Bolsheviks had such confidence in Lockhart that they permitted him to communicate with London in code, which even official foreign missions were prohibited from doing.⁸⁵

The first concrete result of the rapprochement with the Allies was the landing on March 9 of a small Allied contingent at Murmansk. Since 1916, nearly 600,000 tons of war matériel sent to the Russian armies, much of it unpaid for, had accumulated here from lack of transport to move it inland. The Allies feared that this matériel might fall into German hands as a result of Brest-Litovsk or the capture of Murmansk by German-Finnish forces. They also worried about the Germans seizing nearby Pechenga (Petsamo) and constructing a submarine base there.

The initial request for Allied protection came from the Murmansk Soviet, which on March 5 cabled Petrograd that “Finnish White Guards,” apparently assisted by German forces, were making preparations to attack Murmansk. The soviet contacted a British naval force and at the same time requested Petrograd for authorization to invite Allied intervention. Trotsky informed the Murmansk Soviet that it was free to accept Allied military assistance.⁸⁶ Thus, the first Western involvement on Russian soil occurred at the request of the Murmansk Soviet and with the approval of the Soviet Government. In a speech which he delivered on May 14, 1918, Lenin explained that the British and French had landed “to defend the Murmansk coast.”⁸⁷

The Allied party which disembarked at Murmansk consisted of 150 British sailors and a few Frenchmen as well as several hundred Czechs.⁸⁸ In the weeks that followed, Britain was in constant communication with Moscow on the subject of Murmansk: unfortunately, the contents of these communications have not been revealed. The two parties cooperated to prevent the Germans and Finns from seizing this important port. Later, under German pressure, Moscow issued protests against the Allied presence on Russian soil, but Sadoul, who was in close contact with Trotsky, advised his government not to take them to heart:

Lenin, Trotsky, Chicherin accept, under the present circumstances, that is, in the hope of an entente with the Allies, the Anglo-French landings at Murmansk and Archangel, it being understood that in order to prevent giving the Germans an excuse for protesting this certain violation of the peace treaty, they themselves will address a purely formal protest to the Allies. They marvelously understand that it is necessary to protect the northern ports and the railroads leading there from German-Finnish ventures.⁸⁹

On the eve of the Fourth Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks held the Seventh (Extraordinary) Congress of their party (March 6–8). The agenda of this hastily convened meeting of forty-six delegates centered on Brest-Litovsk. The discussions in the intimate circle of the initiated, especially Lenin’s defense of his unpopular position, provide a rare insight into Communist attitudes toward international law and relations with other countries.

Lenin vigorously defended himself against the Left Communists.⁹⁰ He surveyed the recent past, reminding his audience how easy it had been to seize power in Russia and how difficult to organize it. One could not simply transfer the methods which had proven so effective in the capture of power to the arduous task of administration. He acknowledged that there could be no lasting peace with the “capitalist” countries and that it was essential to spread the revolution abroad. But one had to be realistic: not every industrial strike in the West spelled revolution. In a very un-Marxist aside, he conceded that it was far more difficult to make revolution in democratic and capitalist countries than in backward Russia.

All this was familiar. Novel were some of Lenin’s candid reflections on the subject of war and peace. To an audience that feared that he had made perpetual peace with a leading “imperialist” power he gave reassurances. First, the Soviet Government had every intention of violating the provisions of the Brest Treaty: in fact, it had already done so “thirty or forty times” (in a mere three days!). Nor did peace with the Central Powers signify abandonment of the class struggle. Peace was by its nature transitory, an “opportunity to gather strength”: “History teaches that peace is a breathing space for war.” In other words, war is the normal condition, peace a respite: there could be no lasting peace with non-Communist countries but only a temporary suspension of hostilities, a truce. Even while the peace treaty was in force, Lenin went on, the Soviet Government—in disregard of its provisions—would organize a new and effective military force. Thus, Lenin comforted his followers, the peace treaty they were asked to approve was merely a detour on the road to global revolution.

The Left Communists restated their objections,⁹¹ but failed to muster enough votes. The motion, approving the treaty, passed 28–9 with one abstention. Lenin then asked the Party Congress to pass a secret resolution, not subject to publication for an indefinite period, giving the Central Committee “the authority at any time to annul all peace treaties with imperialist and bourgeois governments and, in like manner, to declare war on them.”⁹² Readily approved and never formally rescinded, this resolution empowered the handful of men in the Bolshevik Central Committee, at their own discretion, to break all international agreements entered into by their government and to declare war on any and all foreign countries.

There still remained the formality of ratification. Notwithstanding the sham apprehensions Trotsky had confided to the Allied representatives, the issue was never in doubt. The congress was not a democratically elected body but an assembly of initiates: of the 1,100 to 1,200 delegates who gathered on March 14, two-thirds were Bolsheviks. Lenin delivered his standard defense of the treaty in two long-winded and rambling speeches—they were those of a thoroughly exhausted man—in which he pleaded for realism.

He was impatiently awaiting a response to his requests to the United States and British governments for economic and military assistance: he knew full well that as soon as the treaty had been ratified the chances of procuring it were nil.

In the early years of Bolshevik power, knowledge of Russia and interest in Russia’s affairs were in direct proportion to a country’s geographic proximity to her. The Germans, who lived closest, despised and feared the Bolsheviks even as they were dealing with them. France and England were not terribly concerned about the actions and intentions of the Bolsheviks, as long as they stayed in the war. The United States, an ocean away, seemed positively to welcome the Bolshevik regime, and in the months that followed the October coup, lured by fantastic visions of large-scale business opportunities, sought to ingratiate herself with its leaders.

Woodrow Wilson seems to have believed that the Bolsheviks truly spoke for the Russian people,⁹³ and formed a detachment of that grand international army that he imagined advancing toward universal democracy and eternal peace. Their appeals to the “peoples” of the world, he felt, required an answer. This he provided in the speech of January 8, 1918, in which he presented the celebrated Fourteen Points. He went out of his way to praise Bolshevik behavior at Brest:

There is … a voice calling for these definitions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any of the many moving voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people. They are prostrate and all but helpless, it would seem, before the grim power of Germany, which has hitherto known no relenting and no pity. Their power, apparently, is shattered. And yet their soul is not subservient. They will not yield either in principle or in action. Their conception of what is right, of what it is humane and honorable for them to accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy which must challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind; and they have refused to compound their ideas or desert others that they themselves may be safe. They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in what, if in anything, our purposes and our spirit differ from theirs; and I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond, with utter simplicity and frankness. Whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace.⁹⁴

There existed one potentially serious obstacle to Bolshevik-Allied cooperation, and that was the issue of Russian debts. As noted, in January the Bolshevik Government defaulted on all Russian state obligations to both domestic and foreign lenders.⁹⁵ The Bolsheviks took this step with considerable trepidation: they feared that such a violation of international law, involving billions of dollars, could spark a “capitalist crusade.” But the widespread expectation of an imminent revolution in the West overcame caution and the deed was done.

There was no revolution in the West and no anti-Bolshevik crusade. The Western powers took this fresh assault on international law surprisingly calmly. Indeed, the Americans went out of their way to assure the Bolsheviks they had nothing to fear from them. Iurii Larin, Lenin’s closest economic adviser, had a visit from the American Consul in Petrograd, who told him that while the United States could not accept “in principle” the annulment of international loans, it was ready

to accept it de facto, not to demand payment, and to open relations with Russia as if it were a state that had just made its appearance in the world. In particular, the United States could offer us [Soviet Russia] large-scale commercial credit, on the account of which Russia could draw from America machines and raw materials of all kinds with delivery to Murmansk, Archangel, or Vladivostok.

To ensure repayment, the U.S. Consul suggested, Soviet Russia might consider depositing some gold in neutral Sweden and granting the United States concessions in Kamchatka.⁹⁶

What more proof was needed that one could do business with the “imperialist robbers” even while inciting their citizens to revolution? And why not play the business community of one country against that of another? Or pit capitalist industrialists and bankers against the military? The possibilities of such divide et impera policies were endless. And, indeed, the Bolsheviks would exploit to the fullest these opportunities to compensate for their appalling weakness, luring foreign powers with prospects of industrial imports in exchange for food and raw materials which they did not have, even as their own population was starving and freezing.

Every message which the U.S. Government transmitted to the Bolshevik authorities in the early months of 1918 conveyed the sense that Washington took at face value the Bolsheviks’ professions of democratic and peaceful intentions and ignored their calls for world revolution. Hence Lenin and Trotsky had good reason to expect a positive response to their appeal to Washington for help.

The impatiently awaited American response to the inquiry of March 5 arrived on the opening day of the Fourth Congress of Soviets (March 14). Robins handed it to Lenin, who had it immediately published in Pravda. It was a noncommittal note, addressed not to the Soviet Government but to the Congress of Soviets, presumably on the assumption that this body was the equivalent of the U.S. legislature. It refused for the present to grant Soviet Russia aid, but accorded the regime something close to informal recognition. The American President wrote:

May I now take advantage of the meeting of the Congress of the Soviets to express the sincere sympathy which the people of the United States feel for the Russian people at this moment when the German power has been thrust in to interrupt and turn back the whole struggle for freedom and substitute the wishes of Germany for the purpose of the people of Russia?

Although the government of the United States is, unhappily, not now in a position to render the direct and effective aid it would wish to render, I beg to assure the people of Russia through the congress that it will avail itself of every opportunity to secure for Russia once more complete sovereignty and independence in her own affairs, and full restoration to her great role in the life of Europe and the modern world.

The whole heart of the people of the United States is with the people of Russia in the attempt to free themselves forever from autocratic government and become the masters of their own life.

Woodrow Wilson

Washington, March 11, 1918⁹⁷

The British Government reacted in a like spirit.⁹⁸

This was not what the Bolsheviks had expected: they had overestimated their ability to play one “imperialist” camp against the other. Hoping that perhaps Wilson’s cable was only the first installment, with more to come, Lenin kept on badgering Robins for a follow-up message. When it became obvious that no more would be forthcoming, Lenin drafted an insulting reply to the American “people” (rather than their President) in which he promised that the revolution in their country would not be long in coming:

The congress expresses its gratitude to the American people, above all to the laboring and exploited classes of the United States, for the sympathy expressed to the Russian people by President Wilson through the Congress of Soviets in the days of severe trials.

The Russian Socialistic Federative Republic of Soviets takes advantage of President Wilson’s communication to express to all peoples perishing and suffering from the horrors of imperialistic war its warm sympathy and firm belief that the happy time is not far distant when the laboring masses of all countries will throw off the yoke of capitalism and will establish a socialistic state of society, which alone is capable of securing just and lasting peace, as well as the culture and well-being of all laboring people.⁹⁹

Amid peals of laughter, the Congress of Soviets unanimously approved the resolution (with two minor changes), which Zinoviev described as a “resounding slap” in the face of American capitalism.¹⁰⁰

The congress duly ratified the Brest Treaty. The motion to this effect received 724 votes, 10 percent less than there were Bolsheviks present, but more than a two-thirds majority; 276 delegates, or one-quarter, nearly all of them Left SRs, with the addition perhaps of some Left Communists, voted against; 118 delegates abstained. After the results had been announced, the Left SRs declared that they were withdrawing from the Sovnarkom. This ended the fiction of a “coalition government,” although for the time being the Left SRs continued to work in lower-level Soviet institutions, including the Cheka.

In a secret vote, the congress approved the resolution of the Bolshevik Central Committee authorizing the government to renounce the Brest Treaty and declare war at its discretion.

Lenin has been widely credited by the Bolsheviks with prophetic vision in accepting a humiliating treaty that gave him the time he needed and then collapsed of its own weight. When the Bolsheviks renounced the Brest Treaty on November 13, 1918, following Germany’s capitulation to the Western Allies, his stock in the Bolshevik movement rose to unprecedented heights. Nothing he had done contributed more to his reputation for infallibility: he never again had to threaten resignation to have his way.

And yet there is nothing to indicate that in pressuring his colleagues to accede to German demands Lenin had expected an imminent collapse of the Central Powers. In none of his speeches and writings between December 1917 and March 1918, private and public, when he used every conceivable argument to bring the opposition around, did he claim that time was running out for Germany and that Soviet Russia would soon regain all that she had to give up. Quite the contrary. In the spring and summer of 1918 Lenin seemed to have shared the optimism of the German High Command that they were about to deal the Allies a crushing defeat. Leonid Krasin certainly was not speaking only for himself when on his return from Germany early in September 1918 he assured the readers of Izvestiia that, thanks to her superb organization and discipline, Germany would have no difficulty staying in the war yet another, fifth, year.¹⁰¹ The Bolshevik faith in Germany’s victory is evidenced by the elaborate accords that Moscow concluded with Berlin in August 1918, accords viewed by both countries as a prelude to a formal alliance.¹⁰² How inconceivable Germany’s defeat appeared to Moscow is attested to by the fact that as late as September 30, 1918, when Imperial Germany lay in her death throes, Lenin authorized the transfer to Berlin of assets valued at 312.5 million deutsche marks, as provided for by the August 27 supplementary accord to the Brest Treaty, although he could have delayed this payment with impunity and then canceled it. One week before Germany sued for an armistice, the Soviet Government reconfirmed that German citizens could withdraw deposits from Soviet banks and take them out of the country.¹⁰³ The inescapable conclusion from this evidence is that Lenin bowed to the German Diktat, not because he believed that Germany would be unable to enforce it for very long, but, on the contrary, because he expected Germany to win and wanted to be on the winning side.

The circumstances surrounding the Brest-Litovsk Treaty furnish the classic model of what was to become Soviet foreign policy. Its principles may be summarized as follows:

1. The highest priority at all times is to be assigned to the retention of political power—that is, sovereign authority and the control of the state apparatus over some part of one’s national territory. This is the irreducible minimum. No price is too high to secure it; for its sake anything and everything can be sacrificed: human lives, land and resources, national honor.

2. Ever since Russia had undergone the October Revolution and turned into the center (“oasis”) of world socialism, its security and interests take precedence over the security and interests of every other country, cause, or party, including those of the “international proletariat.” Soviet Russia is the embodiment of the international socialist movement and the base from which the socialist cause is promoted.

3. To purchase temporary advantages, it is permissible to make peace with “imperialist” countries, but such peace must be treated as an armed truce, to be broken when the situation changes in one’s favor. As long as there is capitalism, Lenin said in May 1918, international agreements are “scraps of paper.”¹⁰⁴ Even in periods of nominal peace, hostilities should be pursued by unconventional means with a view to undermining the governments with which one has signed accords.

4. Politics being warfare, foreign policy, as much as domestic policy, must always be conducted unemotionally, with the closest attention being paid to the “correlation of forces”:

We have great revolutionary experience, and from that experience we have learned that it is necessary to follow the tactics of relentless advance whenever objective conditions allow it.… But we have to adopt the tactic of procrastination, the slow gathering of forces when the objective conditions do not offer the possibility of making an appeal to the general relentless advance.¹⁰⁵

Yet another fundamental principle of Bolshevik foreign policy was to be revealed after the enactment of the Brest Treaty: the principle that Communist interests abroad had to be promoted by the application of divide et impera, or, in Lenin’s words, by the

most circumspect, careful, cautious, skillful exploitation of every, even the smallest “crack” among one’s enemies, of every conflict of interest among the bourgeoisie of the various countries, among the various groups or various species of the bourgeoisie within individual countries …¹⁰⁶

*The earliest Soviet polpredy were stationed in neutral countries: V. V. Vorovskii in Stockholm, and Ia. A. Berzin in Berne. After the Brest Treaty had been ratified, A. A. Ioffe took over the Berlin mission. The Bolsheviks tried to appoint first Litvinov and then Kamenev to the Court of St. James’s, but both were rejected. France also would not accept a Soviet representative until after the Civil War.

*George Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (Princeton, N.J., 1956), 75–76. In early November, the Bolsheviks began to publish the secret treaties between Russia and the Allies from the files of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With their appeals, the Bolsheviks emulated the French revolutionaries who in November 1792 pledged “brotherhood and assistance” to any nation desirous of “regaining” its freedom.

*J. Buchan, A History of the Great War, IV (Boston, 1922), 135. The Armistice Agreement forbade “major” transferals of troops from or to the Russian front while it was in force.

†According to the French general Henri A. Niessel, the Allies intercepted German cables from Petrograd to Brest and from them learned how desperately the Germans desired peace: General [Henri A.] Niessel, Le Triomphe des Bolchéviks et la Paix de Brest-Litovsk: Souvenirs, 1917–1918 (Paris, 1940), 187–88.

*The Soviet Government’s default on all state obligations, domestic as well as foreign, was announced on January 28, 1918. The sum of foreign debts annulled by this measure has been estimated at 13 billion rubles or $6.5 billion: G. G. Shvittau, Revoliutsiia i Narodnoe Khoziaistvo v Rossii (1917–1921) (Leipzig, 1922), 337.

*Text: J. Degras, ed., Documents on Russian Foreign Policy, I (London, 1951), 22. The money was placed at the disposal of Vorovskii.

*Lenin, PSS, XXXV, 478; LS, XI, 41; Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 (Vienna-Munich, 1966), 22. Stalin, who supported Lenin, said that a revolution in the West was not in sight. The protocols of this conference are said to have disappeared. Isaac Steinberg says that the Left SRs liked the “neither war nor peace” formula and had a hand in its formulation: Als ich Volkskommissar war (Munich, 1929), 190–92.

*Sovetsko-Germanskie Otnosheniia ot peregovorov v Brest-Litovske do podpisaniia Rapall’skogo dogovora, I (Moscow, 1968), 328. Although inspired by Kaiserlingk’s dispatches from Petrograd, this anti-Semitic remark echoed the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was soon to become favorite reading fare of the simpleminded in quest of an “explanation” for the World War and Communism.

*Each of the three Allied ambassadors left memoirs: George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, 2 vols. (London, 1923); David Francis, Russia from the American Embassy (New York, 1921); and Joseph Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1933).

†The sentence was not carried out after Sadoul had returned home and joined the French Communist Party. His revolutionary experiences are recorded in an interesting book, first published in Moscow, in the form of letters to Albert Thoma: Notes sur la Révolution Bolchevique (Paris, 1920), supplemented by Quarante Lettres de Jacques Sadoul (Paris, 1922).

*Letter dated April 25, 1918, in the Raymond Robins Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. In responding, Lenin expressed confidence that “proletarian democracy … will crush … the imperialist-capitalist system in the New and Old Worlds”: Ministerstvo Inostrannykh Del SSSR, Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, I (Moscow, 1957), 276.

†George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, N.J., 1958), 237–38. In light of the above evidence it is difficult to agree with Kennan that Robins’s “feelings with respect to the Soviet government did not rest on any partiality to socialism as a doctrine” or that he entertained no “predilection for communist ideology”: Ibid, 240–41. Robins later eulogized Stalin and was received by him in 1933. See Anne Vincent Meiburger, Efforts of Raymond Robins Toward the Recognition of Soviet Russia and the Outlawry of War, 1917–1933 (Washington, D.C., 1958), 193–99.

‡See his Memoirs of a British Agent (London, 1935) and The Two Revolutions: An Eyewitness Account (London, 1967).

§A. Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations Franco-Soviétiques, 1917–1924 (Paris, 1981), 53. Niessel does not mention these facts in his memoirs, Le Triomphe des Bolcheviks.

*In fulfillment of the peace terms, in mid-April Moscow proposed to the Ukrainian Government the opening of negotiations leading to mutual recognition. For various reasons having to do with internal Ukrainian politics, these negotiations got underway only on May 23. On June 14, 1918, the governments of Soviet Russia and the Ukrainian Republic signed a provisional peace treaty, which was to be followed by final peace negotiations, but these never took place: The New York Times, June 16, 1918, 3.