The two governments now drew steadily closer: one week before Germany’s collapse, they were in a state of de facto political, economic, and military alliance. Hintze was fanatically committed to the support of the Bolsheviks. In early September, when Moscow unleashed its Red Terror, in which thousands of hostages were massacred, he prevented the German press from publishing full accounts of these atrocities sent by correspondents in Russia, for fear of creating public revulsion injurious to further collaboration.213
In September, at Moscow’s request, Germany began to supply Soviet Russia with fuel and weapons. In response to an urgent appeal for coal, the Foreign Office arranged in the second half of October for twenty-five German ships to sail for Petrograd with 70,000 tons of coal and coke. Only about one-half or less managed to reach its destination before the shipments were suspended because the two countries broke off relations. The fuel unloaded in Petrograd went to plants manufacturing weapons for the Red Army.214
In September, Ioffe requested 200,000 rifles, 500 million bullets, and 20,000 machine guns. Under pressure from the Foreign Office, Ludendorff gave his reluctant consent, after managing to remove machine guns from the list. This deal did not materialize, due to the departure of Hintze and Chancellor Hertling: the new Chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, was much less enthusiastic about a pro-Bolshevik policy.215
Despite the looming defeat of the Central Powers, Moscow punctiliously fulfilled the financial obligations of the Supplementary Treaty. On September 10, it shipped to Germany gold worth 250 million deutsche marks as the first payment of compensation, and on September 30, a second installment of 312.5 million deutsche marks, partly in gold and partly in rubles. The third installment, due on October 31, it did not pay because by then Germany was on the verge of surrendering.
The Bolsheviks believed in the victory of their German friends as late as the end of September 1918. Then things happened which forced them to change their mind. The resignation on September 30 of Chancellor Hertling, followed by the dismissal a few days later of Hintze, removed their most loyal supporters in Berlin. The new Chancellor, Prince Maximilian, requested President Wilson to use his good offices to arrange for an armistice. These were unmistakable symptoms of a looming collapse. Lenin, who at this time was recovering at a dacha near Moscow from wounds suffered in an attempt on his life (see below, this page), at once stirred into action. He instructed Trotsky and Sverdlov to convene the Central Committee to discuss urgent questions of foreign policy. On October 3 he sent to the Central Executive Committee an analysis of the situation in Germany in which he spoke glowingly of the prospects for an imminent revolution there.216 At his recommendation, the CEC on October 4 adopted a resolution in which it “declare[d] to the entire world that Soviet Russia will offer all its forces and resources to aid the German revolutionary government.”217
The new German Chancellor found such brazen appeals to subversion intolerable. By now even the Foreign Office had its fill of the Bolsheviks. At an interagency meeting in October, the Foreign Office for the first time agreed to a break with Moscow. A memorandum drafted by its staff toward the end of that month justified the change in policy as follows:
We who are in bad odor for having invented Bolshevism and for having let it loose against Russia should now, at the last moment, at least cease to extend any longer a protective hand over it, in order not to forfeit also all the sympathies of future Russia …
218
Germany had ample justification for breaking with Moscow, inasmuch as Ioffe, who even in the spring and summer of 1918 had pursued subversive activities on its soil, now openly stoked the fires of revolution. As he later boasted, at this time his embassy’s agitational-propagandistic work
increasingly assumed the character of decisive revolutionary preparation for an armed uprising. Apart from the conspiratorial groups of Spartacists, in Germany, and specifically in Berlin, there existed since the January [1917] strike—of course, illegally—soviets of workers’ deputies.… With these soviets the embassy maintained constant communication.… The [Berlin] Soviet assumed that an uprising would be opportune only when the entire Berlin proletariat was well armed. We had to fight this. We had to demonstrate that if one awaited such a moment then no uprising would ever occur, that it is sufficient to arm only the vanguard of the proletariat.… Nonetheless, the striving of the German proletariat to arm itself was entirely legitimate and sensible and the embassy assisted it in every way.
219
This assistance took the form of money and weapons. When the Soviet Embassy departed, it inadvertently left behind a document showing that between September 21 and October 31, 1918, it had purchased, for 105,000 deutsche marks, 210 handguns and 27,000 bullets.220
The declaration of the supreme soviet legislative body that it intended to assist the triumph of a revolutionary government in Germany, and Ioffe’s efforts to implement this intention, should have sufficed for a break of diplomatic relations. But the German Foreign Office wanted more incontrovertible grounds and to this end it provoked an incident. Aware that Soviet couriers had for months brought to the embassy agitational materials for distribution in Germany, it arranged for a diplomatic box from Russia to drop and break, as if by accident, while being unloaded at a Berlin railroad station. This was done on the evening of November 4. Out of the damaged crate flew a shower of propaganda material exhorting German workers and soldiers to rise and overthrow their government.221 Ioffe was told he would have to leave Germany at once. Although he displayed appropriate indignation, before departing for Moscow he did not forget to leave Dr. Oskar Cohn, a member of the Independent Socialist Party and a virtual resident of the Soviet mission, 500,000 deutsche marks and 150,000 rubles, to supplement the sum of 10 million rubles previously allocated “for the needs of the German revolution.”*
On November 13, two days after the armistice on the Western Front, Moscow unilaterally abrogated both the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the Supplementary Treaty.222 The Allies also had Germany renounce the Brest Treaty as part of the Versailles settlement.223
The Russian Revolution was never a national event confined to Russia: from the moment the February Revolution broke out, but especially after the Bolsheviks seized Petrograd, it became internationalized and this for two reasons.
Russia had been a major theater of war. Its unilateral withdrawal from the war affected the most vital interests of both belligerent blocs: for the Central Powers it raised the hope of victory, for the Allies the specter of defeat. As long as the war continued, therefore, neither party could be indifferent to what happened to Russia: geographic location alone prevented Russia from escaping the maelstrom of global conflict. The Bolsheviks contributed to their country’s involvement in this conflict by playing off the two belligerent blocs against each other. In the spring of 1918, they discussed with the Allies the formation on their territory of an anti-German multinational army, they agreed to the occupation of Murmansk, and invited help in building the Red Army. In the fall, they requested German military intervention to free the northern ports from the Allies and to crush the Russian Volunteer Army. Time and again, the Germans had to intervene, with political support and money, to prevent the Bolshevik regime from collapsing. Helfferich, referring to the Soviet regime’s crisis of July–August 1918, conceded in his memoirs that “the strongest supporter of the Bolshevik regime during this critical time, even if unconsciously and unintentionally, was the German Government.”224 In view of these facts, it cannot be seriously maintained that foreign powers “intervened” in Russia in 1917–18 for the purpose of toppling the Bolsheviks from power. They intervened, first and foremost, in order to tip the balance of power on the Western Front in their favor, either by reactivating the front in Russia, in the case of the Allies, or by keeping it quiescent, in the case of the Central Powers. The Bolsheviks actively participated in this foreign involvement, and invited it now from this party, now from that, depending on what their momentary interests called for. German �
�intervention,” which they welcomed and solicited, very likely saved them from suffering the fate of the Provisional Government.
Second, the Bolsheviks from the outset declared that national borders in the era of socialist revolution and global class war had become meaningless. They issued appeals to foreign nationals to rise and overthrow their governments; they allocated state funds for this purpose; and where they were in a position to do, which for the time being was mainly Germany, they actively promoted revolution. By challenging the legitimacy of all foreign governments, the Bolsheviks invited all foreign governments to challenge theirs. If in fact no power chose to avail itself of that right in 1917–18, it was because none of them had an interest in so doing. The Germans found the Bolsheviks serving their purposes and propped them whenever they ran into trouble; the Allies were busy fighting for their lives. The question posed by one historian—“How … did the Soviet government, bereft of significant military force in the midst of what was until then mankind’s most destructive war, succeed in surviving the first year of the revolution?”225—answers itself: this most destructive war completely overshadowed Russian events. The Germans supported the Bolshevik regime; the Allies had other concerns.
Hence, it is misleading to see foreign involvement in Russia in 1917–18 in terms of hostile “intervention.” The Bolshevik Government both invited such intervention and aggressively intervened on its own account. Although the great powers, yearning for a return to normalcy, were reluctant to acknowledge it, the Russian Revolution never was a purely internal affair of Russia, important only insofar as it affected the outcome of the war. Russia’s new rulers made certain that it would reverberate around the globe. The November 1918 armistice offered them unprecedented opportunities to organize revolutions in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and wherever else they could do so. Although these efforts failed for the time being, they ensured that the world would know no respite and no return to pre-1914 life.
One further thing needs to be said about foreign involvement on Russian soil during 1918. In all the talk of what the Allies did in Russia, which really was not very much, it is usually forgotten what they did for Russia, which was a great deal. After Russia had reneged on her commitments and left them to fight the Central Powers on their own, the Allies suffered immense human and material losses. As a result of Russia’s dropping out of the war, the Germans withdrew from the inactive Eastern Front enough divisions to increase their effectives in the west by nearly one-fourth (from 150 to 192 divisions).226 These reinforcements allowed them to mount a ferocious offensive. In the great battles on the Western Front in the spring and summer of 1918—St.-Quentin, the Lys, the Aisne, the Matz, the Marne, and Château-Thierry—the British, French, and Americans lost hundreds of thousands of men. This sacrifice finally brought Germany to her knees.* And the defeat of Germany, to which it had made no contribution, not only enabled the Soviet Government to annul the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and recover most of the lands which it had been forced to give up at Brest but also saved Soviet Russia from being converted into a colony, a kind of Eurasian Africa, which fate Germany had intended for her.
This point is vigorously and persuasively argued by Brian Pearce in How Haig Saved Lenin (London, 1987).
* Izvestiia, No. 22/286 (January 28, 1918), 1, emphasis added. Heraclitus actually said something slightly different: “Strife [not war] is the father and the king of all; some he has made slaves, and some free.”
* Joseph Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, II (Paris, 1933), 57–58; A. Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations Franco-Soviétiques, 1917–1024 (Paris, 1981), 59. Noulens wanted to add a further condition that Allied citizens be granted in Russia “the same advantages, privileges, and compensations” that German nationals had received in the Brest Treaty, but he had to drop this demand: Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations, 59.
*Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 (Vienna-Munich, 1966), 49. There is no basis whatever for Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff’s claim (Les Relations, 60) that it was Noulens who deliberately “ruptured” a looming accord between the Allies and Moscow by giving, at the end of April, an admittedly tactless newspaper interview in which he justified Japanese landings in Vladivostok. The Bolsheviks were not that easily insulted.
†On him, see Wilhelm Joost, Botschafter bei den roten Zaren (Vienna, 1967), 17–63, which is not entirely reliable.
*His papers were edited by Karl Dietrich Erdmann: Kurt Riezler: Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente (Göttingen, 1972). This edition has come under criticism from some German scholars for liberties alleged to have been taken with the texts. See further K. H. Jarausch in SR, XXXI, No. 2 (1972), 381–98.
*It deserves note that neither then nor later in private conversation did Lenin claim popular support as a source of strength: he rather saw it in the disunity of his opponents. In 1920 he told Bertrand Russell that two years earlier he and his associates had doubted they could survive the hostility which surrounded them. “He attributes their survival to the jealousies and divergent interests of the different capitalist nations, also to the power of Bolshevik propaganda”: Bertrand Russell, Bolshevism (New York, 1920), 40.
*The Bolshevik Government received from the Germans monthly subsidies of 3 million marks in June, July, and August: Z. A. B. Zeman, ed., Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915–1918 (London-New York, 1958), 130.
*A selection of Ioffe’s dispatches to Lenin appears in ISSSR, No. 4 (1958), 3–26, edited by I. K. Kobliakov.
*Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 352n. Ioffe says that although he maintained contacts with all German parties, from extreme right to extreme left, he studiously avoided relations with the Social-Democrats, the party of “social traitors”: VZh, No. 5 (1919), 37–38. This policy, pursued on Lenin’s instructions, anticipated Stalin’s policies fifteen years later, which, by forbidding the German Communists to cooperate with the Social-Democrats against the Nazis, has been widely blamed for making possible Hitler’s rise to power.
*This seems to be the earliest mention of concentration camps in Soviet pronouncements.
*M. Klante, Von der Wolga zum Amur (Berlin, 1931), 157. Sadoul, who may have received his information from Trotsky, distributed the legion at the end of May differently: 5,000 in Vladivostok, 20,000 between Vladivostok and Omsk, and another 20,000 west of Omsk, in European Russia: J. Sadoul, Notes sur la Révolution Bolchevique (Paris, 1920), 366.
†A medical assistant in the Austro-Hungarian army, he had been promoted to the rank of captain in the Czechoslovak Corps. In 1919, he fought in the armies of Admiral Kolchak. After Czechoslovakia gained independence, he served as chief of staff, until his arrest on charges of betraying military secrets, of which the courts acquitted him. Later still, he collaborated with the Nazis.
*“One is reduced to the conclusion that external instigation or encouragement, either from the Allies or from the central headquarters of the underground Whites, played no significant part in the decision of the Czechs to take arms against the Soviet power. The outbreak of these hostilities was a spontaneous occurrence … desired by none of the parties concerned”: G. F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, N.J., 1958), 164.
†Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 227; Erdmann, Riezler, 474; Alfons Paquet in Winfried Baumgart, ed., Von Brest-Litovsk zur deutschen Novemberrevolution (Göttingen, 1971), 76. Muraviev defected anyway in early July and died at the hands of his troops.
*Erdmann, Riezler, 711–12. Riezler included the Kadets among Germany’s potential allies because their leader, Miliukov, then living in the Ukraine, had come out in favor of a pro-German orientation. Other Kadets remained true to the Allies.
* According to their commander, I. I. Vatsetis, by that time most of the Latvian units had been dispatched to the Volga-Ural Front: Pamiat’, No. 2 (1979), 16.
*V. Vladimirova in PR, No. 4/63 (1927), 122–23; Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 554–56; Krasnaia Kniga VChK, II (Moscow, 1920), 148–55. Proshian had served as Commissar of Post and Telegraphs earlier in the y
ear.
*It is known from Riezler’s recollections (Erdmann, Riezler, 474) that the German Embassy had to bribe the Latvians to move against the Left SRs.
*Before her escape, Spiridonova addressed a long letter to the Bolshevik Central Committee. It was published the following year by her followers under the title Otkrytoe pis’mo M. Spiridonovoi Tsentral’nomu Komitetu partii bol’shevikov (Moscow, 1920). The Hoover Institution Library has a copy.
*On May 24, the French Consul General in Moscow, Grenard, who served as intermediary between the French Ambassador and Savinkov, advised Noulens that Savinkov was planning to stage an anti-Bolshevik uprising in the middle of June in the Volga area. That Noulens needed this information, not quite correct in any event, confirms his claim that he had not been involved in Savinkov’s plot: Noulens, Mon Ambassade, II, 109–10. The Grenard dispatch is in the Archive of the French Foreign Ministry, Guerre, Vol. 671, Noulens No. 318, May 24, 1918.
†Boris Savinkov, Bor’ba s Bol’shevikami (Warsaw, 1923), 26. A. I. Denikin, Ocherki Russkoi Smuty, III (Berlin, 1924), 79, claims that the actual figure was 2,000–3,000.
* Krasnaia Kniga VChK, I (Moscow, 1920), 1–42. At his trial in 1924 (Boris Savinkov pered Voennoi Kollegiei Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR, Moscow, 1924, 46–47), Savinkov denied having had a formal program.
* A recent study by Michael Carley, Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917–1919 (Kingston-Montreal, 1983), 57–60, 67–70, places rather more direct responsibility on the French, but it confuses general assistance given Savinkov with involvement in his uprising.
*Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 237–38. It seems that Lenin was planning to move the seat of government to Nizhnii Novgorod: Ibid., 237, note 38. In 1920, Lenin told Bertrand Russell that two years earlier neither he nor his colleagues had believed their regime stood a chance of surviving. Bertrand Russell, Bolshevism: Practice and Theory (New York, 1920), 40.
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