The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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