In October 1917 on the Russian calendar, and in November on the Western European calendar, which was twelve days ahead of the Russian calendar, the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia. We are used to thinking that Lenin was at the head of the Revolution. However, his unimpeachable authority among the Bolsheviks is one of many myths that do not correspond to reality. The Bolsheviks’ own Central Committee, which ignored Lenin’s directives; the Petrograd Soviet, at whose helm stood Leon Trotsky, an “interdistrictite” (not a Bolshevik) and an obvious rival for Lenin’s place in the Russian Revolution; the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which convened in October 1917 in Petrograd as a body of several socialist parties, of which the Bolsheviks were neither the largest nor the main party of the Russian Revolution—none of these organizations recognized Lenin as its head and leader, none of these constituent parts of the October armed uprising in Petrograd had any intention of submitting to his will.
But Lenin and his socialist rivals occupied unequal positions. The latter had to decide on the correct course of action in the interests of the Russian and the international revolution. He needed to determine what steps he had to take in order to end up at the head of the first Soviet government. It is not surprising that while his opponents argued and debated, Lenin—who made his first public appearance in Petrograd at the Congress of Soviets only on October 26, after Trotsky’s Petrograd Soviet had carried out a coup on the night of October 25—went ahead and proclaimed the creation of a government, the Sovnarkom, that was to be run by a handful of Bolsheviks under his own leadership.
Lenin’s declaration about the creation of the Sovnarkom, however, was of no inspiration to anyone. It introduced a split into the already weak and heterogeneous socialist movement, and proclaimed the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the creation of the Soviet government not by the will of the Congress of Soviets—which was an elected body, however small the number of voters that had elected it—but by the will of the Bolshevik party. And not by the entire party, since this question had not been discussed and its opinion on the matter was not known, nor the party’s entire Central Committee, or the entire delegation at the Congress of Soviets, but only by the will of a small group of party comrades who had supported Lenin on this issue.
In the very first hours and days of the rule of the Bolshevik government, Lenin worked out a strategy that he successfully applied through all the years that followed. By using threats and blackmail, to the point of announcing his resignation, he would obtain support for his revolution—by a single-vote margin if need be—arranging for multiple rounds of voting until the exhausted opponents finally yielded to him and granted him a majority. Then he would pass a resolution to the effect that the entire Central Committee (or the entire delegation of the party) fully supported this majority, which in reality consisted of Lenin and a negligible minority, in all party policies. Then he would impose the minority’s policies—in the name of the Bolshevik Party—on the VTsIK or the Congress of Soviets, splitting up or breaking up congresses at which the left wing lacked a majority. He rejected the idea of a “homogeneous socialist government” formed by a relatively wide circle of Soviet voters; and he rejected the idea of a nationwide Constituent Assembly—“the master of the Russian land”—elected by an even broader section of the population (although even here one could not speak of a secret ballot or a universal franchise, especially since the Kadet Party had been dismantled before the Assembly convened). Instead, Lenin proposed dictatorship, and not even the dictatorship of the party or the Central Committee, but his own, personal dictatorship, repeatedly giving his enemies and friends to understand that he would never cede this power to anyone as long as he was alive.
After announcing the creation of the Sovnarkom, Lenin overcame multiple crises, one after another. Making use of his opponents’ departure from the Congress of Soviets, he started passing Bolshevik resolutions. Securing the Central Committee’s support to establish a one-party government, he entered into negotiations with the Left SRs, whose political platform was close to the Bolsheviks’, and obtained the ousting of VTsIK Chairman Lev Kamenev, who had come out against Lenin’s diktat. Krupskaya recalled:
On November 21 [Old Style], 1917, Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was elected to replace L. B. Kamenev as VTsIK chairman. His candidacy had been put forward by Ilyich. The choice was remarkably successful. Yakov Mikhailovich was a very firm person.... He was irreplaceable.... What was needed was an organizer of the highest caliber. Yakov Mikhailovich was exactly such an organizer.1
Sverdlov was by no means a random choice “promoted” by Lenin. Since the Seventh All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) in April, Sverdlov headed the Secretariat of the party’s Central Committee—the Central Committee’s executive arm. On August 6 (19), the Secretariat of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee was formally established at a restricted meeting of the Central Committee, which included Felix Dzerzhinsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvei Muranov, Yelena Stasova, and Yakov Sverdlov. Sverdlov remained the chairman of the Secretariat. The Encyclopedia of the October Revolution indicates that the Secretariat “maintained contact with local party organizations,” “directly oversaw the Bolshevik Party’s military organizations and local party organizations,” and assembled a “staff of traveling agents for delivering instructions from the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee to local party organizations.”2 In other words, as early as August 1917, the Secretariat was already in charge of the party’s operations and the party’s personnel. And Sverdlov was the head of that office.
By December 1917, the Cheka—the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission—was formed for the purpose of fighting opponents outside the party. The leadership of this crucial institution, which would form the foundation of the GPU and the NKVD, was assumed by Dzerzhinsky, one of the Secretariat’s organizers. Meanwhile, the organizational, political, and ideological command over the army and the foreign policy of Soviet Russia went to Trotsky (formally, he became People’s Commissar of War in March).
Leon Trotsky, one of the most prominent Russian and international revolutionaries, one of the ideologues of the first Russian revolution and chairman of the Petersburg Soviet, had emigrated after the defeat of the revolutions of 1905–1907. Returning to Petrograd in early May 1917, he was the organizer of the October coup in the capital. It appears he and Lenin formed an agreement literally on the day of the coup, October 24, 1917. Trotsky was the head of the Petrograd Soviet, the main lever of the Revolution. However, he did not have his own organization. The “interdistrictites” (Mezhrayontsy), headed by Trotsky, finally merged with the Bolshevik Party in July-August 1917. Also, unlike Lenin, Trotsky did not have his own private, mafia-style support structure. He was interested in leading the Revolution, while Lenin was interested in power: after seizing power, he planned to begin leading the Revolution. Lastly, Trotsky understood that, as a Jew, he could lead an uprising, but he could not become the head of the government of Russia.
The coalition between Trotsky and Lenin was a natural and mutually beneficial step. In return for giving up his “interdistrictites” to the Bolsheviks, turning the Petrograd Soviet into a tool for Lenin’s policies, fully supporting Lenin in the extremely risky and in essence adventurist enterprise of seizing power and forming the Sovnarkom in circumvention of the will of the Second Congress of Soviets, influential socialist parties and labor unions, Trotsky obtained a Bolshevik Party membership card, became a member of its Central Committee, and received the minister of foreign affairs portfolio in the Sovnarkom. It was precisely because Trotsky was dealing with individuals who believed in power and valued it, such as Lenin, Sverdlov, and Dzerzhinsky, that his personal rise to power should be seen as a brilliant performance. Without endless petty fights against his real and imagined enemies, which perpetually preoccupied Lenin, without any shady “German money,” without compromising himself by passing through German enemy territory, Trotsky became the number two man in the government with an ease that others might have envied. It was precisely this arrogant gesture—and his emphatic indifference to personal power, the ease with which everything came to him, and the popularity that he enjoyed among Communist activists—that was not forgiven by the members of the Bolshevik elite whom the October Revolution had passed by—Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin.
In the end, Trotsky never became an equal member of Lenin’s mafia. His position within the government was guaranteed only by his personal agreement with Lenin. It was clear that with Lenin’s departure, Trotsky—the “non-Bolshevik”—would inevitably be ousted from power as well. Without knowledge of Lenin’s agreement and the obvious weakness of his position, entirely dependent upon Lenin’s personal power, one cannot correctly explain Trotsky’s actions in the intraparty struggle of 1918–1924.
Trotsky’s policies on the issue of a peace treaty with Germany became the first and most important test of his loyalty to Lenin. Because for many decades patent lies and slander were heaped upon him, first by Stalin, and then by the post-Stalinist Soviet leadership, it is extremely difficult to give an accurate description of Trotsky’s actions during the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in January-March 1918. Trotsky himself, remaining loyal to Lenin to the end of his days, did not reveal everything in his numerous articles, books, diaries, and memoirs. But since it was precisely his stance in Brest-Litovsk that was invoked as an example of his obvious non-Bolshevism and even treason when accusations against him were made, Trotsky’s story cannot be told without an elucidation of the Brest-Litovsk agreement.
Up to 1917 Germany appeared to be the leader of the revolutionary movement—its Social Democratic Party was the most powerful in the world—a world revolution naturally assumed a revolution in Germany. The revolution did not necessarily have to begin there, but its victory in Germany seemed to all revolutionaries to be a requirement for success. The Social Democratic rhetoric of the time did not allow for any other conception of world revolution. And Russian revolutionary Lenin, prior to February 1917, saw no greater role for himself than as the leader of the extremist wing of Russia’s Social Democratic movement, which was unquestionably secondary and subsidiary to the Communist movement in Germany.
In the days leading up to the war, it was to Germany’s Social Democratic movement that the socialists in the world turned to. It seemed that by voting against giving the government war credits in the Reichstag, the German Social Democratic Party could stop the impending tragedy. However, the German socialists voted in favor of the war funding, in part because they hoped that the war would topple the monarchy in Russia, which they regarded as the main enemy of the international socialist movement.
The Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party believed—just as the Menshevik wing did—in the eventual triumph of socialism in the world. This seemed as obvious then as, say, the inevitable demise of colonial empires does today. The answer to the question, “Will the world revolution come?”, was invariably positive, built entirely on their faith in ultimate victory. However, after October 1917, this once-theoretical question had to be examined from a more practical angle. Was it more important to preserve Soviet rule in Russia—where the revolution had already taken place—at any cost; or to try to organize a revolution in Germany, even at the price of seeing Soviet rule in Russia fail?
In 1918, the answer to this question was not as obvious as it might appear today. The consensus among Europe’s socialist leaders was that in backward Russia it would be impossible not only to build socialism, but also to hold on to power for any extended period of time without the support of European socialist revolutions, if only because (as the Communists believed) Russia’s “capitalist encirclement” would consider it imperative to overthrow its socialist regime. The revolutionaries saw a revolution in Germany as the only guarantee for the Soviet government to remain in power in Russia.
Lenin thought otherwise. In October 1917, breaking out of oblivion in Switzerland and seizing power in Russia with lightning speed, he showed his many opponents how much they had underestimated this unique individual—the leader of a small extremist sect. Bolshevism not only seized the reigns of power in Russia, but created a real and unique base to launch a world revolution, to organize a Communist coup in Germany itself, where, as everyone assumed, the ultimate victory of socialism in the world would come from. For Lenin, the German revolution took second place to the already victorious revolution in Russia. Even more than that: it would be wrong to hurry toward a successful revolution in Germany, since when that happened, the center of gravity of the Communist world would shift to the industrialized West and Lenin would be left behind as nothing more than the head of the government of an “underdeveloped,” “backward,” and “uncultured” country.
It is in the light of Lenin’s changed views about the revolution in Germany that one must examine the history of the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk between December 1917 and March 1918, which ended in a peace treaty between Russia, on the one hand, and Germany and the other Central Powers, on the other. His position at these negotiations—his insistence on forming a “Tilsit truce” for the sake of a respite from war with Germany—seems so reasonable that one can only marvel at the adventurism, naiveté, and carefree idealism of all of his opponents, from the Bukharin-led Left Communists headed to Trotsky with his formula “neither war nor peace.” To be sure, Lenin’s position seems correct mainly because it appeals to notions that most people find familiar: a weak army cannot fight against a strong one; if resistance is impossible, a peace treaty must be signed in the face of an ultimatum. But this is an ordinary person’s way of thinking, not a revolutionary’s. Such thinking would not have made it possible to seize power in October 1917 and to hold on to it against a coalition of socialist parties as Lenin had done, with Trotsky’s help, during the days of November 1917. Indeed, such a way of thinking would have made it impossible to be a revolutionary. For some reason, the core of the party, with the exception of Lenin, was against signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; in fact, a large number of party functionaries supported Trotsky’s “demagogical” formula. And no one viewed the state of things as pessimistically as Lenin. Still, all of these people had to be governed by some kind of logic that we propose to discover.
The revolution and the revolutionaries were subject to their own special laws, which were perceived by the majority of the population as obscure, deranged, and irrational. But once it abandoned these laws, the revolution perished. In them lay the only source of power for the revolution and the only promise of victory. Lenin stepped back from these laws for the sake of preserving his power and leadership in the global Communist movement. From the point of view of absolute Communist interests, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a catastrophe. It unequivocally destroyed any chance (however slight it had been) of a revolution in Germany, and consequently, of a swift revolution throughout Europe. The treaty, formed against the wishes of the majority of the revolutionary party, became the Soviet leadership’s first pragmatic step, which set the stage for all of the USSR’s subsequent unprincipled and inconsistent policies.
Ironically, it turned out that in order to secure victory for the revolution in Russia, a potential revolution in Germany had to be sacrificed. While in order to secure victory for the revolution in Germany, it might have been necessary to sacrifice Soviet rule in Russia. This was the choice that the treaty represented to the Soviet government. A peace treaty with Germany gave the German government a certain leeway from fighting and improved the general state of the country. By contrast, the Soviet government’s refusal to sign a treaty would have impacted Germany’s military and political situation negatively and increased the chances for a German revolution. This, at least, was the view shared by the German Communists, on the one hand, and the German government, on the other. As early as December 1917 German leftists had tried to prevent the formation of a separate peace between Russia and Germany. They distributed a declaration stating that peace negotiations would have a ruinous effect on a likely revolution in Germany and must be aborted.
The positions of Karl Liebknecht, the leader of the German Communists, and Lenin, the head of the Soviet government, were different. The German Communists demanded a revolution in Germany for the sake of a world revolution. Lenin’s objective was to ensure that the Sovnarkom remained in power at any cost, so that he might keep power in his own hands and, in time, come to “reign over the international Communist movement.”3 By contrast, if Liebknecht did want to save the top position in the future Comintern for himself, this did not go against the interests of the European revolution.
It was initially believed that the Bolsheviks were engaging in peace talks with the German government exclusively for propaganda purposes and to gain some time, not in order to sign an actual treaty. Liebknecht emphasized that if the negotiations “did not lead to a socialist peace,” it would be necessary “to curtail the negotiations, even if their [Lenin’s and Trotsky’s] government should fall because of this.”4 Lenin, however, was playing his own game and seeking to obtain a temporary peace with the German imperial government, seeing in this his only means of concentrating power in his own hands and splitting up the unified capitalist world; i.e., his aim was to form an alliance with the German Empire against England and France.
Liebknecht saw victory in a German revolution; Lenin wanted to influence the contradictions between the Central Powers and the Allied Powers. Liebknecht was interested in seeing Germany lose the war as quickly as possible; Lenin, by signing a separate peace, wanted Germany to avoid losing the war for as long as possible. He feared that Soviet rule in Russia would be overthrown by the joint efforts of Germany and the Allied Powers as soon as a peace treaty was signed on the Western Front. But by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and delaying Germany’s defeat, Lenin did exactly what Liebknecht had effectively accused him of doing: sabotaging the German revolution.
In Russia itself, the Bolshevik Party was not unanimous regarding the negotiations with Germany even when they were understood to mean signing a peace treaty without annexations or reparations, conducting revolutionary propaganda, and playing for time while simultaneously preparing for revolutionary war. Those who supported an immediate revolutionary war (in time, they became known as the Left Communists) initially dominated the party organizations in Moscow and Petrograd. The Left Communists had a majority in the Second Moscow Regional Congress of Soviets, which took place from December 10 to December 16, 1917, in Moscow. Of the 400 members of the Bolshevik delegation in the Moscow Soviet, only 13 supported Lenin’s proposal to sign a separate peace with Germany. The remaining 387 voted for revolutionary war.
On December 28, a resolution was passed at a plenary session of the Moscow regional party bureau calling for an end to the peace talks with Germany and in favor of breaking off diplomatic relations with all capitalist states. On the same day, the majority of the Petrograd party committee came out against Germany’s peace conditions. Both organizations demanded that a party conference be convened to discuss the Central Committee’s policies with regard to the peace talks. Since the delegations to such a conference would consist of the committees themselves and not the local organizations of the RSDLP, the Left Communists were assured a majority. Consequently, in order to avoid a defeat, Lenin began delaying the convocation of the conference.
The All-Army Demobilization Congress, which convened in Petrograd on December 15 (28) and remained in session until January 3 (16), 1918, also opposed Lenin’s policies. On December 17 (30), Lenin prepared a special questionnaire for the congress. Delegates were supposed to answer ten questions about the state of the army and its ability to conduct a revolutionary war with Germany. He asked whether the German army could advance in winter conditions, whether German troops could occupy Petrograd, whether the Russian army could hold the front line, whether it was better to prolong the peace talks or to curtail them and start a revolutionary war. He hoped to obtain the congress’s approval to continue the negotiations. But the delegates came out in favor of revolutionary war: their resolution called for conducting an intensive propaganda campaign against an annexationist peace, insisting that the peace talks be transferred to Stockholm, “prolonging the peace talks,” conducting all necessary preparations to reorganize the army and provide for the defense of Petrograd, advocating and campaigning for the inevitability of a revolutionary war. The resolution was not published.
At the same time, the Moscow regional and Moscow city committees of the party—both headed by Left Communists—as well as a number of the largest party committees—from the Urals, Ukraine, and Siberia—all came out against Lenin. Lenin—who had just returned from abroad and had little enough influence as it was with “members of the underground” like Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, and Kamenev, who believed (perhaps rightly) that the Revolution had been prepared by them, and not by the emigrants (Lenin and Trotsky) who returned once everything was ready—was losing his control over the party. The issue of peace was gradually becoming transformed into the issue of Lenin’s power within the Bolshevik Party and his weight in the government of Soviet Russia. And so, he launched a desperate campaign against his opponents—a desperate campaign for the peace treaty, for his leadership in the party, and for power.
Lenin’s original position was weak. Most party activists came out against Germany’s demands and in favor of cutting off the peace talks and declaring a revolutionary war on German imperialism to establish a Communist regime in Europe. In addition, on January 7 (20), Trotsky reported to the Sovnarkom that Germany would not accept peace without annexations. But an annexationist peace—it would seem—should have been unacceptable to the leaders of the Russian Revolution. However, unexpectedly for the whole party, the head of the Soviet government, Lenin, once again came out for the peace treaty—and in favor of accepting Germany’s annexationist conditions. He expressed his point of view in his ‘Theses on the Question of an Immediate Conclusion of a Separate and Annexationist Peace,” written on the same day. The theses were discussed at a special party meeting on January 8 (21), 1918, with 63 people present, mainly delegates from the Third Congress of Soviets, which was to begin two days later.
Lenin tried to convince his listeners that without an immediate peace agreement, the Bolshevik government would fall under the onslaught of the peasant army. But if the threat to the Bolsheviks came from the peasant army, then it would have been expedient to disband it as quickly as possible and not leave it under arms, as Lenin in fact attempted to do both before and after the peace treaty was signed. If the army was ineffectual, then it should have been demobilized at once, as Trotsky suggested. If Lenin feared that that the Bolsheviks would be toppled by the Russian army in January 1918, when the army was so weak that it could do nothing—in Lenin’s own words—to oppose Germany, then how could he have been so bold as to seize power in October 1917, when the army of the Provisional Government was far more powerful than the current one, while the Bolshevik government had not yet even been formed? Lenin’s well-known pronouncement that if the Bolsheviks refused to sign a peace agreement, the Germans would sign it with another government, was probably not sincere. He must have understood that no other government would accept a separate, annexationist peace with Germany, just as no other government would agree to break off diplomatic, military, and economic ties with the Allied Powers. If only for these reasons alone, Germany could have had no better ally than Lenin.
During the first stage of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, Lenin received support from Trotsky on the question of the peace agreement. However, Trotsky was for peace only as long as this was a peace “without annexations or reparations.” And he turned against peace when it became clear that Russia would have to sign an annexationist agreement. It was obvious to him from the first day of the negotiations to the last that the Soviet government was in no condition to wage a revolutionary war. In this respect, he had no argument with Lenin. At the same time, he believed that the Germans would be unable to “quash a revolution that would proclaim an end to the war.”5 And on that point, he and Lenin differed. Lenin was betting on a peace treaty with Germany and was prepared to capitulate to the Germans on one condition: that they should not demand the resignation of Lenin’s government.
At the beginning of 1918, it seemed that Trotsky’s calculations were correct. The dragging peace talks and the deteriorating food situation in Germany and Austria-Hungary led to the rapid growth of the strike movement, and a general strike in Austria-Hungary. Workers’ councils were organized in a number of districts on the Russian model. On January 9 (22), after the government promised to sign a peace treaty with Russia and to improve the food situation, the strikers returned to work.
A week later, on January 15 (28), strikes paralyzed Berlin’s defense industry, quickly spread to other sectors and soon engulfed the entire country. The center of the movement was Berlin, where, according to official reports, about half-a-million workers were on strike. As in Austria-Hungary, workers’ councils were organized, whose main demand was the formation of a peace agreement and the establishment of a republic. It was against the background of these events that Trotsky posed the question of whether “the German working class and the German army should be put to a test: on this side, a workers’ revolution, which declares that the war is over, and on that side, the Hohenzollern government, issuing orders to crush the revolution.”6
Lenin believed that Trotsky’s plan was “tempting” but risky, since the Germans could launch an offensive. And taking a risky course, in Lenin’s opinion, was out of the question, since “nothing [was] more important” than the Russian Revolution. Here, Lenin again disagreed with Trotsky, the Left Communists, and the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks’ allies who believed that only the victory of the revolution in Germany would guarantee that the Soviets would hold on to power in backward, agricultural Russia. Lenin, on the other hand, believed only in the success of only those enterprises which he was personally in charge of, and therefore the revolution in Russia was far more important to him than the revolution in Germany. The risk of Trotsky’s position did not consist in the possibility that the Germans might launch an offensive, but that, by formally signing a peace treaty with Germany, Lenin would remain in power, while without a formal agreement with the Germans, he might be driven from his position.
On January 21, at a party meeting devoted to the problem of peace with Germany, Lenin suffered another defeat. His theses, written on January 7, were not approved, despite the fact that on the day of the meeting Lenin added another paragraph, calling for a delay in finalizing the peace agreement. The transcript of this meeting, it turns out, “has not survived.” The theses themselves were apparently not allowed to be published. In a final vote, only 15 people supported his proposal to sign a separate peace, while 32 voted for the Left Communists and 16 for Trotsky, who on that day for the first time proposed not signing a formal peace agreement, but making it known to the world that Russia would no longer participate in the war and would demobilize its army.
Trotsky’s position, summed up in the formula “neither war nor peace,” provoked arguments and objections. Nowadays, it is usually portrayed as an absurdity. However, his formula did have a perfectly concrete practical meaning. He based his reasoning on the premise that Germany was in no condition to engage in major offensive action on the Russian front (otherwise, the Germans would not have sat down at the negotiating table in the first place) and that that the Bolsheviks must preserve “moral purity before the working classes of all countries.”7 In addition, it was important to refute the general belief that the Bolsheviks had simply been bribed by the Germans and that everything taking place in Brest-Litovsk was nothing more than a well-played piece of theater, where each part had already been determined in advance. For these reasons, Trotsky now proposed resorting to a political demonstration: the plan was to discontinue military action due to the impossibility of engaging in it any further, but at the same time to not sign any peace accords with the Central Powers on principle. One of the undeniable advantages of Trotsky’s position was that the formula “neither peace nor war” did not commit the Bolsheviks to any course of action with respect to a revolutionary war and even made it possible for them to initiate military operations at any moment. Here is what Trotsky himself wrote about this subject many years later, when he was no longer living in Russia:
Many clever fellows use any available pretext to ridicule the slogan “neither peace nor war.” It clearly appears to them, evidently, to go against the very nature of things. Meanwhile...several months after Brest, when the revolutionary situation in Germany became completely apparent, we dissolved the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk—without starting a war with Germany.8
However, after dissolving the treaty and not declaring war, the Red Army began a Western offensive (and quite a successful one, at that). If it was this—waging war without declaring it—that was called “Trotsky’s middle line”—“neither war nor peace”—then it is clear that in time it won the support of the majority of the core of the party. The Left Communists with Bukharin at their head proposed waging a war in a gentlemanly fashion, by declaring it beforehand. Trotsky proposed making a declaration of peace, waiting until Russian forces gathered sufficient strength, and then initiating military operations without declaring anything to anyone.
Traditionally, war had been seen by mankind in terms of the loss or gain of territory. Defeat in war meant a loss of land, while victory meant gain. This ancient approach was, of course, rejected by the revolutionaries. Neither Lenin, nor Trotsky, nor Bukharin saw victory or defeat as consisting in the gain or loss of territory, especially since the Bolsheviks had always favored the breakup of the Russian empire and popular self-determination. The Left Communists put more value on preserving the purity of the Communist principle of not compromising with the imperialists, even if this meant the defeat of the revolution in Russia. Trotsky found a less worrisome solution: he did not trample on any principles, but he also did not take the risk of declaring a revolutionary war that would have left Germany with no other choice than to topple the Soviet government.
Trotsky’s formula, therefore, exhibited neither the demagogy that has been attributed to it by Soviet historiographers (it was in Lenin’s theory of “peace” that the real demagogy was to be found), nor the reckless adventurism of those who, under Bukharin’s leadership, supported an immediate revolutionary war. By the standards of the revolutionary times, Trotsky’s position was moderate. Like the Left Communists, he believed that signing a peace treaty would not guarantee the cessation of military operations, that the revolutionaries had no reason to trust the “imperialists,” that Germany would continue to take offensive action when it could. And under such circumstances, it was better to sign no documents at all, but to appeal to the proletariat of all countries and even to make use of the Allied Powers’ assistance. In addition, during those months there was a widespread view in revolutionary circles that Germany was in no condition to take offensive action, and that even if it did manage to launch an offensive, it would not be able to hold on to occupied territories without risking an uprising in Berlin.
Lenin alone stubbornly insisted on a separate agreement with the Germans on terms dictated by Germany. At a Central Committee meeting on January 11 (24), he presented his theses on forming a peace agreement—and suffered a defeat. Bukharin, sharply criticizing Lenin’s speech, declared that the “most correct” position was that of Trotsky, whose formulation—“end the war, conclude no peace, demobilize the army”—was passed by nine votes to seven. At the same time, twelve members to one voted in favor of a proposal introduced by Lenin, for face-saving purposes, “to prolong the signing of the peace treaty for as long as possible”: Lenin was inviting people to vote for an obvious truth, namely, that in purely formal terms it was his resolution that had received the majority of the votes. He did not dare to submit the issue of signing a peace treaty to a vote that day. On the other hand, eleven votes against two, with one member abstaining, rejected the Left Communists’ resolution, which called for revolutionary war. A joint assembly of the RSDLP’s and the Left SRs’ central committees, which convened on the following day, likewise voted for Trotsky’s formula.
The majority stood behind Trotsky. For the second time since October 1917, Lenin’s fate was in the hands of this lucky individual, to whom everything came with great ease, and who therefore never did manage to learn the value of power. Trotsky was too involved as a revolutionary and totally worthless as a tactician. Not seeing any of this, not suspecting that by effortlessly getting the party to embrace his political line—“neither war nor peace”—he was also exerting control over Lenin’s personal power. At the end of January (New Style) he departed for Brest-Litovsk in order to break up the peace talks.
Thanks to the efforts of Soviet historiography, which for decades republished the same lies in book after book, there is a common belief that after returning to Brest-Litovsk to renew negotiations with Germany, Trotsky had orders from the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom to sign a peace treaty. This myth is based on a statement made by Lenin to the Seventh Party Congress, which took place on March 6–8, 1918: “It was agreed that we would hold back until the Germans handed over an ultimatum and consent after the ultimatum was given.”9
It appears, however, that Lenin maligned Trotsky in the eyes of the congress, trying to lay the blame on him for the breakdown of the peace talks and for the German offensive. That this is the case can be inferred from the absence of documents that confirm Lenin’s words, and from the existence of materials that refute them. In his recollections of Lenin, published in 1924 initially in Pravda and then as a separate book, Trotsky elucidated the meaning and contents of the agreement:
Lenin: “Suppose your plan is accepted. We refuse to sign a peace treaty, and then the Germans attack. What do you do then?”
Trotsky: “We sign a peace treaty at gunpoint. Then the situation will be clear to the working class around the world.”
“Will you not then support the call for a revolutionary war?”
“By no means.”
“Putting it that way, the experiment might not seem so dangerous. We risk losing Estonia and Latvia.... It would be a great pity to sacrifice a socialist Estonia,” Lenin joked, “but for the sake of a good peace treaty, I suppose we’d have to agree to that compromise.”
“And what if we sign a peace treaty immediately—would that rule out the possibility of a German military intervention in Estonia and Latvia?”
“Let’s say you’re right. But in this case, it’s only a possibility, whereas in the other case, it’s almost a certainty.”10
Thus, they had in fact agreed that a peace treaty would be signed, not after a German ultimatum, but after the start of a German offensive.
Trotsky touched on this matter more candidly in November 1924 in an article entitled “Our Disagreements,” which was not published at the time. Concerning the Brest-Litovsk talks, he wrote:
I cannot, however, avoid mentioning here the absolutely shameless distortions of the Brest-Litovsk story.... Supposedly, after leaving for Brest-Litovsk with party instructions to sign a peace treaty in the event of an ultimatum, I independently went against these instructions and refused to give my signature. This lie goes beyond all limits. I left for Brest-Litovsk with a single instruction: to prolong the negotiations for as long as possible, and in the event of an ultimatum, to negotiate an extension and come back to Moscow to participate in the Central Committee’s decision. Only Comrade Zinoviev proposed giving me instructions to sign a peace treaty immediately. But this was rejected by everyone else, including Lenin. Everyone agreed, of course, that prolonging the negotiations would worsen the terms of the agreement, but they believed that this negative would be outweighed by the positive agitational purpose that such a strategy would serve. What course of action did I follow in Brest-Litovsk? When things came to an ultimatum, I arranged for an extension, returned to Moscow, and the question was decided by the Central Committee. Not I alone, but the majority of the Central Committee at my suggestion decided not to sign the peace treaty. This was also the decision of the majority of the all-Russian party convention. I left for Brest-Litovsk for the last time with a perfectly clear decision from the party: to not sign the peace treaty. All of this can be easily verified by the Central Committee’s transcripts.11
The same picture emerges from the directives that were sent to Brest-Litovsk by Lenin on orders from the Central Committee. The directives called for a cessation of the peace talks in the event that the Germans should introduce another condition to the negotiating table: recognition of Ukraine’s independence under the leadership of the “bourgeois” Rada.
However, in the case of Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky still came out looking like the villain. Out of loyalty, he could not begin clearing his name while Lenin was alive. But after Lenin’s death, it was already too late. Those who were struggling against Trotsky for power had no interest in the historical truth.
On February 5 (NS), Trotsky met with Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister. The head of the Soviet delegation to Brest-Litovsk was prepared to break off the peace talks and generally tried to provoke the Germans and Austrians into presenting unacceptable demands, declaring that he would “never agree” to the formation of a separate peace treaty between the Central Powers and Ukraine. The Germans accepted the challenge. On the same day, at a meeting in Berlin chaired by Chancellor Georg von Hertling and attended by Ludendorff, a decision was made to “conclude a peace agreement with Ukraine, and discontinue negotiations with Trotsky regardless of whether their outcome was positive or negative.” The form of the interruption (with or without an ultimatum) was left to the discretion of the German delegation in Brest-Litovsk.
On January 27 (February 9), opening the morning session, German foreign minister Kühlmann, and then Czernin, made an offer of peace to the Soviet delegation. At the same time, at a meeting of the political committee, the representatives of the Central Powers announced that they had signed a separate agreement with the Ukrainian Republic. According to the terms, the Rada was recognized as the only legitimate government of Ukraine, and moreover Germany pledged to provide Ukraine with military and political assistance in order to stabilize its regime. The Rada, in its turn, pledged to sell to Germany and Austria-Hungary one million tons of bread, up to 500,000 tons of meat, 400 million eggs, and other food supplies and raw materials, before July 31, 1918. There was also a secret agreement to deliver one million tons of grain. It was stipulated that the peace treaty would be cancelled by the German government if Ukraine failed to make these deliveries.
On the evening of January 27 (February 9), Trotsky wired the Smolny Palace that Kühlmann and Czernin had “offered to resolve the main issue tomorrow once and for all.” The historian A. O. Chubaryan interprets the telegram as referring to the signing of a peace treaty between Germany and Austria-Hungary, on one side, and Ukraine, on the other. “Thus, I repeat,” Trotsky went on, “the final decision will be made tomorrow evening.” Meanwhile, in Kiev, the Bolsheviks were attempting to form a government and announce a takeover of power. “If we receive definite and reliable information from you before 5 p.m. that Kiev is in the hands of the Soviet people,” Trotsky wired Petrograd, “this might have major significance for the negotiations.”12 Within several hours Trotsky’s request was honored, and he received a telegram from Petrograd about the victory of the Soviet government in Kiev. He reported this news to the Central Powers’ delegation. But it is obvious that even if he had been telling the truth, the Germans and the Austrians had no intention of following his advice and tearing up their treaty with Ukraine, which was also useful to them as a means of exerting pressure on the Bolsheviks.
An exchange of opinions regarding the Ukrainian question was scheduled for 6 p.m. on January 28 (February 10). “Today, around 6 p.m., we will give our final answer,” Trotsky wired Petrograd on the same day. “It is necessary to make its essence known to the whole world. Take the necessary measures.”13
What instructions was he given? In a telegram sent to Trotsky at 6:30 a.m. in response to his query, Lenin wrote: “You know our point of view; it has only become firmer in recent days14 and especially after Joffe’s letter. We repeat once more that nothing is left of the Kiev Rada and that the Germans will have to accept this fact if they have not already accepted it. Report to us more often.”15
Lenin didn’t mention a peace agreement. Meanwhile, if the “point of view” that was known to Trotsky was to agree to a German ultimatum and to sign a peace treaty, Lenin would have had no need to speak in such veiled terms. He could have given explicit orders to sign. The answer to this puzzle, of course, is found in Joffe’s letter. Its subject was not the peace treaty, but the Soviet government’s attempt to get Germany to recognize the Soviet Ukrainian delegation in Brest-Litovsk as a legitimate participant in the peace talks. It was the Central Committee’s point of view concerning this question that Trotsky knew so well: no concessions, refusal to recognize the “bourgeois” Rada in Kiev, and in the event of German persistence—an end to the peace talks. At this moment—so decisive for the fate of the Ukrainian Communist revolution—the Soviet government could not recognize the Ukrainian Rada even for the sake of a separate peace with Germany, even if Lenin insisted on it.
Differences of opinion regarding the peace issue had divided not only the Bolsheviks, in those days, but the Germans as well. On February 9 (NS), Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a telegram to Kühlmann at Brest-Litovsk with a directive to conclude the negotiations within 24 hours on conditions dictated by the Germans (and unacceptable to the Bolsheviks). Kühlmann disagreed. In a telegram, he advised the Chancellor that the situation would become completely clear on February 10 (NS) at a Sunday meeting at which the Soviet delegation would have to either accept or reject the German conditions. If the latter happened, the negotiations would end within 24 hours; and then the truce would be broken as well. But if Trotsky accepted the German conditions, then it would be highly unreasonable to break off the peace talks, since this would lead to a conflict with Austria-Hungary and to unrest in Germany. Kühlmann characterized Wilhelm’s demands as “unacceptable both from the political point of view and from the perspective of peoples’ rights,” pointing out in addition that it would be absolutely impossible to secure support for these demands from Germany’s allies.
On February 10, Kühlmann discussed the newly emerging complications with Czernin, who gave his full support to Germany’s foreign minister and indicated that if the Germans changed their course from seeking to achieve a peace agreement with the Bolsheviks, then Austria-Hungary would not be able to support Germany and would go its own way. Kühlmann’s response to this was that it would be “completely impossible” for the foreign ministry to pursue a new, hard-line agenda, and that if Berlin should insist on an ultimatum, then he, Kühlmann, would resign. He gave the Kaiser and the Chancellor four hours to reply: if no reply came, Kühlmann would remain at his post and not present Trotsky with an ultimatum. Four hours passed. There was no reply from the Kaiser. Kühlmann remained at his post. The peace talks continued.
On the evening of January 28 (February 10), in response to Germany’s repeated request to “discuss only those conditions which can lead to concrete results,” in accordance with directives from the RSDLP’s Central Committee and Lenin’s telegram, Trotsky—speaking for the Soviet delegation—announced the termination of the peace talks: “We are withdrawing from the war, but we must decline to sign a peace treaty.”
General Hoffmann recalled that after Trotsky’s announcement, the assembly hall fell silent: “The dismay was unanimous.” On the same evening, the Austro-Hungarian and German diplomats held a consultation, to which Hoffmann was invited. Kühlmann believed that General Hoffmann’s proposal to discontinue the peace talks and to declare war was “completely unacceptable,” and that it was far more reasonable, just as Trotsky had suggested, “to maintain a state of war, without interrupting the truce.”
“Under the right circumstances,” Kühlmann observed, “we could... reach the environs of St. Petersburg within a few months. However, I don’t think that that would give us anything. No one will be able to prevent the [new] revolutionary government, which will perhaps replace the Bolsheviks by that time, from moving to another city or even beyond the Urals.... With Russia being as large as it is, we can conduct a campaign against it for a very long time...and still not attain our goal; that is, we won’t sit people down at the negotiating table and we won’t force them to sign an agreement. The degree of military pressure that will influence people, that is, the highest degree...has already been reached. Further war would have no higher aim than the simple destruction of the enemy’s forces. We know from the example of small countries—in particular, Serbia—that even after the whole territory of the state has been occupied, the government in exile...remains the government of the country. And no degree of military pressure (raising this degree is no longer possible, since everything that could be occupied has already been occupied) is capable of forcing people to sign a peace agreement.... War cannot be considered a suitable means to achieve the peace agreement that we seek.”
After Kühlmann’s speech, the German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Bulgarian diplomats unanimously declared that they accepted Trotsky’s proposal: “Although the declaration does not constitute a peace treaty, it nonetheless reestablishes a state of peace between the two sides.” Hoffmann was left completely alone: “I was unable to convince the diplomats of the correctness of my view,” he wrote. Trotsky’s formula “neither peace nor war” has been accepted by the conference, Czernin stated.16 And the Austrian delegation was the first to telegraph Vienna that a “peace agreement with Russia has already been concluded.”17
Hoffmann did not remain passive, but immediately informed German army headquarters of the outcome of the meeting. Germany’s supreme command, which had long been searching for a pretext for new conflicts with the foreign ministry, decided to support Hoffmann against Kühlmann. Feeling powerful forces behind him, Hoffmann began to insist that it was necessary to respond to Trotsky’s declaration by ending the truce, marching to St. Petersburg, and openly taking the side of Ukraine against Russia. But on February 10–11 (NS), Hoffmann’s demands were ignored. And at a ceremonial, final meeting on February 11 (NS), Kühlmann “fully embraced the point of view expressed by the majority of the delegations to the peace talks and supported it in a very persuasive speech.”18 Trotsky had won. His calculations had proven accurate. A state of “neither war nor peace” became a fact. The only thing left to be done was to disband the old, Russian, anti-Bolshevik army, which was not controlled by the capital. And Trotsky issued orders for its demobilization.
During this time, events were taking place in Berlin that would decide Germany’s destiny. Hertling, who on the whole supported the supreme command, turned to Wilhelm, insisting that Trotsky’s declaration was a “factual violation of the truce.” By contrast with Hoffmann, however, Hertling did not intend to declare a resumption of the war: his plan was to declare the truce over on February 10 (according to the terms of the truce agreement, this would give Germany freedom of action by February 18). And although Hertling was not yet announcing the beginning of military action against Russia, that was the clear implication of his proposal.
Once again, the foreign ministry came out against this plan, citing domestic political considerations. Nonetheless, in the early morning of February 13, the Kaiser presided over a Crown Council meeting in Hamburg at which a final decision was made to continue military action against Russia and to regard Trotsky’s declaration as being tantamount to a termination of the truce as of February 17 (since Trotsky had made the declaration on February 10). It was planned that the German government would officially announce the termination of the truce as soon as the German diplomatic mission in Petrograd, headed by Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, left Soviet Russian territory (the German military offensive did indeed begin on February 18—immediately following the departure of the German diplomatic mission).
Upon returning, Trotsky gave a speech before the Petrograd Soviet. He indicated that Germany would most likely be unable “to deploy troops against a socialist republic. The odds are nine to one that they will be unable to mount an offensive, and there is only a ten percent chance of an offensive. But I am certain that there will be no offensive.”19 “This was the only correct decision...” Zinoviev commented. “Despite all the cries of desperation from the right...we are profoundly convinced that there can be no offensive by the German imperialists at this point.”20
A majority of the Petrograd Soviet supported the decision of the Bolshevik delegation to Brest-Litovsk. A day earlier, the executive committee of the party’s Petrograd bureau had also come out in favor of breaking off the peace talks with the Germans and against the policy of an “obscene peace.”21 On January 30 (OS), the Moscow Soviet voiced its support for terminating the negotiations. Trotsky’s position was endorsed by the Left SRs and approved by the German Communists. Like Trotsky, the latter believe that “with the collapse of the peace talks, the Central Powers will unlikely be able to inflict new major military damage on Russia, despite the current state of Russia’s armies. War on the Russian border must increasingly dwindle down.”22
Austria-Hungary’s political leaders, apprised of the Germans’ intention to declare the truce over on February 17, were thrown into confusion. “Our view that the truce expires on February 17 is in most cases not shared here even in government circles,” wrote Count von Wedel, the German ambassador in Vienna, to Germany’s foreign ministry on February 15. Austria-Hungary’s ambassador to Rome, Baron von Merey, was literally “stunned” and stated that without a formal reply to Trotsky’s declaration, which had not yet been made, it was impossible to take February 10 as the starting date for the time that had to elapse before hostilities could resume. Thus, on February 16, the German government sent an official press release to the Wolfe Bureau News Service, stating that Germany viewed Trotsky’s declaration as a termination of the peace talks and the truce. “February 10,” the press release indicated, “must be seen as the date marking the termination of the truce... Upon the expiration of the seven-day period stipulated by the agreement, the German government shall consider itself at liberty to act as it chooses.”
A copy of the press release was forwarded to the headquarters of Germany’s Eastern Front. From there, on February 16 at 7:30 p.m., a notification was sent to Russian military command: “at 12 p.m. on February 18, Germany and Russia shall resume a state of war.” At least this was the message wired to Petrograd from Brest-Litovsk by General Samoilo on February 17. At 1:42 p.m., Trotsky sent an urgent query to Berlin, indicating that the Soviet government considered the telegram to be a provocation, since even if Germany had decided to terminate the truce, “notification of this, according to the terms of the truce, must be given seven days in advance, not two, as has been done.” The Soviet government demanded an immediate explanation.
On February 18, Germany’s high command sent an explanation, bearing Hoffmann’s signature, which pointed out that “the seven-day period provided for by the agreement began...on February 10 and expired yesterday. Because the Russian government has refused to conclude a peace agreement with Germany, Germany considers itself free from all obligations and reserves the right to pursue whatever course of action it deems necessary.”
Germany’s ultimatum was not supported by its ally Austria-Hungary, whose government came out against resuming military action and lodged an official protest with Germany because of this. The Germans, however, had asked the Austrians to “wait before making their position known,” until the Soviets could be formally notified of Germany’s conditions. Czernin naturally agreed, promising “not to undertake anything” without contacting Berlin beforehand. By this time, Czernin already had on his desk a radiogram from Trotsky, who had inquired “whether the Austro-Hungarian government also [considered] itself to be in a state of war with Russia,” and if not, whether it considered it “possible to enter into a practical agreement.” In addition, it was well known that the Germans had redeployed all battle-ready troops from the Eastern Front to the West. Lastly, Germany’s envoys—who had arrived with diplomatic instructions on December 16 (29)—were still in Petrograd: Count Mirbach, the head of the German economic mission, and Vice Admiral Count Kaiserling, the head of the naval mission. Thus, there was still some hope that the Germans themselves had not yet made a final decision to begin an offensive.
Based on these considerations, at a meeting on the evening of February 17 the Central Committee rejected—by six votes to five—Lenin’s proposal to agree to the German conditions and to sign a peace treaty immediately, and instead came out in favor of Trotsky’s formula, resolving to wait before renewing any peace talks until a German offensive should actually materialize and its influence on the proletarian movement in the West might be gauged. Those who voted against immediately resuming negotiations, even under the threat of a German attack, included Trotsky, Bukharin, Lomov, Uritsky, Joffe, and Krestinsky. Voting in favor of Lenin’s proposal were Sverdlov, Stalin, Sokolnikov, Smilga, and Lenin himself.
During a Central Committee session on the morning of February 18, Lenin’s resolution was once again defeated by one vote: six to seven. A new session was scheduled for the evening. Only in the evening, after protracted debate and under the pressure of a German attack, was Lenin’s proposal accepted by seven votes to five. Voting in favor were Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, and Smilga. Uritsky, Joffe, Lomov, Bukharin, Krestinsky voted against. The task of preparing an official statement for the German government was given to Lenin and Trotsky. In the interim, the Central Committee resolved immediately to send a radio message to the Germans about their decision to sign a peace agreement. Meanwhile, Sverdlov had to go to the Left SRs, notify them about the Bolshevik Central Committee’s decision, and about the fact that a joint resolution by the Central Committees of the Bolshevik Party and the Left SRs would stand as the official decision of the Soviet government.
On February 18, at a joint meeting of the Central Committees of the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, the latter voted to accept the German conditions. Lenin therefore hurried to schedule for February 19 a joint meeting of the Bolshevik and Left SR delegations to the VTsIK, agreeing to regard the new resolution as final. On the night of February 19, certain of his victory, Lenin, together with Trotsky, in accordance with the Central Committee’s resolution, composed a radio message to the Germans. The Sovnarkom expressed a grievance about the German decision to launch an offensive against a republic “that had declared the state of war over and had begun to demobilize its army on all fronts”; but it also declared its “intention to sign a peace treaty on the conditions that have been put forward by the delegations of the Quadruple Alliance [Central Powers] in Brest-Litovsk.”23
On the morning of February 19, the radio telegram—signed by Lenin and Trotsky—was sent. By 9:12 a.m. it was received by the Germans, and General Hoffmann was notified immediately. Lenin had done all of this before any formal joint decision had been made by the Bolshevik and Left SRs delegations to the VTsIK. But while he had been able to skip over formalities in dealing with the Left SRs, he was unable to do so in dealing with the Germans. The latter, not wishing to call a halt to a successful offensive, demanded an official written document; and Lenin replied that a courier was on its way. Germany took this declaration under advisement, but did not stop the offensive.
The Germans occupied several cities during those days: on February 18, Dvinsk; on the 19th, Minsk; on the 20th, Polotsk; on the 21st, Rezhitsa and Orsha; on the 22nd, Wolmar, Wenden, Walk, and Hapsal; on the night of the 24th, Pskov and Yuryev; on the 25th, Borisov and Reval. Remarkably, the Germans carried out this offensive without an army. They made use of small, dispersed units of 100–200 men, made up of volunteers. Due to the panic that reigned under the Bolsheviks and to false rumors about approaching German troops, cities and stations were given up without any fighting even before the enemy’s arrival. Dvinsk, for example, was taken by a German detachment of 60–100 men. Pskov was occupied by a small troop of Germans on motorcycles. In Rezhitsa, the German soldiers were so few in number that they were unable to take over the telegraph office, which continued to operate for another 24 hours. The Germans did not capture cities as declare that they had occupied various locations that had been abandoned in a panic by the hastily retreating Russian army. On February 22, 1918, the military commissar Vadim Podbelsky wired from the front: “I have no reliable new information, apart from the fact that the Germans, generally speaking, are advancing inexorably, for lack of any resistance.”24
In Ukraine, the offensive proceeded mainly along the railways, reaching a “speed that impressed even the soldiers themselves,”25 as Hoffmann put it. Here and there, some resistance was offered by the Soviet Red Guards, who were advancing in order to occupy Ukraine, and by Czechoslovakian troops, who supported the Allied Powers and put up the strongest opposition. Nonetheless, on February 21, the Germans entered Kiev.
On February 19, Lenin made a two-hour speech in defense of his theses on signing the peace treaty at a joint meeting of the Bolshevik and Left SR delegations to the VTsIK. Evidently, he expected a victory. But to his surprise, and to the surprise of many members of the Central Committee of Left SR Party, a majority in the VTsIK voted to reject Germany’s peace conditions. The transcript of the meeting from February 19 “has not survived,” but on the following day, the newspaper Sotsial Demokrat—the media outlet of the Bolsheviks’ Moscow organization—published a brief account of the meeting: “The majority was of the opinion that the Russian Revolution would survive this trial; it was decided to resist as long as possible.”26
Then, on February 19, Lenin called a meeting of the Sovnarkom to discuss “questions of foreign policy in connection with Germany’s offensive and the telegram” sent by him to Berlin. By a majority of the votes—with only two members opposed—the Sovnarkom approved the contents of his nighttime telegram, mailed prematurely and against the will of the VTsIK. And since he had already passed a resolution that provided for transferring all questions connected with the peace treaty to the Sovnarkom, all of the requisite formalities had been taken care of.
Due to the newly passed decision to sign a peace treaty with Germany, a schism effectively took place within the Bolshevik Party at a Central Committee session on February 22. Bukharin resigned from the committee and relinquished his duties as editor of Pravda. A group consisting of Lomov, Uritsky, Bubnov, V. Smirnov, I. Stukov, M. Bronsky, V. Yakovleva, Spunde, M. Pokrovsky, and G. Pyatakov submitted a statement to the committee expressing their disagreement with its decision to discuss the very idea of signing a peace treaty, and reserving the right to agitate against its policies in party circles. Joffe, Dzerzhinsky, and Krestinsky also declared their disagreement with its decision to sign a peace treaty, but refrained from joining Bukharin’s group, since this meant splitting up the party, which they did not dare do.
At 10:30 a.m. on February 23, the Germans presented an ultimatum that would expire in 48 hours. The ultimatum was read by Sverdlov at a Central Committee meeting. The Soviet government had to agree to the independence of Kurland, Lifland, Estland, Finland, and Ukraine, with which it had to make peace, facilitate the transfer of the Anatolian provinces to Turkey, recognize the Russian-German trade agreement of 1904, which was unfavorable to Russia, grant Germany most favored nation status in trade until 1925, grant Germany the right to export ore and other raw materials freely and without tariffs, and refrain from any agitation or propaganda against the Central Powers and on territories occupied by them. The agreement had to be ratified within two weeks. Hoffmann believed that the ultimatum contained every demand that could possibly be made.
Lenin called for the immediate acceptance of Germany’s terms and announced that he would resign if no agreement was forthcoming. Then, apparently by prior agreement with him, Trotsky took the floor:
We cannot wage a revolutionary war with a split inside the party.... Under the conditions that have developed, our party is powerless to conduct a war.... V. I. [Lenin’s] arguments are hardly convincing; if we had unanimity, we could undertake the task of organizing a defense, we could manage it...even if we had to surrender Petersburg and Moscow. We would keep the whole world in suspense. If we sign the German ultimatum today, then we might get a new ultimatum tomorrow. Everything is formulated so as to leave open the possibility of further ultimatums.... From the international point of view, we would stand to gain a great deal. But that would require the greatest possible unanimity; and since there is none, I cannot take upon myself the responsibility for voting for war.27
Following Trotsky, two other Left Communists refused to vote against Lenin: Dzerzhinsky and Joffe. Uritsky, Bukharin, and Lomov took a firm stand against signing the agreement. Stalin initially did not commit himself to the peace treaty: “We can start the peace talks again, without signing it.”28 In the end, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Krestinsky, and Joffe—opponents of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk—abstained from voting. Uritsky, Bukharin, Lomov, and Bubnov voting against it. But Sverdlov, Stalin, Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, Smilga, and Stasova supported Lenin. By seven votes to four, with four abstaining, the German ultimatum was accepted. At the same time, the Central Committee made a unanimous decision “to immediately prepare for revolutionary war.”29 This was another one of Lenin’s nominal concessions.
However, the victory of Lenin’s minority in such an important vote threw the Central Committee into even greater disarray. Uritsky, speaking for himself and for Bukharin, Lomov, Bubnov, candidate member Yakovleva, as well as Pyatakov and Smirnov, declared that he did not wish to bear the responsibility for a decision that had been passed by a minority, since the abstaining members were against signing the peace agreement; he threatened that all of the aforementioned Bolsheviks would quit the committee. A panic set in. Stalin said that for the opposition to leave their posts was to “murder the party.” Trotsky said that he “would have voted differently if he had known that his abstention would lead to the comrades’ departure.” Lenin now agreed to “silent or open agitation against signing,” as long as people did not leave their posts and signed the agreement for the time being. But the Left Communists departed, reserving the right to agitate in favor of the war in party newspapers.
A joint meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and the central committee of the Left SR Party was scheduled for the evening of February 23. The transcript of the meeting has not been found, and nothing is known about what took place. Various pieces of evidence indicate that the majority of the Left SRs supported Trotsky. The question was then given over for discussion to the two parties’ VTsIK delegations, which remained in session all night on February 23, both separately and jointly. The small hall given over to the Bolshevik delegation was packed. Apart from the delegation, the members of the Petrograd Soviet and the city’s party workers were also in attendance. The meeting was chaired by Sverdlov. Lenin came later and made a speech in which he argued that every possible way of delaying and sabotaging the peace talks had already been tried.
A majority of the Bolsheviks’ VTsIK delegation voted in favor of a resolution to accept the German peace terms. The Left Communists tried to get the Bolshevik delegation to allow each member to vote as he or she saw fit, but they were defeated: the Bolshevik delegation then passed a resolution that obligated each member of the delegation either to vote for the peace treaty or to abstain from voting. At the joint session between the Bolshevik and the Left SR contingents of the VTsIK, the Left Communists again spoke out against signing the peace treaty, but failed to gather a majority of the votes.
Finally, at 3 a.m. on February 24, a VTsIK meeting began in the great hall of the Tauride Palace. There were five main delegations in all: the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs, the SRs, the Mensheviks, and the Anarchists. In the early morning, a roll call vote began. Every attendee was called to the podium and, facing the audience, spoke out in favor of peace or war. All kinds of scenes were played out. Bukharin, despite the Bolshevik delegation’s directive not to vote against signing the peace agreement, came out against it, “and his words were drowned out by the applause of half the people present.”30 He was supported by Ryazanov. Lunacharsky did not know what to say until the very last second: as a Left Communist, he had to be against the peace, yet as a disciplined Bolshevik, he had to be for it. Coming up on the podium, he uttered “yes” and “covering his spasmodically twitching face with his hands, [ran] down from the podium.”31 Apparently, he was crying. Most of the Left Communists, not wishing to vote for peace, but not daring to violate party discipline, left the hall even before the voting began thus deciding the outcome in Lenin’s favor.
An analogous split took place among the Left SRs, the only difference being that their delegation as a whole decided to vote against the peace treaty and obligated Lenin’s supporters to abstain from voting. Just as with the Bolsheviks, not everyone agreed to uphold party discipline if that meant going against their own principles. Spiridonova, Malkin, and a number of other notable members of the Central Committee voted in favor of the peace treaty. The SRs and the Mensheviks voted against it. But Lenin still won the majority that he needed: 116 VTsIK members voted for Lenin’s resolution, 85 voted against it (SRs, Mensheviks, Anarchists, Left SRs, Left Communists), and 26—Left SRs who were in favor of the peace treaty—abstained from voting.
At 5:25 a.m. the meeting was adjourned. An hour and a half later, messages were sent from the Sovnarkom to Berlin, Vienna, Sofia, and Constantinople, notifying the Central Powers that the German terms had been accepted and that a duly authorized delegation was leaving for Brest-Litovsk. A courier was sent from Petrograd to Brest-Litovsk so that the Soviet agreement might be submitted in written form. By 10 p.m., Germany’s Eastern Front headquarters—responding to a radiogram about the Soviet government’s acceptance of Germany’s terms—demanded that a peace treaty be signed within three days of the Soviet delegation’s arrival in Brest-Litovsk.
February 24 was spent discussing who would be part of the delegation that would sign the peace treaty. No one wanted to go. Joffe refused. Zinoviev pointed to Sokolnikov, Sokolnikov pointed to Zinoviev. Everyone pointed to Joffe. Joffe made his participation contingent on hundreds of “ifs,” Sokolnikov threatened to resign (if he was sent). Lenin asked the comrades “not to get upset,” pointing out that “Comrade Petrovsky can go as a People’s Commissar.” Lomov, Smirnov, Uritsky, Pyatakov, Bogolepov, and Spunde all resigned from their posts in the Sovnarkom. Trotsky remembered that five days earlier he had already tendered his resignation from the post of People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs and now insisted upon it. Zinoviev urged Trotsky “to remain [at his post] until the peace treaty is signed, because the crisis is not over yet.” Stalin talked about the “pain that he feels about the comrades” who are leaving their posts, especially because “there is no one to replace them.” Trotsky declared that he “no longer wished to bear responsibility” for the peace policy at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, but, not wanting to split up the party, he was prepared to announce his resignation in the “least conspicuous fashion”; “the routine work can be supervised by Chicherin, while the political leadership must be taken over by Lenin.” Zinoviev begged Trotsky to “delay his departure by two or three days.” Stalin also asked him to “wait a couple of days.” Lenin stated that Trotsky’s resignation was unacceptable. The arguments began again. Trotsky described a split within the party:
In the party now there are two very sharply separated factions. If we look at it from a parliamentary perspective, then we now have two parties, and from a parliamentary perspective, the minority should yield to the majority; but this isn’t happening in our case, because what we have is a struggle between groups. We cannot surrender our positions to the Left SRs.32
After long debate, Sokolnikov agreed to put his signature on the peace treaty. The delegation left on the night of February 24. Sokolnikov was accompanied by Grigory Petrovsky, Georgy Chicherin, Lev Karakhan, and Joffe, who had finally been persuaded to go along as a consultant, without any responsibility to sign the agreement.
On February 28, the Soviet delegation arrived in Brest-Litovsk only to learn that the German government was going even further in its demands. They were now demanding that Kars, Ardagan, and Batum be handed over to Turkey (although these territories had never been occupied by Turkish troops during the war). Sokolnikov made an attempt to object, but Hoffmann let it be understood that discussion of the ultimatum was out of the question. The three-day period during which the peace treaty had to be signed had been defined by the Germans as starting at 11 a.m. on March 1, when the first official meeting in Brest-Litovsk was to take place.
On March 1, the conference resumed its work. On both sides, the negotiations were now conducted by secondary figures. Foreign ministers Kühlmann, Czernin, Talaat (Turkey), and Radoslavov (Bulgaria) were all at peace talks in Bucharest at this time, and they had sent their deputies to Brest-Litovsk. At the very first meeting, Rosenberg—the German envoy who was to sign the agreement—proposed to the Soviet delegation to discuss the draft of the peace treaty that he had brought with him. Sokolnikov asked him to read the entire draft, and after the reading declared that he refused “to discuss any of it because that is absolutely useless under the present circumstances”33—especially since the world-wide proletarian revolution was already drawing nigh.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was literally the only point of contention between Trotsky and Lenin during the first and most crucial years of the Soviet government. The history of their disagreements is quite telling: on February 23, 1918—when the issue was not really the peace treaty as much as Lenin’s power in the party—Trotsky refused to speak out against the peace treaty, thereby securing for Lenin a majority of the Central Committee’s votes. If would be absurd to think that Trotsky was motivated by gentlemanly considerations. By leaving Lenin in power, he was first and foremost protecting his own position, knowing that without Lenin he would not be able to survive in the government and would be squeezed out by rivals. So he had no alternative. Lenin, the great party strategist, of course understood this. Nor was Trotsky supporting Lenin for disinterested motives: on the very next day after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, March 4, 1918, Trotsky was appointed head of the Supreme Military Council, and on March 13, People’s Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs. It is difficult to believe that these appointments, which took place as soon as the peace treaty was signed, were not Lenin’s reward to Trotsky for the outcome of the February 23 vote. It is possible that, even before the vote, Lenin had obtained from Trotsky a promise not to speak out against him in return for important ministerial posts, which significantly strengthened Trotsky’s position in the government.
In insisting on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin clearly understood what he was doing. While his opponents on the issue of the peace agreement were trying to ascertain what course of action would most benefit the cause of world revolution, he had to calculate which path guaranteed him personally the greatest chances of remaining in power. By not signing a peace treaty with the Germans, he would have lost his position of leadership, since a continuation of the German-Russian war might have led to the toppling of the Sovnarkom government. Furthermore, victory over the Germans could only be achieved through national unity, and for this he would have had to relinquish his personal leadership position and enter into an alliance with other socialist parties. On the other hand, in order to get the peace treaty signed, Lenin needed to overcome only one kind of opposition: the one within his own party. To achieve this, according to a strategy already familiar to him, he had to overwhelm the resistance of the majority of his own Central Committee. And to reach this goal, according to a strategy that was entirely familiar to him, it was enough to threaten to resign. This was precisely his way of proceeding. By yielding to the Germans on all counts, by signing off on conditions that contemporaries described as “humiliating,” Lenin remained the head of the Sovnarkom. However, the opposition to the separate peace within the party and the Soviet apparatus forced him to change tactics. He gradually shifted his stress from “peace” to “respite.” Rather than talking about a peace treaty with the Central Powers, he was now arguing for signing a noncommittal nominal agreement for the sake of a brief pause—even if it was one that lasted only a couple of days—which was required in order to prepare for revolutionary war. By formulating the matter this way, he almost erased the distinction between himself and the Left Communists. Their disagreement now was about timing. Bukharin was in favor of immediate war. Lenin was in favor of war after a short respite. The separate peace vanished from his lexicon.
Just like Trotsky’s formula “neither war nor peace,” Lenin’s “respite” was a middle course. Without renouncing the call for a revolutionary war, it made it possible to delay its beginning indefinitely. By giving the Left Communists hope for a quick declaration of war, the “respite” enabled him to conclude the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was so important to his survival. The “respite” formula also seemed more convenient than a separate peace in terms of solving the Soviet government’s foreign relations problems. By signing a peace treaty, the Bolsheviks compromised themselves both with the German socialists and with the Allied Powers, provoking the latter’s intervention. A “respite” gave both of them a hope that war between Russia and Germany would soon resume. One drawback to this policy, from Lenin’s point of view, consisted in Germany’s growing fears that the Bolsheviks had no serious intentions to honor the peace. But since Germany would not have been able to obtain more advantageous peace terms from any other Russian government, Lenin understood that Germany would remain interested in the Sovnarkom.
As for the Allied Powers, the Bolsheviks’ initial intention to conclude a separate peace and thus break up Russia’s alliance with England and France seemed in 1918 to be an act of unprecedented duplicity. Not wishing to deal with a government of “Maximalists” in Russia, and doubting its ability to remain in power, the Allied Powers nonetheless tried to maintain contact with the Soviets, at least on an unofficial level, in order to convince the Soviet government not to sign—and after the signing, not to ratify—the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
In the eyes of the Allied Powers, Lenin, who had traveled through Germany in a sealed train, and who had received money from the Germans (which England and France, at least, there was not doubt), was, of course, a puppet of the German government, if not a true German agent. This was how the British and the French explained Lenin’s pro-German policies. Clearly, Trotsky’s formula “neither war nor peace” did not cut Russia off from the Allied Powers as categorically as Lenin’s peace proposal. By signing a peace treaty, Lenin was pushing the Allied Powers toward war with Russia. Trotsky tried to maintain a balance between the two opposing camps. After March 3, however, this course became quite difficult to maintain. Lenin’s “respite,” without ridding Russia of the German occupation, provoked the intervention of the world powers—England, France, Japan, and the United States—and unleashed a civil war in Russia.
One can understand the reasons that, in this instance as well, drove Lenin to pick what would seem to be the most risky course for the Revolution (and the least dangerous course for himself). The Germans demanded territories. But they did not demand that Lenin relinquish power; just the opposite, they were interested in him, since they understood that, in order to conclude a separate peace, they would find no better ally. By contrast, the Allied Powers were not interested in territories. What they needed was to keep the Eastern Front active. By forming an alliance with Germany, Lenin secured his personal power. In an alliance with the Allied Powers, he would have unquestionably lost it, since he was a supporter of a pro-German orientation.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk could go into effect only after it was ratified by three bodies: the party congresses, the Congress of Soviets, and the German Reichstag. Therefore, those who supported the peace and those who opposed it had two weeks at their disposal as stipulated by the Germans as the deadline for the ratification. The Moscow regional party bureau had passed a resolution of no confidence in the Central Committee, and Lenin, before doing anything else, tried to get it revoked. The opportunity came at a Moscow municipal conference of the RSDLP, convened shortly after the peace was signed, on the night of March 4. All three points of view were represented in the reports of the conference’s participants: Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin. Lenin’s position was defended by Zinoviev and Sverdlov. Obolensky (Osinsky) spoke for the Left Communists, proposing that the conference pass a resolution of no confidence in the Central Committee. The Left Communists were defeated: only five people voted for Osinsky’s resolution; 65 conference delegates voted for a resolution of confidence in the Central Committee, and came out in favor of preserving party unity by any means necessary. However, on the question that was of greatest importance to Lenin, Trotsky came out the winner: a majority of the participants in the conference, 46 people, voted against signing the peace treaty (Pokrovsky’s resolution).
In a fight, Lenin always had a clear grasp of the interconnections between minor details. This distinguished him from Trotsky, who was perpetually striving for the unreachable horizon and did not set immediate goals for himself. For Lenin in March 1918 the objective was the ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk at the upcoming Seventh Party Congress. By this time, the Bolshevik Party had effectively split in half. The most striking manifestation of this split was the beginning of the publication of the newspaper Kommunist by the Left Communists. The newspaper, which was first published on March 5 and edited by Bukharin, Radek, and Uritsky, became the press organ for the St. Petersburg committee and the St. Petersburg regional committee of the RSDLP. In Moscow, the Left Communists began to publish a magazine under the same name. Lenin tried to oppose the Left Communists, mainly through Pravda. Thus, before the opening of the congress, on March 6, he published an article entitled “A Serious Lesson and a Serious Responsibility.” But the article was very persuasive. The main idea was that “from 1 p.m. on March 3, when the Germans called a halt to military action, until 7 p.m. on March 5,” when Lenin wrote the article, the Soviet government had had a respite which it had already successfully made use of.34 Such an argument could only elicit a smile. It was premature to talk about the Germans calling a halt to military action. In addition, it was obvious that no measures for the defense of the state could be enacted over two days.
On March 6, at 8:45 p.m., shortly after a joint meeting between the presidium of the VTsIK and the Sovnarkom at which Sokolnikov delivered a report about the work of the peace delegation, the Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the party, convened specifically for the ratification of the peace treaty with Germany, opened in the Tauride Palace. The congress did not represent the full membership. “Only party members with more than three months’ standing could take part”35 in the voting, i.e., only those who had joined the RSDLP before the October coup. In addition, the number of delegates was small. As late as March 5 it had still not been clear whether the congress would take place, and whether it would be allowed to make any rulings. At a preliminary meeting, Sverdlov admitted that “this is a conference, a meeting, but not a congress.”36 And since such a “congress” could in no way be called “ordinary,” it was labeled “extraordinary.”
The congress met in a great hurry. There are no precise records about the number of delegates participating; it is assumed that there were 47 delegates with the right to vote and 59 consultative delegates, formally representing 169,200 members of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). As for the actual size of the party as a whole, according to inaccurate and unverified records it had as many as 300,000 members—not that many, considering that at the time of the Sixth Congress in July 1917, when the party did not yet control the government, its ranks had already swelled to about 240,000; indeed, between April and July 1917, the size of the party had tripled. Now, however, Lenin was compelled to point out that “many organizations have effectively not grown over the recent period.”37 And Sverdlov, who delivered a Central Committee report before the Seventh Congress, drew the delegates’ attention to two other deplorable factors: “members’ dues were coming in extremely haphazardly,” while Pravda’s circulation had fallen from 220,000 in October 1917 to 85,000—and moreover the newspaper was being distributed effectively only in Petrograd and the surrounding areas.38
On March 7, at 12 p.m., the first report at the congress—about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk—was delivered by Lenin, who attempted to convince the delegates of the need to ratify the agreement. It may be considered genuinely remarkable that the text of the agreement was kept secret and not shown to the delegates at the congress. Meanwhile, the terms of the treaty were harsher than those of the Treaty of Versailles. With respect to territorial changes, the Brest-Litovsk agreement stipulated that Russia would withdraw from the provinces of Eastern Anatolia—the Ardagan, Kars, and Batum regions—and ensure “their orderly return to Turkey”; sign an immediate peace treaty with the Ukrainian Republic; and recognize the peace treaty between Ukraine and the Central Powers. Effectively, this meant handing over Ukraine—which had to be cleared of all Russian and Red Guard units—to German control. Estland and Lifland were also to be cleared of Russian troops and Red Guards. Estland’s eastern border would now more or less follow the Narva River. Lifland’s eastern border would run through Lakes Chudskoye and Pskovskoye. Finland and the Aland Islands were also to be cleared of Russian troops and Red Guards, while the Finnish ports were to be freed from the Russian fleet and naval presence.
The surrendered territories, with a total area of 780,000 square kilometers with a population of 56,000,000 (one-third of the population of the Russian Empire), before the Revolution contained 27% of the country’s agricultural land, 26% of its entire railway system, 33% of its textile industry, 73% of its iron and steel production, 89% of its coal mines, 90% of its sugar industry, 918 textile factories, 574 breweries, 133 tobacco factories, 1685 distilleries, 244 chemical enterprises, 615 cellulose factories, 1073 machine shops, and most importantly, 40% of its industrial workers, who would now be placed under “the capitalist yoke.” Obviously, without all this it would be impossible to “build a socialist economy”39 (which was the point of the Brest-Litovsk respite). Lenin compared the peace agreement with the Treaty of Tilsit, in which Prussia had lost about one-half of its territory and 50% of its population. Russia was losing only a third. But in absolute numbers, the territorial and demographic losses were immeasurable. Russia’s territory would now be smaller than it was before Peter the Great.
This was the agreement that Lenin was defending. He read his speech as an inveterate supporter of world revolution, speaking above all of the hope for a revolution in Germany and of the fundamental impossibility of coexistence between socialist and capitalist states. In substance, Lenin expressed solidarity with the Left Communists on all of the main issues: he welcomed the revolutionary war, the guerilla struggle, world revolution; he admitted that war with Germany was inevitable, that coexistence with capitalist countries was impossible, that Petrograd and Moscow would most likely have to be surrendered to the Germans, who were preparing for another advance, that the “respite” could not last for more than a day. But still from all this the Left Communists concluded that the proper course of action was to declare a revolutionary war. Lenin, on the other hand, felt that a respite, even one that lasted only one day, was worth a third of Russia and, more significantly, a retreat from revolutionary dogma. In this, the Left Communists could never agree with Lenin.
Bukharin responded to Lenin with his own speech. He indicated that the Russian Revolution would either be “saved by the international revolution or perish under the blows of international capital.” Therefore, there was no point in talking about peaceful coexistence. The advantages of a peace agreement with Germany were illusory. Before signing the agreement, it was necessary to understand the purpose of the reprieve proposed by Lenin. He claimed that it was “needed in order to regulate the railways,” to organize the economy, and to “establish the same Soviet apparatus” that “we have been unable to establish over the last four months.”
Bukharin believed that “if there was any chance for such a respite,” the Left Communists would agree to sign the peace treaty. But if the lull would last only a few days, then the game wasn’t worth the candle, because the problems that Lenin had enumerated could not be solved in a few days: they would require at least a few months, and neither Hoffmann nor Lieb-knecht would grant the Bolsheviks that much time. “The point is not that we are protesting against shameful and ignominious peace terms as such,” Bukharin continued. “We are protesting against these terms because they in fact do not provide us with this lull,” since they leave Russia without Ukraine and bread, without the Donets Basin and coal, splitting up and weaking the workers and the workers’ movement. Even such pro-Soviet territories as Latvia are surrendered to German occupation. The Soviet government’s measures to nationalize foreign industry are in fact cancelled, because “the peace terms contain clauses that pertain to safeguarding the interests of foreign subjects.” In addition, the agreement would forbid Communist agitation by the Soviet government in the countries of the Central Powers and in the territories occupied by them, which, in Bukharin’s opinion, would negate the international significance of the Russian Revolution that in the end will depend on “whether or not the international revolution will triumph,” because the international revolution is its only “salvation.”
Lastly, Bukharin categorically objected to a new item in the Brest-Litovsk agreement, “added only afterward,” according to which “Russia must preserve the independence of Persia and Afghanistan.” Bukharin believed that this alone was reason enough not to sign a peace treaty that provided a two-week delay. The only solution, according to him, was to begin a revolutionary war against “German imperialism,” which, in spite of inevitable defeats during the initial stage of such a war, would bring victory in the end, because “the more deeply the enemy penetrates into Russia, the more unfavorable will be the conditions in which he will find himself.”40
After Bukharin’s speech, the meeting was adjourned. In the evening, during the debates about Lenin’s and Bukharin’s speeches, Uritsky argued that Lenin had failed to prove “the correctness of his position.” One could try to obtain a prolonged respite. But to “settle for a pause of two-three days,” which “will give us nothing, but threatens to destroy the remaining railroads and the small army,” which the Bolsheviks have only begun to create, means to agree to “a pause that no one needs, that is useless and harmful,” only to have to resume fighting “on the very next day, under much worse conditions,” retreating “to infinity,” all the way to the Urals, evacuating “not just Petrograd, but Moscow as well,” since, as is obvious to everyone, “the general situation can deteriorate significantly.”
Uritsky disagreed with Lenin’s comparison between the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the Treaty of Tilsit. “It was not the German working class that signed the Treaty of Tilsit,” he said. “It was signed by the other side. The Germans had to accept it as a fait accompli.” Uritsky therefore proposed “not to ratify the agreement,” although he understood that a break with Germany “would initially bring a whole series of defeats on the battlefield,” which, however, “might contribute a great deal more to the outcome of the revolution in Western Europe” than the “obscene peace” advocated by Lenin.41
Bubnov commented that at a moment when a “revolutionary crisis [was] already gathering steam in Western Europe” and the “international revolution [was] preparing to turn into the most acute, the most large-scale form of civil war, to sign a peace agreement” would mean to deal a fatal “blow to the cause of the international proletariat,” which was now “facing the problem of starting a civil war on an international scale,” a problem that was “not fanciful, but quite real.” This was the meaning of the call for “revolutionary war.” Lenin, however, from his leftist position of October 1917 had shifted to a rightist position and was now contending that the “masses do not want to fight, the peasants want peace.” “Since when do we pose the question in the way that it is now being posed by Comrade Lenin?” asked Bubnov, hinting at hypocrisy.42
The point of view of those who favored a pause was also critiqued by Radek. He described Lenin’s policies as impossible and unacceptable, pointing out that the Bolsheviks had never hoped that “German imperialism would leave us in peace.” On the contrary, everyone assumed the inevitability of war with Germany and therefore “stood for a demonstrative policy of peace, a policy aimed at stirring up the masses in Europe.” It was such a policy on the part of the Soviet government that had “brought forth a general strike in Germany” and “strikes in Austria.”
Even now, after the new German offensive, Radek believed that the opponents of the peace treaty were right when they argued that “the Germans have no major forces” and that they are prepared to accept an agreement “without a formal peace treaty” (as was reported in the German press). He said that the plan to declare a guerilla war against German occupying forces was more than empty words and that if the Bolsheviks surrendered Petrograd and retreated deep into the country, they would be able to “create new military cadres” within three months, during which time the Germans would be unable to advance further into Russia “in view of the international situation, in view of the state of affairs in the West.”43
Ryazanov, who also spoke out against signing the peace treaty and in favor of revolutionary war, effectively charged Lenin with treason. If Petrograd was to be evacuated, only government agencies should leave the city. “Any attempt to surrender Petersburg without resistance by singing and ratifying this peace treaty” would constitute “an inevitable betrayal of the Russian proletariat,” since “it would encourage the Germans to continue their offensive.” Lenin, Ryazanov went on, was prepared to give up “Petersburg, Moscow, the Urals, he is not afraid of going to Vladivostok if the Japanese let him,” he was prepared to retreat and retreat; “this retreat has a limit.”44
Kollontai, another opponent of the peace treaty, indicated that there would be no peace and that even if the treaty was ratified, the Brest-Litovsk agreement would exist only on paper. The proof of this was the fact that even after the signing of the treaty, the war was set to continue. She believed that there was no possibility of a pause, that peace with Germany was impossible, that the current situation should be used in order to form an “international revolutionary army,” and that if the Soviet government in Russia collapses, the Communist banner will be “picked up by others.”45
The Seventh Party Congress was remarkable as a majority of the delegates present voted in favor of the peace treaty, while a majority of the speakers came out against it, and even the minority that supported Lenin—and indeed even Lenin himself—qualified their arguments for the peace treaty in different ways (Zinoviev, Smilga, Sokolnikov, and others). Sverdlov, another supporter of the peace agreement, spoke in defense of Trotsky, who had been misrepresented by Lenin, stating that Trotsky’s policies at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks had been the policies of the Central Committee:
We were all equally in favor of drawing out the peace talks for as long as possible... All of us supported the position that was initially taken by our Brest delegation, under the leadership of Comrade Trotsky... Therefore, the claim that the Central Committee was pursuing an incorrect policy does not correspond to reality. We still continue to say that, under certain circumstances, we will inevitably have to wage a revolutionary war.46
After this, Trotsky elaborated a “third position” for the delegates—the position of neither peace nor war—and said that he had abstained from the Central Committee vote on signing the peace treaty because he did not see “this or that attitude to this issue as being decisive for the destiny of the revolution.” He acknowledged that the chances of victory were greater “not on the side that has been taken” by Lenin, and pointed out that the peace talks with Germany were above all a form of propaganda and that, if it had really been necessary to form a genuine peace agreement, then the peace treaty should not have been delayed, but ought to have been signed in November, when the Germans were willing to accept terms that were most favorable to the Soviet government.
Trotsky rejected the argument that if the Soviet government failed to ratify the peace treaty, the Germans would take over Petrograd, and referred to a conversation that he had had with Lenin. Even Lenin believed, he noted, that “the capture of Petrograd would have a revolutionizing an effect on German workers.” “Everything depends on the speed with which the European revolution will come,”47 Trotsky concluded, but he did not speak out against ratifying the peace treaty: “I will not argue that you should not ratify it,” he said, adding that “there is a certain limit” beyond which the Bolsheviks could not go, since “that would really constitute a betrayal in the full sense of the word.” This limit was the German demand that the Bolsheviks sign a peace treaty with the Ukrainian Rada.48 And since the contents of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were unknown to the delegates, no one corrected Trotsky by pointing out that the treaty—which had already been signed by the Soviet government and which was now supposed to be ratified by his listeners—did in fact require the Bolsheviks to sign a peace treaty with the Ukrainian Republic.
At 9:45 p.m. on March 7, the session ended. On the following day, at 11:40 a.m., the fourth and penultimate session of the congress began. Bukharin again spoke, calling for revolutionary war: “Is war today even possible? We must decide whether it is objectively possible or not.” If war was possible and if it would begin anyway “in two or three days,” what was the point of paying “such a price for this peace treaty,” which brought incalculable harm and besmirched the Soviet government “in the eyes of the entire global proletariat”?49 In reply, Lenin acknowledged that he was “ninety percent” in agreement with Bukharin,50 that the Bolsheviks were maneuvering “in the interests of revolutionary war,” and that there was agreement on this score between “both halves of the party”; the argument concerned only the question of “whether the war should be continued without any pause or not.” Lenin likewise argued that Bukharin’s apprehensions about signing the peace treaty were mistaken, since the treaty could be torn up at any time: “In war, one must never let oneself be bound by formal considerations; the peace treaty is a means to gather our strength.” “The revolutionary war will come, we have no disagreement here.” But for the time being, Lenin threatened to resign in the event the congress failed to ratify the treaty.51
In a recorded vote, 30 people supported Lenin’s resolution, 12 voted against it, and 4 abstained. The Left Communists’ resolution received 9 votes, with 28 people voting against it. However, Lenin’s resolution, which won the majority of the votes, did not mention an actual armistice, but only talked about a respite in order to prepare for a revolutionary war. Publishing such a resolution was absolutely out of the question, since the Germans would have taken it as a repeal of the truce. Therefore, Lenin insisted that the congress add an amendment: “The present resolution will not appear in print, and only the fact that the peace treaty has been ratified will be made public.”
For Lenin, it was important to sign the peace treaty and get it ratified. In every other respect, he was willing to yield to the Left Communists. In particular, he proposed an amendment to the effect that the Central Committee would have the right to repeal the agreement at any time: “The congress grants authority to the Central Committee of the party both to repeal all peace treaties and to declare war on any imperialist power and on the whole world whenever the Central Committee deems appropriate.” Naturally, such an amendment infringed not only on the VTsIK’s prerogatives, but on the Sovnarkom’s as well. But it gave freedom of action to the core of the Bolshevik party, which now had the right not to convene a special congress in order to annul the peace treaty. Obviously, Lenin himself had no interest in this amendment, but after winning the vote on the ratification issue, he was attempting to lull the opposition by yielding on all possible (and, to him, insignificant) points. As it happened, however, Sverdlov refused to put Lenin’s amendment to a vote, on the grounds that the Central Committee “naturally” had the right to make fundamentally important decisions between party congresses, including decisions about war and peace.52
Since the resolution passed by the congress concerned a delay rather than an armistice—that is, since the congress was in fact announcing that it would shortly resume war with Germany—Lenin tried to do everything in his power to prevent this information from going beyond the halls of the Tauride Palace. In the end, fearing the possibility that the Left Communists might sabotage his plans directly (for example, by publishing the congress’s resolution in Kommunist), he demanded that “personal signatures be obtained on this matter from all those present” in view of the “importance of the matter to the state.”53 The congress approved the amendment as well. And it was only his demand that the delegates return the text of the peace resolution in order to “safeguard a military secret” that met with resistance, especially from Sverdlov: “Every delegate, returning home, will have to report to his organization, at least to the main office, and you will need to have these resolutions with you.” Lenin persisted, arguing that “messages that contain military secrets are delivered orally.”54 But he lost the vote and this amendment was rejected by the congress on Sverdlov’s initiative.
By forcing the party to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin achieved a brilliant tactical victory. However, his position was made more difficult by the fact that Russia’s main socialist parties, which had representation in the VTsIK, remained in the opposition on this issue: the Left SRs, the Mensheviks, the SRs, and the Anarchist Communists. The battle with these parties still lay ahead, at the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk treaty by the Congress of Soviets. Lenin also had to take into account the likelihood that the Left SRs and the Left Communists would try to form their own party. In the end, in the heat of the struggle over the peace treaty, he overlooked another possible danger: Sverdlov, who was becoming an increasingly prominent figure during those months—overshadowing himself, who was losing his power, authority, and control—blocked the formation of an alliance between the Left Communists and the Left SRs by attempting in March-April 1918 to unite the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs for an inevitable and imminent revolutionary war with Germany.
The German government was informed about the struggle taking place within the Bolshevik Party regarding the peace treaty. On March 11 State Secretary Kühlmann of Germany’s foreign ministry indicated in a telegram to the ministry that the general situation was highly “uncertain” and proposed to “refrain from any commentary about” the upcoming ratification of the treaties at the Congress of Soviets. The transfer of Russia’s capital from Petrograd to Moscow (where the Congress of Soviets was to meet), farther away from the front lines, likewise pointed to the fact that the Soviet government’s intentions were far from peaceful.
The congress opened in Moscow on March 14. Like the Seventh Party Congress, the Congress of Soviets was not representational and labeled “extraordinary.” It was attended by 1172 delegates, including 814 Bolsheviks and 238 Left SRs. For the first time, 1000 copies of the text of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were printed for the delegates. In the final vote, the peace treaty was ratified by a majority of 784 against 261, with 115 abstaining. The consequence of this vote, however, was the departure of the Left SRs from the government, although this decision by the Left SR delegation was by no means unanimous. At least 78 Left SR delegates voted against resigning from the Sovnarkom and in favor of signing the peace treaty. Nonetheless, on March 15, all of the people’s commissars who were members of the Left SR Party resigned from their posts, after which they, like the Left Communists, reserved the right to criticize the Sovnarkom’s Brest-Litovsk policy.
In connection with the departure from the Soviet government of all of the Left SRs and some of the Left Communists, on March 18, one day after the Fourth Congress of Soviets concluded its work, the Sovnarkom took up the issue of the “general ministerial crisis.” A speech on the subject was delivered by Sverdlov, who was not formally a Sovnarkom member, but was gradually beginning to take over Lenin’s duties in the Sovnarkom. At congresses and conferences, Sverdlov had long ago become the presenter or co-presenter for the head of the Sovnarkom. He would also deliver the reports of the Central Committee, as at the Seventh Party Congress, which in the future would be done by the general secretary. On Sverdlov’s initiative, the Sovnarkom began negotiating with the Bolshevik Party’s Moscow regional committee, whose members had resigned from the government earlier in opposition to the Brest-Litovsk policy, for them to return. Sverdlov himself began negotiating with a number of Bolsheviks who were seen as potential candidates for the posts of People’s Commissars of Agriculture, Property, Justice, and for the chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy, to replace the Left SRs and Left Communists who had tendered their resignations and who were, in turn, discussing the issue of removing Lenin from power and forming a new government out of a coalition between the Left SRs and Left Communists. At the same meeting of the Sovnarkom, Sverdlov delivered a report about the Supreme Military Council, which had expelled the Left SR Prosh Proshyan following the departure of the Left SRs from the Sovnarkom.
The longer the “delay or pause” lasted, the more evident Lenin’s miscalculations became. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk remained nothing but a declaration on paper. Neither of the sides viewed it as practical, feasible, or final. If Germany won the war, the treaty was to be reviewed and given a concrete form within the framework of the overall European agreement. If Germany lost, the treaty would obviously become void both because it would be dissolved by Russia, since it would not be recognized by the Allied Powers. The population of the former Russian empire that did not find itself under Soviet rule did not recognize the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk at all unless it was under German, Austro-Hungarian, or Turkish occupation. Within the Soviet camp, both those who had voted for the treaty under pressure from Lenin, and those who had supported an agreement with the Germans under the influence of circumstances, regarded the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement as nothing other than a delay. Not surprisingly, shortly after the ratification of the treaty, Stasova, Sverdlov’s assistant and secretary of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee, indicated in a letter to local organizations: “There is no doubt that Germany, although it has agreed to a peace treaty, will make every effort to eliminate the Soviet government.”55
From the military point of view, the Brest-Litovsk agreement did not make things easier either for Germany or for the RSFSR. The fall of Petrograd and its occupation by the Germans was expected at any moment. On March 4, one day after the peace treaty was signed, the Petrograd committee of the RSDLP queried the Central Committee about the possibility of operating as an underground organization should the Germans occupy the city—so little did everyone believe in the newly signed agreement. In the event that it might have to operate as an underground organization, the Petrograd committee requested several hundred thousand rubles. It also proposed not to convene the Seventh Party Congress in Petrograd, but to transfer it to Moscow and evacuate all the delegates who had come for the congress to Moscow as well, so as not to “lose our best comrades” should the city be captured.56 As the head of the Petrograd Soviet, however, Zinoviev tried to remain calm:
The actual balance of forces on the two sides reveals that at the present moment German imperialism has the power to demand a pound of meat from us without paying customs duties, but it still lacks the capacity to demand the extradition of the head of the Soviet.... Germany will not continue its offensive, no matter how tempting the possibility of occupying Petrograd and destroying the Smolny Palace might be.... And if Wilhelm does remain capable of continuing his offensive against us, what then? Then we have no other choice but to continue the war, and in this case the war will for the first time acquire a truly revolutionary meaning.57
No one paid any attention either to the peace treaty or to the fact that it had been ratified by the congress. Thus, concurrently with the Seventh Party Congress, a city conference of the Bolshevik Party also took place in Petrograd. Like the earlier Moscow conference, the conference in Petrograd was devoted to two issues: the Brest-Litovsk agreement and preventing a split within the ranks of the Bolshevik Party. Also as in Moscow, the majority of the people at the conference voted against the split, demanded that the Left Communists “end their independent organizational existence,” and resolved that the publication of the Left Communists’ newspaper, Kommunist, must be terminated as well;58 Petrograd Pravda was declared to be the official newspaper of the Petrograd party organization.59 However, on the question of Lenin’s middle course—the delay—he once again met with disappointment. Even Zinoviev, who represented his position at the conference, concluded his speech with a declaration of compromise:
Not for a second can we create the impression that a period of peace has arrived. A delay is a delay. We must sound the alarm. We must prepare and mobilize our forces. Under the crossfire of our enemies, we must create an army for the revolution.60
The majority of the conference voted in favor of Trotsky’s formula “neither war nor peace.”
The main fault in Lenin’s plans was that the Brest-Litovsk agreement turned out to be a total and unconditional capitulation. The closer one came to the line of demarcation (or to the regions of the intervention), the more obvious it was that the peace treaty which Lenin had signed was only the beginning of the problems connected with the issues of war and peace. This was true first and foremost of those regions that had been surrendered to Turkish and German occupation: the Transcaucasus and Ukraine (in the Transcaucasus, Lenin had surrendered not just three districts—Kars, Batum, Ardagan—but the Transcaucasus as a whole). If the revolutionaries, whose gaze was fixed on the West, were willing to forgive Lenin for the loss of the southern territories, which could have been of use only to launch attacks on India, Turkey, Iran, or Afghanistan, they viewed Lenin’s consent to surrender Ukraine—now almost Soviet—to the German occupation as an outright betrayal of the revolutionary cause. This was the very threshold that Trotsky, at the Seventh Party Congress, had promised not to cross. This was “betrayal in the full sense of the word.”61
From the economic, political, military, or emotional point of view, the transfer of Ukraine to German control was a singularly dramatic step for the revolutionaries. Soviet rule, which was already succeding in Ukraine (or perhaps this was merely the impression of the credulous Communists?), was being sacrificed for the sake of the same old whim of Lenin’s: in order to obtain a delay for Soviet Russia. For those who were genuine internationalists, it was difficult not to feel that the Russian Bolsheviks were betraying their Ukrainian comrades, who had been attempting to seize power since December 1917.
As in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks in Kiev had initially tried to stage a coup by relying on the Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. However, the Ukrainian Peasant Union—having sent its representation to the congress beforehand—neutralized this first attempt. The Bolsheviks there abandoned Kiev, made their way over to Kharkiv, and there declared themselves to be the organ of the Soviet government in Ukraine. From Russia, the Sovnarkom sent troops to aid the Ukrainian Bolsheviks. The Soviet detachments were carrying out a successful offensive, were about to take Kiev, and the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic had no other choice but urgently to declare independence—on January 9 (22), 1918—and sign a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers in order to avoid occupation by the Soviets in exchange for German occupation.
As in the case of the Transcaucasus, Russia was losing a great deal more than had been stipulated by the Brest-Litovsk agreement. Initially, the designnation “Ukraine” was taken to refer to the provinces of Kiev, Chernihiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Kherson, Volyn, Podolsk, Yekaterinoslavsk, and the Tauride Province—nine in all. Soon, however, the RSFSR also lost the provinces of Kursk and Voronezh to the Ukraine, as well as the Don Voisko Oblast and the Crimea.
Germany assumed the role of Ukraine’s defender against anarchy and the Bolsheviks. However, the peace treaty that it had signed with the Rada was based on food, not politics. And the fact that the Germans and Austrians were taking food supplies out of the country made Germany and Austria-Hungary responsible for economic disruptions, not necessarily Germany’s fault, in the eyes of the populace. The recent threat of a Soviet occupation was soon forgotten. The devotees of Ukrainian independence were now predisposed against the Germans, since they saw them as occupiers. The supporters of reunification with Russia were also against the Germans, since they believed, rightly, that it was under pressure from Germany that Ukraine had declared independence and separated from Russia. Within a short time, all sections of the Ukrainian population were turning against the Germans.
If in Ukraine the population believed that Germany was robbing their food supplies, then the opinion in Russia was that the famine and shortages were the results of Germany’s occupation of Ukraine. Whether or not this had any relation to reality was beside the point. What was important was that the cause of the food shortages in Russia was attributed to the German occupation of Ukraine and to the Sovnarkom’s Brest-Litovsk policy.
To these objective factors were added some subjective ones. German troops in Ukraine behaved as an occupying force, in part because of provocations from the opponents of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. This was most conspicuously confirmed by the establishment of German courts-martial in Ukraine, which according to German law could operate only during a time of war on occupied enemy territory. There were cases of German troops disarming Ukrainian units, although such units had a right to exist according to the terms of the Ukrainian-German agreement. The Ukrainian government had to obtain permission for a May Day celebration from the head of the German forces in Ukraine. More eloquent proof of the absence of any real peace agreement would have been difficult to imagine: Ukraine was not under allied, but under enemy, occupation.
Clearly, the hardening of the occupying regime in Ukraine was connected, first to Germany’s own deteriorating food supply situation. It was precisely to secure the regular export of Ukrainian food products that the German army engaged in various military actions in Ukraine. The “peace for bread” strategy had been advertised thoughtlessly to the German and Austro-Hungarian public. Ukrainian bread became a legend. Everyone in Germany and Austria-Hungary—from government officials to simple workers—believed that it would save them. Therefore, Germany’s military policies in Ukraine were governed by objectives connected to the food supply. In order to organize the export of food products from Ukraine, it was necessary to establish a stable regime there, to station troops in the region, and to secure a reliable means of transport. Many fields lay fallow. Not all arable land was being used. This greatly preoccupied the German leadership, that chose the path of coercion: on orders from General Eichhorn, the head of Germany’s occupation forces in Ukraine, peasants were forced to plant crops on all available land.
The order called for coerced cultivation of the fields by the peasants and military requisitioning of agricultural products with “due compensation” to the owners; it required landowners to make sure that peasants were planting crops and to report to the military authorities if they refused to do so. Local land committees were obligated under penalty of punishment to provide the necessary working animals, farm equipment, and seeds. But since the order did not indicate who exactly had to do the planting, it led mainly to arbitrary takeovers of other people’s fields. German officers on location interpreted the order in various ways, “sometimes chasing the land-grabbers away, sometimes encouraging them.”62 And this naturally led to the growth of rural banditry in Ukraine, i.e., to results that were diametrically opposed to the objectives set by the German government—to stabilize Ukraine’s regime in order to provide for the peaceful export of food supplies to Germany.
Such policies could be called neither wise, nor reasonable, nor consistent. In time, even the Rada government—which was dependent on Germany—began to speak out against them. For reasons of political expediency, it directed its criticism at Eichhorn, the head of Germany’s forces in Ukraine, and attempted to appeal to the German government and the Reichstag for help. Key meetings devoted to German policies in Ukraine took place in Kiev on April 27 and 28, shortly after Eichhorn’s orders to establish German courts-martial and capital punishment were made public. The criticism was universal. At a meeting on April 27, Lyubinsky, who had himself signed the German-Ukrainian peace treaty in Brest-Litovsk, proposed to stand firm this time and to demand the recall of Eichhorn and Mumm, the German envoy. In opposition to Eichhorn’s order, he proposed that the Ukrainian government issue its own decree, cancelling the German commander’s instructions. On the following day, Vsevolod Golubovich, the head of Ukraine’s Council of People’s Ministers, told the members of the Lesser Rada that, according to the existing treaty between the German and the Ukrainian governments, “all orders must be issued by mutual agreement and after joint discussion”;63 meanwhile, Eichhorn’s orders were being given unilaterally.
Given that, on April 17, the Ukrainian government had already refused to sign the Ukrainian-German military convention, which the Germans were insisting on, it was obvious that it was no longer loyal to Germany. The German government drew its own conclusions: on April 28, during a meeting of the Lesser Rada, at 3:45 p.m., the Ukrainian government was arrested by German troops. Since Germany, was not interested in maintaining a government that was (in its opinion) sabotaging its food supply policies, it organized the coup d’état. The old government was replaced by the new government of the Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, which pursued a more pro-German course.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk became the Achilles heel of Bolshevik rule. In the final analysis, they would either have to yield to their political opponents, to acknowledge the fundamental soundness of their criticism, and both formally and factually to terminate the delay, or else deepen their ties to the German government even further and to increase their dependency on Germany. In the former case, Lenin might be removed from power as the initiator of a flawed policy. Obviously, therefore, he preferred the second option. Under pressure from him, the Central Committee agreed to exchange ambassadors with “imperialist Germany.” Today, this move does not seem extraordinary. But in April 1918, when the German revolution was about to erupt at any moment, the official recognition of the “Hohenzollerns” by the Soviet government—which could in no way be justified by the need to maintain Lenin’s “delay”—was no longer simply a mistake from the point of view of the interests of the German and world revolution: it was a crime. And if Joffe, a Left Communist who supported the world revolution and opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, had been told in March 1918 that he would become Soviet Russia’s first authorized representative in imperialist Germany, he would likely have considered this a bad joke, and the very idea that the Soviet republic and the Kaiser’s Germany might exchange embassies would have seemed to him like sheer mockery.
As it turned out, however, the Central Committee, which disagreed with Lenin on the issue of Germany and the German revolution, nonetheless yielded to him step by step in all practical matters. Obviously, it was first and foremost he who insisted on establishing diplomatic relations between the RSFSR and Germany. Giving the ambassadorship to Germany to a Left Communist and an ardent opponent of the Brest-Litovsk treaty constituted a compromise, allowing the majority of the Central Committee to agree to establish diplomatic relations with the imperialist state: Joffe was going to Germany in order to coordinate the activities of German and Russian Communists toward organizing a German revolution.
The Germans appointed Count Mirbach as ambassador to the RSFSR; he had already spent several weeks in Petrograd and was thus familiar with the general outlines of the situation. Mirbach arrived in Moscow on April 23. The embassy occupied a two-story townhouse that belonged to the widow of the sugar manufacturer and collegiate counselor von Berg (today at Vesnin Street, no. 5). The ambassador’s arrival coincided with the coup d’état in Ukraine, the occupation of Finland by German troops, and the Germans’ gradual and systematic advance eastward of the line demarcated by the Brest-Litovsk agreement. Naturally, the Soviet government expressed its displeasure to Mirbach as soon as the opportunity presented itself—when his credentials were being presented on April 26. Three days later Mirbach informed Hertling that the German offensive in Ukraine “became the first cause of complications.” Finland was the second problem. Chicherin voiced his displeasure with a diplomatic formula; Sverdlov was more severe, expressing the hope that Mirbach would succeed in “eliminating the obstacles that still stand in the way of a genuine peace.” The ambassador’s letters credentials were given in a cold and perfunctory manner. After the official ceremony ended, Sverdlov did not invite anyone to sit down and engage in private conversation.64
As a diplomat, Mirbach was unprejudiced and subtle. His reports to Hertling and to State Secretary Kühlmann of Germany’s foreign ministry on the whole speak of an accurate understanding of the situation in Soviet Russia. On April 30, in a report on the political situation in the RSFSR, Mirbach did not hesitate to describe the central issue: the state of anarchy in the country and the weakness of the Bolshevik government, which lacked the support of the population. “Moscow, the holy city, the symbol of czarist rule, the sacred site of the Orthodox Church,” Mirbach wrote,
has become in the hands of the Bolsheviks the symbol of the most flagrant violations of good taste and style, unleashed by the Russian Revolution. Anyone who knew the capital during the days of its glory has difficulty recognizing it now. In all parts of the city, particularly in the central commercial district, the walls of buildings are riddled with bullet holes—evidence of the battles that took place here. Artillery fire has turned the magnificent Hotel Metropole into a heap of ruins, and even the Kremlin has suffered great damage. Various gates have been severely hit.
The streets are full of life, but one gathers the impression that they are filled exclusively with the proletariat. Well-dressed people are virtually not to be seen—as if all the representatives of the former ruling class and the bourgeoisie have suddenly fallen off the face of the earth. Maybe this is partly explained by the fact that most of them are trying outwardly to adapt to the new appearance of the streets, so as not to excite the passion for plunder and unpredictable excesses on the part of the new ruling class. Orthodox priests, who had previously constituted a significant proportion of the pedestrians, have likewise vanished from view. In the stores, one can buy almost nothing—only the dusty remnants of former luxury and at unheard-of prices. The central leitmotif of the whole picture is unwillingness to work and idleness. Since the factories are still not operating, and the land is still not being cultivated—or so it appeared to me, at least, during my journey—Russia seems to be moving toward an even more frightening catastrophe than the one that has already been brought about by the revolution. Security is quite poor, but during the day one can walk anywhere freely without escorts. However, to go out in the evening is unwise, and even during the day one keeps hearing gunfire, and more or less serious clashes take place constantly.
The former owning class has fallen into a state of profound unrest: one order by the government would be enough to deprive them of all their possessions. Sinister warrants of requisition hang on almost all of the palaces and large mansions, resulting in the owner ending up on the street, often in a matter of hours. The desperation of the representatives of the former ruling class knows no limits, but they are in no condition to gather sufficient strength to put an end to the organized robbery to which they are being subjected. The desire to establish some kind of order extends to the lowest strata of the population, while their sense of their own powerlessness compels them to hope that salvation will come from Germany. The same circles that had formerly been the loudest in railing against us now view us, if not as angels, then at least as a police force....
The Bolsheviks’ power in Moscow is provided mainly by Latvian battalions, as well as by the large number of automobiles, requisitioned by the government, which constantly circulate throughout the city and can, if necessary, deliver troops to locations where disorders arise.
To predict what all of this will lead to is impossible. At the present time, one can only suppose that the basic situation will remain the same.
Mirbach believed that it was still in Germany’s interest to deal with Lenin’s government, since those who would replace the Bolsheviks would try, with the Allied Powers’ help, to reunite with the territories that had been cut off by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, first and foremost with Ukraine, and that therefore it was most advantageous for Germany to provide the Bolsheviks with a minimum of supplies and maintain them in power, since no other government would have agreed to a treaty that was so advantageous to Germany.
Mirbach heard these arguments once more from Lenin himself, during a meeting that took place on May 16 in the Kremlin. Lenin acknowledged that the number of his opponents was growing and that the situation in the country was more serious than it had been a month before. He likewise noted that his opponents were not the same people as in the past. Previously, these had been the representatives of the right-wing parties; now, however, he had to face an opposition within his own camp, where a left wing had emerged. The main contention of this opposition, he went on, was that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which he was still prepared staunchly to defend, was a mistake. More and more Russian territory was under German occupation; the peace treaty with Finland had still not been ratified; there was no peace treaty with Ukraine; famine was spreading. The situation was still very far from a genuine armistice, Lenin indicated, while a number of recent events had confirmed the soundness of the left opposition’s arguments. He therefore was working toward securing peace agreements with Finland and Ukraine as a top priority. Mirbach noted the fact that Lenin did not threaten him with a possible reorientation of Soviet policy toward a partnership with the Allied Powers. Lenin had simply emphasized that his own position within the government was extremely unstable.
Mirbach’s report about his conversation with Lenin is literally the only document that contains an admission by Lenin that the Brest-Litovsk policy was a failure. Theoretical and ideological mistakes, however, were far less noticeable than practical ones. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, despite the fact that the Bolsheviks had acceded to all the German demands, had resulted neither in the coveted armistice, nor in the “delay” promised by Lenin. From the point of view of the German leadership, the Brest-Litovsk agreement was a military measure to help the Western Front while simultaneously using the Eastern districts for economic purposes in order to continue the war. This being the case, the deterioration of Germany’s position in the West had to increase its appetite in the East. After the peace treaty was signed, military activity did not stop for a single day on most of the territory of the former Russian empire. Germany continued to present new ultimatums and occupy entire districts and cities located to the east of the demarcation line established by the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk turned out to be merely an agreement on paper precisely because the two main participants in the peace talks—the Soviet and the German governments—did not take it seriously, did not consider it final, and most importantly, signed it not to secure peace, but only in order to continue the war, under conditions that were more favorable to them. The Bolsheviks were thinking of a revolutionary war, the Germans of a war for a stable peace. As it turned out, even if the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk did provide a delay, then it was only for the benefit of Germany, and only until November 1918.
There is no point in arguing that Lenin could have foreseen the consequences of the treaty. But it is evident that the majority of the party’s activists saw the worst of their fears realized. They had supported Trotsky’s formula “neither war nor peace” before signing the peace treaty, and after it was signed they entered a period of crisis that resulted in—as Trotsky put it—a “strategy of desperation.” The Bolsheviks themselves during this period believed that their days in power were numbered. With the exception of the two capitals, they had no support in the country. On May 22, a circular letter from the Central Committee—published in Pravda and written, evidently, on Sverdlov’s initiative—acknowledged that the Bolshevik Party was going through “an extremely critical period,” whose urgency was compounded on top of everything else by the grave “internal state of the party,” since “due to the departure of a large number of senior officials from the party” many party organizations had grown weak. One of the main causes of the crisis, the authors of the letter noted, was the secession of the left wing of the Bolshevik Party. They went on to conclude: “We have never before gone through such a difficult period.”65 Two days later, in his article “On the Famine (A Letter to the Workers of Petrograd),” Lenin wrote that due to problems with the food supply and the famine that had spread to vast regions of the country, the Soviet government was near collapse.66 He refused, however, to acknowledge that both of these developments were the results of his Brest-Litovsk policy.
On May 29, the Central Committee addressed party members in yet another letter, apparently also written on Sverdlov’s initiative, which stressed that the “crisis” which the party was going through was “very, very grave”—membership was falling, internal conflicts were becoming more and more frequent, clashes between party organizations and the party’s representatives in the Soviets and in executive committees were not uncommon. “The harmony and integrity of the party apparatus have been compromised. There is no longer the former unity of action. Discipline, which had always been so solid,” has grown weak. “There is an unquestionable general decline in party work and disintegration within the organizations.”67
The moribund state of the Soviet government became the reason for increasing panic in Bolshevik ranks. “However strange it may seem,” Vacietis later recalled, the expectation at the time was that “the center of Soviet Russia would become a stage for internecine war and that the Bolsheviks would unlikely be able to hold on to power and would fall victim to the famine and to the general discontent within the country.” People were not ruling out “the possibility of a Moscow offensive by the Germans, the Don Cossacks, and the White Czechs. This last notion was particularly widespread at the time.”68 Georgy Solomon, Krasin’s agent and good acquaintance with close ties to the Bolsheviks, wrote in his memoirs about the confusion prevailing in Bolshevik ranks during the summer of 1918. Solomon noted that it was approximately during these months that a prominent Soviet diplomat in Berlin (probably Joffe) confessed that he was certain that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia would fail and suggested to Solomon that he should disappear as soon as possible.69
The catastrophic state of the Soviet republic was discussed at a VTsIK meeting on June 4. Many prominent Bolsheviks delivered speeches, including Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin acknowledged that “we are now, in the summer of 1918, facing what may be one of the most difficult, one of the most severe, and one of the most critical transitions in our revolution,” and not merely “from the international point of view,” but domestically as well: “we are constrained to undergo enormous difficulties within the country...an agonizing food crisis, an extremely agonizing famine.”70 Intra muros, the VTsIK was even more pessimistic: “We are already effectively dead men; now it is up to the coffin-maker.”71
On June 15, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, Zinoviev delivered a report about the situation in Western Siberia, in the Urals, and in the eastern parts of European Russia in connection with the Czechoslovak offensive. “We are defeated,” he concluded, “but we are not crawling at anyone’s feet. If war must come, then we would have our class enemies choke on blood as well.” After speeches from the opposition—Mensheviks and SRs—Mikhail Lashevich, who was also present, spoke in response, taking out a gun and concluding with the following words: “Remember just one thing: whatever happens—maybe it is our lot to die—fourteen bullets are for you, the fifteenth for us.”72 These fourteen bullets were enough—one month later, on Lenin’s and Sverdlov’s orders—to exterminate the Russian imperial dynasty.
The May-June crisis in the Soviet government was undoubtedly the result of Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk policy, which had led to general discontent. Everyone was tired. Even those who had originally had illusions no longer believed in Soviet rule. In the opposition socialist press, particularly critical pronouncements were made by the Mensheviks, who had once been a part of a united Social Democratic organization along with the Bolsheviks, and who in many respects understood Lenin better than his other political opponents did. The “right” did not lag behind either. At a conference during that time, a speaker—apparently a member of the Kadets—stated in a report on foreign policy that he was obliged to speak “about the international position of a country about which it is not known whether it is in a state of war or peace,” and which was ruled by a government that was recognized “only by its enemies.” “As the story of the Brest-Litovsk treaty has shown,” the speaker observed, “the key point is not the signing of the agreement, but the guarantee that it will be executed.” And obviously, “no new paper agreements with Germany, no improvements on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,” will restrain Germany “from its future encroachments.” After all, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and the Black Sea fleet had been occupied and taken by the Germans outside the signed agreement.73
The Left SRs, who as a Soviet and ruling party could oppose the Brest-Litovsk policy in an official capacity, also directed severe and perceptive criticism against the Bolsheviks. In 1918, a whole series of pamphlets attacking the Brest-Litovsk treaty was penned by prominent opponents of the delay. The Left SRs argued that Lenin’s respite was a betrayal of the revolutionary cause that had given nothing to the Soviet government: “not bread, not peace, not the possibility to continue socialist construction”;74 that the Brest-Litovsk treaty had brought with it a “snuffing out,” an “exhaustion, a revulsion of the spirit,” since it was “not in a final decisive engagement and not from the blow of a knife raised overhead that the Russian revolution surrendered,” but “without making an attempt to fight,”75 that the signing of the peace treaty had caused a “sharp break” in the entire foreign policy of the RSFSR, since the path of accepting German ultimatums, the path of compromises, “represents a turning away from that straight path that the Revolution had followed so triumphantly,” leading not only to territorial and economic losses, but to ruination, since “even after losing its innocence, worker-peasant Russia [had acquired] no capital” from the delay, while the German army was penetrating “more and more deeply” into Russian territory, and the “power of the bourgeoisie” was now restored “in more than one third of the federation.”76
The Left SRs believed that the Bolsheviks’ Brest-Litovsk policy would doom not only the Russian Revolution, but the world revolution as well. The RSFSR, Steinberg wrote, “wants to extend and expand its united states gradually, first over Europe, then over America, and then over the entire world.” The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had “cut [us] off from this task of self-expansion,” depriving Russia “of the assistance and revolutionary collaboration” of other countries, while leaving the Western world without any “help and collaboration” from Soviet Russia.77 “All of the natural wealth of Ukraine, the Don, the Caucasus” had ended up at the disposal of the German government; and in this way the Sovnarkom had done militant Germany a great disservice: “the inflow of fresh natural products from the East” had weakened “the revolutionary will” of the German populace; “one of the most frightening threats”—“the threat of hunger, emaciation, impoverishment”—has been significantly weakened by Germany’s and Austria-Hungary’s food supply agreements.78 “These are the consequences of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,” which “cannot be described otherwise than as a counter-revolutionary treaty,” Steinberg summed up; “it is becoming clear that it should have never been signed.” After a lapse of “a mere three months since the day of its signing, all of the arguments that were made in its favor seem strange and lifeless.” People had talked about a “respite,” a “rest.” But the “rest” had turned out to be an “empty hope”: “Soviet Russia’s imperialist enemies are pressing down upon it from all sides” and giving “[us] neither a rest nor any extra time.”79
The Left SRs saw a popular uprising against the occupiers as the only way out of the existing situation. What they had in mind, naturally, was an uprising in the territories occupied by the Germans and Austrians, above all Ukraine. Speaking out against the “demoralizing preaching of weakness, fatigue, helplessness, the preaching of the inevitability of a pact with the foreign bourgeoisie,”80 the Left SRs proposed to “uphold the revolutionary idea of uprising and armed resistance in the face of the foreign bourgeoisie’s intimidations” until revolutions should break out in Germany, Austria, and other countries.81 As for the chances of success that such an uprising would have, in the opinion of the Left SRs “no regular army, which always fights under the lash,” would compare “with the insurgent people itself, when from behind every bush, from every ravine...the vengeful hand of the insurgents” would threaten the “punitive expedition coming from abroad.” Only after this would “the German nation, worn out by long war and a half-starved existence, terrorized by the guerilla struggle of the entire insurgent Russian nation,” finally understand that it was “attacking a nation that had opened its borders, withdrawn from the war”; and then “the muzzles of rifles and cannons would finally turn against the instigators and leaders of the punitive expedition” and point to the governments of Germany and Austria-Hungary.82
Although the proposal to lie in wait for the enemy “behind every bush” might have appeared naive from a military point of view, the Bolsheviks—during this summer of 1918, when guerilla actions and sabotage had become a reality in Ukraine—declined publicly to reject the idea of an uprising.
All of this criticism probably would not have been enough to be considered critical were it not for the fact that the Bolsheviks themselves were unhappy with Lenin’s Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And given the pervasive resistance to the Brest-Litovsk agreement, the realization of Lenin’s policies became a practical impossibility, Germany—the country for whose sake Lenin had made so many concessions—was now also unhappy with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as well.
Ludendorff, who had never relished the idea of collaborating with the Bolsheviks, was sincerely irritated by what was happening. “The Soviet government,” Ludendorff wrote to Kühlmann, “as anyone can see, has taken the same position toward us as at the beginning of the peace talks in Brest-Litovsk. It is delaying all decisions that are important to us in all kinds of ways and, as far as possible, acting against us. We have nothing to expect from this government, even though it exists only because we allow it. For us, it is a constant danger, which will abate only when it unconditionally recognizes us as the dominant power and submits to us out of fear of Germany and out of fear for its own existence.”
In signing the treaty, Germany had hoped to have at its rear “a peacefully-minded Russia, from which the famished Central Powers might obtain food and resources.” The reality has turned out to be the exact opposite. “Rumors that come from Russia every day are more and more dismal.” The Germans were getting neither peace nor food. “There has been no real peace on the Eastern Front.” Germany, “although relying on weak forces,” was keeping the front active.83 The German government was no less preoccupied than Lenin’s government, unable to see how to get the Sovnarkom—which was pretty much helpless—to fulfill various ultimatum-backed demands.
On May 13, Kühlmann, Ludendorff, and Kühlmann’s deputy Bussche, taking into account the fact that “the Bolsheviks are under a serious threat from the left, that is, from a party that holds even more radical views than the Bolsheviks” (the Left SRs and the Left Communists), found that it was in Germany’s interest to “declare once and for all that our operations in Russia are over,” “the line of demarcation has been drawn,” and “thus the offensive has been concluded.” It is not clear, however, that this assurance was really made to the Soviet government. It is even less clear how anyone could have believed it, since the German offensive continued after May 13. Even at the beginning of June, Radek voiced the belief that the balance of forces created by the Brest-Litovsk agreement “threatens us with further profound upheavals and great economic losses,” that the “territorial losses that are the consequence of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk are not yet over,” that a “period of intensive fighting” over Soviet territories still lay ahead.84 (And indeed, the evacuation of Kursk began a few days later.)
Given this predicament, it is clear that Lenin could find comfort only in the thought of retreating further into the depths of Russia. When Trotsky asked him what he proposed to do “if the Germans nonetheless continue their offensive” and “aim for Moscow,” Lenin replied:
We will retreat further, to the east, to the Urals.... The Kuznetsk Basin is rich in coal. We will create a Ural-Kuznets republic, supported by the industry of the Urals and the coal of Kuznets, the Ural proletariat and the Moscow and Petersburg workers that we manage to take with us.... If necessary, we will go even further to the east, past the Urals. We will go all the way to Kamchatka, but we will not surrender. The international situation will change dozens of times, and from the borders of the Ural-Kuznets republic, we will expand once again and come back to Moscow and Petersburg.
Trotsky explained that the “conception of a Ural-Kuznets republic” was “organically necessary” for Lenin, so that “he might steel himself and others in the conviction that nothing has been lost yet and that a strategy of desperation was absolutely out of the question.”85 Indeed, for Lenin it was more important to be at the head of the Kamchatkan republic than to yield his power, even for the sake of a revolution in Europe. But did anyone else besides Lenin believe in a Soviet Kamchatkan republic? Apparently not. In any case, the idea of retreating to Kamchatka while the Far East was under the threat of a Japanese occupation inspired no one. And on May 10, at a Central Committee meeting, Sokolnikov put forward a resolution to abolish the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk:
The Central Committee believes that the coup d’état in Ukraine represents the emergence of a new political situation, characterized by an alliance between the Russian bourgeoisie and German imperialism. Under these conditions, war with Germany is inevitable and the respite provided by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is over. The party’s task is to begin immediate open and large-scale preparations for military action and to organize resistance through broad mobilization. At the same time, it is necessary to conclude a military pact with the British-French coalition with a view to military cooperation on well-defined terms.86
Until April 1989, this resolution was considered “lost.”87 But the “Theses on the Present Political Situation,” which Lenin outlined at a meeting on May 10, were never lost were:
The foreign policy of the Soviet government must not be changed in any way. We are still facing the very real threat—which at the present time is stronger and closer than it was yesterday—of Japanese troop movements meant to divert German troops deeper into European Russia, and on the other hand, of German troop movements aimed against Petrograd and Moscow in the event of a victory by Germany’s war party. We must respond to these dangers as before with a strategy of retreating, biding time, and maneuvering, while keeping up the most intensive military preparations.88
Sokolnikov’s resolution was defeated. He alone voted for it. Stalin abstained, while Lenin, Sverdlov, Shmidt, and Vladimirsky voted against it. Yet Lenin’s theses were not put to a vote on that day either. Sokolnikov lost. But neither did Lenin come out a winner. A second discussion of Lenin’s theses took place at the next Central Committee meeting, on May 13. Sokolnikov’s resolution was also discussed a second time, and its text has not survived among the materials from this meeting either.89 The Central Committee, with the same members present, came to the conclusion that Lenin had greatly overestimated the military threat posed by Germany. Nonetheless, his theses were passed, with certain amendments. Sokolnikov’s resolution—his proposal to abolish the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and to seek the support of the Allied Powers in the fight with Germany—failed to win a single vote, apart from its author’s. Stalin voted against Lenin (but did not back Sokolnikov). Trotsky and Zinoviev, in Petrograd at the time and not present at the meeting, had voiced their support for Lenin’s theses.
In May and June 1918, an increasingly important role was assumed by Sverdlov. In March-April, he had been mainly coordinating collaboration between different political coalitions. In May-June, he took up all party work and the functions of the “general secretary” and was appointed as Lenin’s copresenter by the Central Committee, i.e., he began to play the role of party commissar to Lenin. It was Sverdlov—in place of Lenin—who read the “Theses of the Central Committee on the Present Political Situation” at a Moscow municipal party conference on May 13. In the transcript of a Central Committee meeting on May 18, his name is at the top of a list of those present. The Central Committee meeting of May 19 was a complete triumph for Sverdlov: he was assigned absolutely every party task. The transcript of this meeting was first published in April 1989:
“The committee heard a report from Dzerzhinsky, who stressed the need to provide the Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] with responsible comrades capable of replacing him.” It was resolved that Latsis would be transferred from the NKVD to the Cheka. “Comrades Yakovleva and Stukov will also be transferred to the Cheka and become the heads of the counter-revolutionary department. Responsibility for notifying them has been assigned to Sverdlov.” Trotsky made a statement “about a conflict that he was having with the representatives of the Zamoskvoretsky District Soviet.” Sverdlov “reports that he has already instructed the Moscow committee to tighten discipline in the districts.” He “reports that the presidium of the TsIK [Central Executive Committee] was discussing the future fate of Nicholas, that the same question is being discussed by the Ural Regional Soviet and by the [Left] SRs. It is necessary to decide what to do with Nicholas. A decision has been made not to do anything with Nicholas for the time being, only taking the necessary precautionary measures. Responsibility for notifying the Ural Regional Soviet has been assigned to Sverdlov.”
The question of military experts was also discussed, with some speakers noting that there was “widespread discontent among the lowest circles, in the rank and file of the party, about the fact that excessively broad rights have been granted to former counterrevolutionary officers and generals,” while the original intention had been to put them “in the position of consultants.” A decision was made to schedule a special meeting of the Central Committee for May 26 in order to discuss this question, and to invite certain prominent Bolsheviks who had served both in the pre-Revolutionary and the Soviet army. “Responsibility for organizing the meeting and selecting comrades from the military has been assigned to Comrades Trotsky and Sverdlov.” It was decided to propose to the Moscow party committee to call a municipal conference “in order to discuss the position of the party organizations and the aims of the party. Comrades Trotsky and Sverdlov have been delegated to the conference from the Central Committee.” The participants also voted to establish a Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. Sverdlov was instructed “to order Stuchka and Krylenko to draft an urgent resolution for the Sovnarkom in accordance with this decision.” It was agreed “to institute death sentences for certain crimes.” Sverdlov was instructed to order Stuchka “to draft a resolution in accordance with this decision first for the Central Committee, and then for the Sovnarkom and the TsIK.”90
Lenin was given only one assignment at this meeting, and it could hardly be characterized as crucial: “to get the Sovnarkom to grant permission to Steklov to be present there.”91
It is impossible to trace the further growth of Sverdlov’s influence (and the decline of Lenin’s authority) in Central Committee transcripts because the transcripts from May 19 to September 16, 1918, have not been located. Evidently, numerous Central Committee transcripts from that time “did not survive” precisely because in them Lenin’s position appeared in a highly unfavorable light. Only fragmentary evidence of this exists. Thus, on June 26 the Central Committee discussed the issue of preparing a draft of the constitution of the RSFSR to be ratified at the Fifth Congress of Soviets. The Central Committee found the work on the preparation of the draft unsatisfactory, and Lenin, supported by several other members of the Central Committee, proposed to “remove this issue from the agenda of the Congress of Soviets.” But Sverdlov “insisted that the question remain in place,”92 going against Lenin and other Central Committee members and winning; later he played an active role in writing the constitution.
Beginning in May—in keeping with the policy of the Secreteriat of the Central Committee (i.e., Sverdlov), and against Lenin’s will—Ukraine became the theater of intense, subversive, anti-German activity. On May 3—in order to weaken Germany’s military might and to set the stage for a Communist takeover—the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party passed two resolutions concerning the creation of a Ukrainian Communist party.93 The texts of these resolutions do not appear in the transcript of the Central Committee’s meeting, but on May 9 Pravda published the following report:
The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, having discussed the question of separating a special Ukrainian Communist party from the Russian Communist Party, found no objections to the creation of a Ukrainian Communist party, because Ukraine is an independent state.
This was one of the resolutions passed by the Central Committee on May 3, and it was published. The second resolution was not subject to publication and is considered “lost,” since “it concerned the fact that the Ukrainian Communist party [was] a component part of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks),”94 in other words, its meaning was precisely the opposite of the resolution that was published in Pravda. The point of this maneuver is clear: by loudly proclaiming the independence of the Ukrainian Communist party, the Central Committee absolved itself of any formal responsibility for the subversive activity which the Bolsheviks were preparing in German-occupied Ukraine. Anti-German actions could now be carried out effectively in the open, without the risk of complicating poor Soviet-German or Soviet-Ukrainian relations. Germany’s objections were dismissed by Chicherin on the grounds that the Bolsheviks in Russia had no connection to the Bolsheviks in Ukraine. At the same time, the second resolution reminded the Ukrainian Bolsheviks that they did not constitute an independent party, but were subordinate to the unified Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.
In the summer of 1918, the inevitability of Germany’s defeat in the world war—following the failure of the last major German offensive on the Western Front and the arrival of American forces in France—became apparent. German leaders therefore recognized that an offensive deeper into Russia was now ill-advised not only from a political, but also from a military point of view. On June 9, in a memorandum to the State Secretary of Foreign Affairs, the usually self-assured Ludendorff indicated that, due to troop shortages on the Western Front, the army’s command was forced further to weaken the divisions on the Eastern Front. “They are sufficiently strong to solve problems of an occupational nature,” Ludendorff continued, “but if the situation in the East deteriorates, they will be unable to manage it.” If the Bolsheviks were to fall, Germany’s prospects would be even worse. Ukraine would reunite with a non-Bolshevik Russia, and, as Riezler believed, Germany could end up “in an extremely difficult situation” and would either have to “oppose a powerful movement with only a few divisions” or to “accept this movement,” and yield to the demands of the new government and revise the Brest-Litovsk agreement.
After the failure of the Germans’ March offensive on the Somme and around Amiens, in Hoffmann’s words, “there were no more good troop replacements, and supreme command gathered men from everywhere for troop replacements, paying attention only to their numbers and not taking into account any other considerations.” This is how “all young soldiers were pulled from the Eastern divisions and redirected to the Western Front.” The artillery was particularly affected by this policy: “all men with any amount of ability have been taken out of the squadrons on the Eastern Front.” The divisions that remained on the Eastern Front were in Hoffmann’s opinion unfit for any serious fighting.95
If even Ludendorff and Hoffmann admitted the German army’s inability to conduct an effective offensive in the East, if it was clear that Germany would have to negotiate with a new government—whatever it might be—from a position of weakness, it was expedient to seek a political decision. Kühlmann therefore instructed Mirbach to continue providing the Bolsheviks with financial assistance in order to keep them in power. “From here, it is very difficult to say who should be given support if the Bolsheviks should fall,” Kühlmann wrote. “If there is truly powerful pressure, the Left SRs will fall along with the Bolsheviks,” and these “are the only parties that base their positions on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.” The Kadets and the monarchists are against the treaty. The latter stand for a unified Russia, and “it is not in our interest to support the monarchic idea, which will reunify” the country. On the contrary, it is necessary, as far as possible, to preclude “Russia’s consolidation and with this aim to support the extreme left-wing parties” (the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs).
It appears that Mirbach did not consider the task set by the foreign ministry feasible. As he observed the collapse from the windows of the embassy, Mirbach was convinced that the Bolsheviks were living out their final days. In the event that the Sovnarkom should fall, he proposed to take precautionary measures in advance and to form a government with pro-German leanings. The foreign ministry agreed to his proposal. “Practically speaking,” Riezler wrote on June 4, “this means that we must stretch a thread to Orenburg and Siberia over the head of General Krasnov, keep the cavalry [ready for battle] and oriented toward Moscow, and prepare a future government” with which Germany could sign a treaty; revise those terms of the Brest-Litovsk agreement which are directed against Germany’s economic hegemony over Russia; attach Ukraine to Russia, and perhaps Estonia and Latvia as well. “To facilitate the rebirth of a Russia that would once again become imperialistic,” Riezler concluded, “is not a pleasant prospect, but such a development might turn out to be inevitable.”96 Riezler believed that the change in Germany’s eastern policy must take place within six to eight weeks.
During this period, Ambassador Mirbach sent a similar report to Hertling. In view of the “ever-increasing instability the Bolshevik position,” he recommended preparing for a “military regrouping, which may become a necessity,” and suggested relying on the Kadets, a group with a “predominantly right-wing orientation,” often called “monarchists.” These people, in his opinion, could form the “kernel of a future new order,” and therefore it would be useful to establish contact with them and to provide them with necessary financial resources.
On June 5, Trautmann—a foreign ministry advisor—spoke out in favor of a change in Germany’s Eastern policies, but envisioning a more passive role for Germany itself. He believed that the Bolsheviks should be supported “by every available means,” in spite of the obstacles that the German demands had created. Nonetheless, Trautmann recommended taking into account the possibility that the Bolsheviks might fall, not breaking off relations with other political parties, and “providing for a maximally secure transition for ourselves.”97
More or less the same course of action was recommended by Ludendorff: despite the existence of diplomatic relations with the Soviet government, it was advisable to maintain simultaneous “relations with other movements in Russia, in order not to find ourselves suddenly in complete isolation”; “to establish contact with right-wing, monarchist groups and to influence them in such a way as to render the monarchist movement, as soon as it acquires any influence,” beholden to Germany’s interests.
The interests of Germany’s political leadership, foreign ministry, and military command finally converged. A reorientation took place in its eastern policy. On June 13, Mirbach notified Berlin that he had been approached, directly and through intermediaries, by various political leaders seeking to learn if the German government would be willing to offer assistance to anti-Soviet forces aiming to overthrow the Bolsheviks, on the condition, however, that the terms of the Brest-Litovsk agreement would also be revised. The most serious of these groups Mirbach considered to be the coalition of right-wing organizations headed by former minister of agriculture Krivoshein. Through the members of the Octobrist Party, Krivoshein had queried Mirbach whether the German ambassador was prepared to establish ties with members of Krivoshein’s organization, and receiving an affirmative response, instructed two members of the central committee of the Kadet Party to take further action; these were Baron Nolde, former assistant to the foreign affairs minister in Lvov’s cabinet, and Leontiev, former assistant to the minister of internal affairs in the same cabinet.
On June 25, Mirbach wrote to Kühlmann that “after two months of careful observation” he could no longer “give Bolshevism a favorable diagnosis. We are, without question, standing by the bedside of a dangerously ill person, whose condition might now and again improve, but who is doomed.” Based on this fact, he proposed filling the “newly formed vacuum” with new “government organs, which we will keep ready and which will be wholly and entirely at our service.” Since it was obvious that no new government would agree to honor the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he proposed substantially easing its terms, above all by uniting Ukraine and Estonia with Russia. On June 28, in his last dispatch from Moscow, the ambassador wrote that he was observing the coup that was being prepared by Krivoshein’s group and that was supposed to take place literally in a few weeks.
The change in Germany’s position did not go unnoticed in Russia. By the middle of May, “right-wing” circles noted that the “Germans, whom the Bolsheviks had brought to Moscow—the treaty between the two being the only basis for the Bolsheviks’ existence—are themselves ready to overthrow the Bolsheviks.”98 The diplomatic representatives of the Allied Powers were informed about the anti-Soviet activities of the German embassy. Given such extensive leaks, it is hardly surprising that the shift in the embassy’s mood was also no secret to the Soviet government. At the beginning of June—around the time when Mirbach and Riezler were sending their letters to Berlin arguing that Germany’s eastern policy had to change—a new department was created in the Cheka, either on orders from above or by the Cheka itself, for the purpose of monitoring “possible criminal activity by the embassy.” The Cheka, it will be recalled, was run by the Left Communist Dzerzhinsky. The top post in this new department was given to the future murderer of the German ambassador, the Left SR Yakov Blumkin, a young man of nineteen or twenty.
It must be said that, for quite some time, the German embassy’s employees had been living with a premonition of unpleasant and unforeseeable events. On June 4, in an astonishingly clear-sighted dispatch to Berlin, Riezler described the future in the bleakest tones imaginable:
Over the past two weeks, the situation has become critical. Famine is encroaching upon us; they are trying to stifle it with terror. The Bolshevik fist comes down on everyone indiscriminately. People are tranquilly executed by the hundreds. All of this in itself is still not so bad, but now there can no longer be any doubt that the Bolsheviks’ material resources are running out. Fuel reserves are waning, and even Latvian soldiers, sitting in their trucks, can no longer be counted on—let alone workers and peasants. The Bolsheviks are terribly nervous, probably feeling their end approaching, and therefore the rats are beginning to flee from the sinking ship.... Karakhan has stored the original copy of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in his desk. He intends to take it with him to America and to sell it there, getting vast sums for the emperor’s signature....
No one is able to predict how they [the Bolsheviks] will meet their end, and their death throes may last for another few weeks. It may be that they will attempt to flee to Nizhny Novgorod or Yekaterinburg. It may be that they are intending, out of desperation, to get drunk on their own blood, or perhaps they will invite us to get lost in order to tear up the Brest-Litovsk agreement (which they call a “respite”)—their compromise with imperialism—thus saving their revolutionary consciousness at the hour of their death. These people’s actions are absolutely unpredictable, particularly in a state of desperation. In addition, they have once again started to believe that the increasingly open “military dictatorship” in Germany is giving rise to enormous resistance, especially as a result of further advances to the east, and that this must lead to a revolution. This was recently written by Sokolnikov, obviously based on Joffe’s reports.... I apologize for this lyrical digression about the state of chaos, which even by Russian standards is now completely unbearable.99
Trautmann offered a similar impression, writing a day later that “in the coming months a political struggle might flare up. It might even lead to the Bolsheviks’ downfall.” Trautmann added that, according to his intelligence, “one or even two” Bolshevik leaders had “already reached a certain level of desperation with regard to their own fate.”
During these weeks, the usually-dynamic Lenin was idle, as if he were paralyzed. Yet he did talk more and more often about Germany’s weakness. On July 1, in an interview with a Swedish newspaper, he effectively acknowledged that the failure of the Brest-Litovsk policy in Ukraine was due to an underestimation of the power of the guerilla movement: “The Germans need peace. It is telling that in Ukraine, the Germans want peace more than the Ukrainians themselves.” Meanwhile, “the Germans’ position in Ukraine is very difficult. They get no bread at all from the peasants. The peasants are arming and large groups of them are attacking German soldiers,” and “this movement is growing.”
Any Left Communist would have concluded that, precisely for this reason, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk should be repealed. But Lenin thought otherwise. “We in Russia must now wait for the development of the revolutionary movement in Europe,” he said. “Sooner or later, things everywhere must come to a political and social collapse.” He emphasized that the Bolsheviks had time on their side also because “due to the German occupation, Bolshevism in Ukraine has become a kind of national movement,” and that “if the Germans occupied all of Russia, the result would be the same.”100 Again and again, Lenin proposed retreating in the face of German demands and remaining inactive even if the Germans should occupy “all of Russia.” He took up this subject again at the Fifth Congress of Soviets in early July:
The frenzied forces of imperialism are continuing to fight, while in the three months that have elapsed since the last congress they have moved several steps closer to the abyss.... This abyss over three and a half months...has unquestionably moved closer.... The Western powers have taken an enormous step toward this abyss into which imperialism is falling faster and faster with every week of the war.... Over three-and-a-half months...of war, the imperialist states have moved closer to this abyss.... This wounded beast [Germany] has torn many lumps of flesh from our living organism. Our enemies are nearing this abyss so fast that even if they had more than three-and-a-half months at their disposal, and even if the imperialist carnage were to bring us new losses as heavy as before, it is they who would perish, not we, for the speed with which their resistance is waning is rapidly bringing them nearer to the abyss.
But in this schizophrenic speech with multiple repetitions of almost identical phrases, Lenin found a way to urge the Soviet leadership to do the same thing that he had urged them to do in March—to wait things out, to remain inactive, and not to tear up the Brest-Litovsk agreement: “Our position cannot be anything else but to wait...until these frenzied groups of imperialists, which are now still strong, shall tumble into this abyss which they are approaching—this everyone can see.”101
Only it was hard not to ask: if Germany was on the brink of demise three and a half months after signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, while conducting large-scale military action on only one front, receiving food supplies from Russia and Ukraine, and using the Red Army to fight the Czechoslovak forces, which, if the Bolsheviks had not prevented them, would have long ago been fighting in Europe against the Germans, how deep in this abyss would the Kaiser’s Germany have already been if it had been forced to fight on two fronts? What would have been the condition of the Central Powers now? And where would the borders of the Communist state have been?
Driven into a dead end by Lenin, brought to a state of crisis, split up and losing power, the Bolshevik Party could now do nothing but grasp at the straw that in March 1918 had been offered to it by Trotsky: “No matter how much we equivocate, no matter what kind of strategy we invent, we can be saved in the full sense of this word only by a European revolution.”102 And in order to encourage it, it was necessary, first of all, to repeal the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and second of all, to form a Red Army. On April 22, the question of creating a regular army had been raised by Trotsky at a session of the VTsIK, and he had emphasized that such a new trained and disciplined army was necessary above all to fight the foreign enemy103—“specifically to renew the world war together with France and England against Germany.” At the same time, Trotsky and Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich began discussing plans for joint military operations with the representatives of the Allied Powers. This new army began to be called the “People’s Army.” By the summer of 1918 it formed the kernel of the Moscow garrison, was built up on a contractual basis, was considered apolitical, came under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Military Council headed by Trotsky, and was under the military leadership of Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, a former officer in the headquarters of the tsar’s army. The forces were under the direct command of Muralov, who was in charge of the troops in the district. In June, the People’s Army admitted the Latvian Rifle Division to its ranks on Trotsky’s orders.104
It seemed that only a breakdown of the Brest-Litovsk agreement could cut through the knot of Soviet-German relations and reunite the divided Bolshevik Party. Perhaps to start the war in the summer of 1918 was no less risky than to have continued it in March. But in June, the Bolsheviks had no options left. Lenin’s “respite” policy had been tried and yielded no positive results for the revolutionaries. By June, it was irrelevant whether he had been correct in March. During the three months of the delay, the Revolution had lost its uncompromising dynamic force. The agony and despair of the Bolshevik regime had reached its peak. The critical moment came on July 6, 1918, when Chekists bearing a mandate from Dzerzhinsky and Ksenofontov arrived at the residence of the German embassy and demanded a meeting with German ambassador Mirbach on extremely urgent business. Right then and there, the Bolshevik government was saved, and along with it—even more ironically—Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk “delay.”