The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  Let it be known to all our brothers that on the basis of the decision of the Congress of the [Czechoslovak] Corps, in agreement with our National Council and by arrangement with all the Allies, our corps is designated as the vanguard of the forces of the Entente, and that the instructions issued by the staff of the Army Corps have as their sole purpose creating an anti-German front in Russia jointly with the entire Russian nation and our allies.

  193

  In accord with these plans, in early July, the Czechoslovak commanders assigned their troops missions for which they had neither the capability nor the motivation.

  To establish a front against the Germans, the Czechoslovaks had to redeploy from a horizontal line, running from west to east, to a diagonal one, running from north to south, along the Volga and the Urals.194 Accordingly, the Czechoslovak forces still in western Siberia, some 10,000–20,000 strong, launched offensive operations to the north and south of Samara. On July 5, they captured Ufa, on July 21, Simbirsk, and on August 6, Kazan. The assault on Kazan marked the high point of their operations in Russia. After they had compelled a severely depleted 5th Latvian Regiment of 400 men defending the city to retreat, the Czechs captured a gold hoard of 650 million rubles of the Imperial Russian Treasury, evacuated there by the Bolsheviks in February. It enabled them to conduct large-scale military campaigns without resorting to taxation or forced food extractions.

  The Czechoslovaks fought with vigor and skill. But they were meant to be only the vanguard—the vanguard of what? The Allies did not stir to help, although they were generous enough with instructions and advice. Nor were anti-Bolshevik Russians more helpful. Prodded by the Allies, the Czechoslovaks tried to unite the Russian political groupings in the Volga region and Siberia, but this proved a hopeless undertaking. On July 15, representatives of Komuch and the Omsk government conferring in Cheliabinsk failed to reach agreement. Disagreements also racked a second Russian political conference held on August 23–25. The squabbling of the Russians exasperated the Czechs.

  Komuch attempted to raise an army to fight alongside the Czechoslovaks and the other Allies, but it had only limited success. On July 8, it announced the formation of a volunteer People’s Army (Narodnaia Armiia) under the overall command of General Čeček. But as the Bolsheviks had also found out, a Russian army could not be created on a voluntary basis. Especially galling was Komuch’s experience with the peasants, who, although violently anti-Communist, refused to enlist on the grounds that the Revolution had freed them of all obligations to the state. After inducting 3,000 volunteers, Komuch went over to conscription and in the course of August recruited 50,000–60,000 men, of whom only 30,000 had weapons and only 10,000 were trained for combat.195 The military historian General N. N. Golovin estimates that at the beginning of September the pro-Allied contingent in western Siberia consisted of 20,000 Czechoslovaks, 15,000 Ural and Orenburg Cossacks, 5,000 factory workers, and 15,000 troops of the People’s Army.196 This multinational force had no central command and no political leadership.

  In the meantime, Trotsky was energetically building up forces in the east. The Kaiser’s pledge of late June not to imperil Soviet Russia allowed him to shift Latvian regiments from the west to the Urals, where they were the first to engage the Czechoslovaks. He then proceeded to press into the Red Army thousands of former tsarist officers and hundreds of thousands of conscripts. He reintroduced and freely applied the death penalty for desertion. The Red Army’s first successes against the Czechoslovaks were won by the Latvians, who on September 7 retook Kazan and five days later Simbirsk. The news of these victories brought jubilation to the Kremlin: for the Bolsheviks they marked a psychological turning of the tide.

  But all this lay in the future. On August 1, when the Kremlin received news of Allied landings in Archangel, the situation looked hopeless. In the east, the Czechoslovaks were capturing city after city and had full control of the middle Volga region. In the south, Denikin’s Volunteer Army, headed by the Don Cossacks under General Krasnov, was advancing on Tsaritsyn, capture of which would allow it to link up with the Czechoslovaks and create an uninterrupted anti-Bolshevik front from the middle Volga to the Don. And now a sizable Anglo-American force was assembling in the north, apparently to launch an offensive into the interior of Russia.

  The Bolsheviks saw only one way out of their plight and that was German military intervention. This they decided to request on August i, the day after Helfferich had given Chicherin undertakings of continued German support. The meeting at which this decision was made is described in Communist sources as a session of the Sovnarkom, but as there exists no record of a meeting of the cabinet on that day, it is virtually certain it was made personally by Lenin, probably in consultation with Chicherin. The Russians were to propose to the Germans joint military action against Allied and pro-Allied forces: the Red Army, composed at this time essentially of Latvian units, would take up positions to the northeast of Moscow to defend it from the anticipated Allied assault, while the German Army would advance from Finland against the Anglo-American expeditionary force and from the Ukraine against the Volunteer Army. This decision is known to us mainly from the memoirs of Helfferich, who late on August 1 received another unexpected visit from Chicherin. The Commissar of Foreign Affairs told him that he had come directly from a meeting of the cabinet to request, on its behalf, German military intervention.* According to Helfferich, Chicherin said:

  In view of the state of public opinion, an open military alliance with Germany is not possible; what is possible is actual parallel action. His government intended to concentrate its forces in Vologda to protect Moscow. It was a condition of parallel action that we not occupy Petrograd: it was preferable that we avoid Petropavlovsk as well. In effect, this approach meant that in order to enable it to defend Moscow, the Soviet Government had to request us to defend Petrograd.

  The Bolshevik proposal meant that German forces, from the Baltic areas and/or from Finland, would enter Soviet Russia, establish lines of defense around Petrograd, and advance on Murmansk and Archangel to expel the Allies. But this was not all.

  [Chicherin] was no less worried about the southeast.… Under my questioning, he finally spelled out the nature of the intervention that was requested of us: “An active assault against Alekseev, no further [German] support of Krasnov.” Here, as in the case of the north and for the same reasons, what was possible was not an overt alliance but only de facto cooperation: but this was a necessity. With this step, the Bolshevik regime requested the armed intervention of Germany on the territory of Great Russia.

  197

  Helfferich forwarded to Berlin the Bolshevik request, which he summarized as calling for “silent [Bolshevik] tolerance of our intervention and actual parallel action.”198 Along with it he sent a pessimistic assessment of the situation in Russia. The main source of Bolshevik authority, he wrote, was the widespread belief that it enjoyed the support of Germany. But such a perception did not constitute a sound basis on which to conduct policy. He recommended that Germany pursue talks with those anti-Bolshevik groups which were not pro-Entente, among them the Right Center, the Latvians, and the Siberian Government.199 He was of the opinion that if Germany did nothing more than demonstratively withhold support from the Bolsheviks, their opponents would rise and topple them.

  Once again the advice of the Moscow Embassy was overruled, this time by Hintze. The Bolsheviks were not friends, he conceded, but they “abundantly” took care of German interests by helping to paralyze Russia militarily.200 He was so displeased with Helfferich’s recommendations that on August 6 he had him recalled to Berlin; the ambassador never returned to his post, which he had held less than two weeks. Hintze then liquidated the troublesome German Embassy, ordering it to leave Moscow so that it could no longer interfere with German-Soviet relations. A few days after Helfferich’s departure, the embassy packed up and left, first for Pskov and then for Revel, both of which were under German occupation. Without a German mission in Russia, the ce
nter of Soviet-German relations shifted to Berlin, where Ioffe served as his government’s spokesman and principal negotiator of the commercial and military accords which the two countries concluded at the end of August.*

  The abortive efforts of some Germans to topple the Bolsheviks had an epilogue. In early September, the German Consul General in Moscow, Herbert Hauschild, had a visit from Vatsetis. The Latvian officer, who had just been appointed Commander in Chief of the armed forces of Soviet Russia, told Hauschild that he was not a Bolshevik but a Latvian nationalist, and that if his men were promised amnesty and repatriation they would place themselves at the disposal of the Germans. Hauschild informed Berlin, which ordered him to drop the matter.*

  The Brest Treaty called for a supplementary accord to regulate Russo-German economic relations.

  The Germans were very eager to resume trade with Russia, their major commercial partner before 1914, when Russia had purchased from them nearly one-half of her imports. They wanted foodstuffs, first and foremost, as well as other raw materials, and they wished to establish a near-monopoly on Russia’s foreign trade. In June 1918, Moscow provided the Germans with a list of goods which it claimed to have available for export: it included grain, of which, in reality, it had none to spare. Krasin painted a dazzling picture of the vast markets that Soviet Russia could provide for German manufactured goods, and to prove it, negotiated with his old employer, Siemens, for imports of electrical equipment. None of the proposals had any basis in reality: they were bait to serve political ends. The Germans soon grew impatient with Soviet Russia’s failure to provide the promised goods. In June Dr. Alfred List, who had come to Moscow on behalf of the Bleichröder Bank, told Chicherin that the delays in Russian deliveries brought disappointment to those German circles “among which Great Russia could find the most likely sympathy for her political strivings.”201 Lenin was well aware that he could use such “circles”—bankers and industrialists—to neutralize other Germans, mainly among the military, who wanted to be rid of him. He therefore closely monitored the negotiations for the Supplementary Treaty, to which he attached the highest political importance.

  The talks opened in Berlin at the beginning of July. The Soviet delegation was headed by Ioffe, who had the assistance of Krasin and various specialists sent by Moscow. The Germans fielded a large delegation of diplomats, politicians, and businessmen. The key person on the German side seems to have been a Foreign Ministry official named Johannes Kriege, whom the historian Winfried Baumgart calls the “gray eminence” of Germany’s policy toward Bolshevik Russia.202 Ioffe was under instructions to be very accommodating to German demands, but if the Germans became unreasonable, he was to make them understand that there were limits to Russia’s compliance. As Ioffe confirmed to Lenin from Berlin: “[our] whole policy must center on demonstrating to the Germans that if they push us too far we will have to fight and then they will get nothing.”203

  91. A German-Russian love affair: contemporary Russian cartoon.

  Considering the complexity of the issues involved, agreement was reached speedily. The Germans made harsh demands. Ioffe managed to wring some concessions from them, but even so the accord, known as the Supplementary Treaty, signed on August 27, gave Germany most of the advantages. At issue were territorial and financial matters.*

  Concerning territorial questions, Germany pledged not to interfere with the relations between Russia and her border regions: this clause repudiated specifically the efforts of the German military to create, under the name “Southern Union,” a protectorate over the Caucasus and the adjoining Cossack regions.204 Russia acknowledged the independence of the Ukraine and Georgia, and further agreed to surrender Estonia and Livonia, neither of which she had conceded in the Brest Treaty. In return, Russia obtained transit rights to the Baltic ports which she had lost. The Germans had initially demanded Baku, the center of Russia’s petroleum industry, but they eventually consented to leave it in Russia’s hands in exchange for a promise of one-quarter of Baku’s annual production. Baku had been occupied by a British force sent from Persia in early August: the German willingness to leave the city to the Bolsheviks was contingent on the Bolsheviks’ expulsion of the British.205 The Russians also undertook to remove the Allied force from Murmansk, while the Germans agreed to evacuate the Crimea and make some minor territorial adjustments on Russia’s western border.

  In the financial settlement, Russia agreed to pay Germany and German nationals full compensation for the losses which they had suffered in consequence of measures taken by the tsarist and Soviet governments, as well as for the costs which Germany claimed to have incurred for the upkeep of the Russian prisoners of war. The Germans estimated this sum to be between 7 and 8 billion deutsche marks. After Russian counterclaims had been taken into account, it was reduced to 6 billion: of this, 1 billion was to be paid by Finland and the Ukraine. Russia undertook to repay, over eighteen months, half of the 5 billion deutsche marks it owed by transferring to Germany 24.5 tons of gold, an agreed-upon quantity of rubles, and 1 billion rubles’ worth of merchandise. The other half Soviet Russia was to repay from the proceeds of a forty-five-year loan floated in Germany. These payments were to satisfy all German claims, governmental as well as private, against Russia. Moscow reconfirmed the provisions of Brest by virtue of which it was to return to their German owners all nationalized and municipalized properties, including confiscated cash and securities, and allow them to repatriate these assets to Germany.

  Although upon coming to power the Bolsheviks had condemned secret diplomacy in the strongest terms and made many secret treaties of the “imperialist powers” public, where their own interests were involved they showed no aversion to such practices. There were three secret clauses attached to the Supplementary Treaty, signed by Ioffe for Russia and Hintze for Germany: these became public knowledge only years afterward and have not been published to this day in the Soviet Union. They formalized Germany’s acceptance of Moscow’s requests of August 1 for German military intervention.

  One of these secret provisions elaborated Article 5 of the Supplementary Treaty, in which the Russians undertook to expel the Allies from Murmansk. The clause specified that if the Russians were unable to do so, the task would be accomplished by a combined Finno-German force.*

  To work out the plan of this operation, the commander of the Petrograd Military District, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, went at the end of August to Berlin at the head of a delegation of the Commissariat of War.206 He agreed that the projected assault on Murmansk would be carried out by German troops; as previously proposed, the mission of the Russian forces would be to intercept the British in the event they advanced on Moscow from Archangel. The two sides clashed over Petrograd. Ludendorff insisted that the Germans had to occupy Petrograd as a base of operations against Murmansk, but Moscow would have none of it. To minimize the bad impression that the movement of German troops across Russian territory would produce, Moscow suggested a variety of deceptive measures, one of which had the German troops serving under the “nominal” command of a Russian officer.207 The actual commander, the Russians agreed, would be a German general: at one point the Soviet side suggested for the part Field Marshal August von Mackensen, the Adjutant General of the Kaiser, who had dealt Russian forces a crushing defeat in Galicia in 1915.208 The operation was being mounted when Germany surrendered.209

  The second secret clause, even more sensitive because it involved German action not against foreign forces but against Russians, confirmed German acceptance of the Bolshevik request to initiate operations against the Volunteer Army. The Germans committed themselves to such action in the following words:

  Germany expects Russia to apply all the available means to suppress immediately the insurrections of General Alekseev and the Czechoslovaks: Russia, on the other hand, recognizes [

  nimmt Akt

  ] that Germany, too, will proceed with all available forces against General Alekseev.

  *

  This commitment the Ge
rmans also took seriously. On August 13, Ioffe communicated to Moscow that after the Supplementary Treaty had been ratified, the Germans would take energetic measures to crush the Volunteer Army.210

  Germany promised to intervene against the British and Denikin’s army in response to Soviet requests. The third secret clause came at German insistence and was forced on the unwilling Russians. It obliged the Soviet Government to expel from Baku the British force that had been there since August 4. As in the case of the other two clauses, it stipulated that if Soviet forces proved unequal to the task, the Wehrmacht would assume responsibility, † This provision was also not implemented, because the Turks occupied Baku on September 16, before the German forces were ready to move.

  The three secret clauses ensured that if Germany had not collapsed, she would have secured not only an economic but also a military stranglehold on Soviet Russia.

  In his report on the Supplementary Treaty to the Reichstag (of course, omitting mention of the secret clauses), Hintze asserted that it laid the basis for Russo-German “coexistence” (Nebeneinanderleben).211 Chicherin used similar language to the Central Executive Committee on September 2, which unanimously ratified the treaty: despite the “profoundest difference between the Russian and German systems and the basic tendencies of the two governments,” he stated,

  peaceful coexistence [

  mirnoe sozhitel’stvo

  ] of the two nations, which is always the object of the strivings of our worker and peasant government, is at present also desirable for the ruling circles of Germany.

  212

  This is one of the earliest recorded uses in an official statement of the term “peaceful coexistence,” which the Soviet Government would dust off after Stalin’s death.