by Adam Tooze
In January 1918, in response to the German-Bolshevik talks at Brest, both Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson felt obliged to make powerful statements of the liberal world order they envisioned for the post-war period. Of the two statements it was Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points manifesto that would echo around the world. But far from challenging Lenin and Trotsky, as Cold War legend would have it, Wilson chose to conciliate them. In the process, by portraying Lenin and Trotsky as potential partners in a democratic peace and a unitary ‘Russian people’ as the victim of German aggression, Wilson helped to consolidate the black legend of Brest. Meanwhile, as democrats in Berlin and Vienna looked on in horror, Bolshevik revolutionary tactics combined with the most aggressive impulses of German militarism to eviscerate any attempt to create a legitimate order in the East.
I
True to their promise of delivering an immediate end to the fighting, it was the Bolsheviks who, at the close of November 1917, asked the Germans to enter into negotiations. But on what terms could peace be made? In the spring of 1917 Lenin had been the sternest critic of the revolutionary defensists and their ‘Petrograd formula’ for a democratic peace, savaging the soft-minded compromises between the conservative doctrine of ‘no annexations’ and the revolutionary slogan of ‘self-determination’. But now that the Provisional Government had been overthrown, what was the alternative? The answer was no more clear in November 1917 than it had been six months earlier. Certainly, Lenin in the first weeks of his new regime did not dare to say out loud that his policy might amount to accepting a separate peace on any terms the Germans would offer. Nor did the Central Powers demand this sacrifice. In acquiescing to an armistice, Germany agreed to negotiate on whatever version of the Petrograd peace formula the Bolsheviks could square with their conscience. Furthermore, Germany did not demand that Russia formally break ranks with the Entente. Instead, Russia and Germany issued a joint declaration, inviting all the other combatants to join the talks. In accordance with the requirements of the ‘new diplomacy’, the negotiations at Brest were to be carried out with an unusual degree of publicity.7 To spread their message, the Bolsheviks were even permitted regular fraternization sessions with German troops. At Brest the atmosphere was a strange mixture of old-school aristocratic chivalry and revolutionary innovation. The talks were the first great-power conference in the modern era in which a woman, Anastasia Bizenko, an ex-Social Revolutionary terrorist turned Bolshevik, served as a plenipotentiary for the Soviet side.
It is tempting to dismiss this surprising beginning as a propaganda charade. But that is seriously to underestimate the forces that were in play. The Bolshevik grip on power in November 1917 was truly precarious. Lenin and Trotsky’s partners in power, the Left Social Revolutionaries, were no friends of the Entente, but like all the other parties of the February revolution they rejected any idea of a separate peace with the Kaiser. Like the majority of the Bolshevik Party’s own activists, they clung to the idea that if acceptable terms could not be agreed, they would proclaim a ‘revolutionary war’, summoning the insurgent energies of both the Russian and German people for united resistance against imperialism. In December 1917 the divisions within the German home front were more and more evident. Since the first major wave of strikes in April 1917, industrial unrest had boiled throughout the summer. The Reichstag majority that had passed the peace resolution remained in being.8 In November the parliamentarians asserted themselves by turfing out Georg Michaelis, the puppet Chancellor whom Hindenburg and Ludendorff had installed to replace Bethmann Hollweg. This time the parliamentarians insisted on a substantial figure, Georg Hertling, former Prime Minister of Bavaria and the first of a long line of Christian Democrats to govern twentieth-century Germany. For his deputy, the Reichstag majority chose one of their own, the progressive liberal Reichstag deputy Friedrich von Payer.
Germany had set out on a road to ‘parliamentarization’. But would these first steps be enough to quiet popular unrest? And, if they did satisfy the left, might that provoke a backlash from the right? Since August 1917 the ultra-nationalist Homeland Party (Vaterlandspartei) had been mobilizing the right wing of German politics to fight the war to a victorious finish; if this required an open military dictatorship, so much the better.9 The Vaterlandspartei, though it exhibited populist fascistoid traits, never in fact managed to break out of the pre-war nationalist milieu. But what now concerned the leaders of the Reichstag majority was the prospect that a dogged rearguard action by the German right wing would stall any further reform and provoke a radicalization on their exposed left flank. In the autumn of 1917 support for the breakaway anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) was clearly surging. There could no longer be any doubt that the most vocal section of the German working class, perhaps a majority, were demanding a negotiated peace, an end to martial law, democratization in Prussia and an immediate improvement in food rations. Germany’s food situation in the coming winter was truly alarming. As Friedrich Ebert, one of the most energetic leaders of the majority Social Democrats, spelled out to his colleagues in the Reichstag on 20 December 1917, ‘in April and May we will be faced with a void. So nothing but shortened bread rations to 110 grams per day. That is impossible.’10 With Russia suing for an armistice, the fabled granary of the Ukraine beckoned in the East. But to gain access to those desperately needed supplies, short of wholesale occupation, Germany and Austria needed a trade deal. Whereas the Bolsheviks could be satisfied with an armistice, it was the Central Powers who needed a substantive peace settlement as quickly as possible.
Before the war, Germany’s Foreign Secretary Kühlmann had made a name for himself as a ‘liberal imperialist’ and he understood that he had to take these domestic pressures seriously. What the German home front needed was a prompt and profitable peace that was in tune with the Reichstag’s peace declaration of July 1917. The German right wing, however, were incensed even by the armistice terms. With the German Army victorious, how could Kühlmann agree to bind Germany to a peace formula proposed by Russian revolutionaries? Why did decisive military victory not give Germany a completely free hand? To the Vaterlandspartei the answer was obvious. As the arch-conservative baron Kuno von Westarp put it in a Reichstag committee, what was at work, both at home and abroad, was the corrosive influence of ‘democracy’.11 On 6 December the Prussian conservatives made their stand. Defying public appeals for a bold gesture of enlightened reform by the Kaiser himself, the Prussian House of Lords voted down the proposal for manhood suffrage.12 As one of Ludendorff’s closest collaborators, Colonel Max Bauer, commented approvingly, why should Germany lay down the lives of its best sons ‘only to drown under Jews and Proles’?13
For the German right, the line was clear. Democratization was a prelude to capitulation. More sophisticated exponents of German strategy could see other possibilities. For men such as Matthias Erzberger, or Bethmann Hollweg’s close collaborator Kurt Riezler, democratization at home was the only possible basis on which Germany could pursue a great-power policy capable of matching that of Britain and the United States.14 The stalwart commitment of the vast majority of the Social Democratic Party had demonstrated the powerful force of German working-class patriotism. But if democracy would give the projection of German power a new energy and legitimacy, it would also impose its own self-limiting logic, restraining the tendency toward heedless territorial acquisition. Adding territory through annexation might satisfy a crude military conception of security. But even with the limited powers conceded to the Reichstag by the Bismarckian constitution, accommodating the Polish minority had presented worrying problems. If one contemplated Germany’s future as a democratized Volksstaat, or people’s state, how were large territories to be incorporated whose populations were linguistically, culturally and religiously alien? Germany did not want to find itself in the situation of the Westminster Parliament, with a resentful Irish minority holding the balance of power. As far as Chancellor Hertling was concerned, the conclusion was obvious. ‘We
want to remain a nation state don’t we, and do not want to integrate such alien population splinters.’15
On the extreme right, pan-German ideologues might imagine a future in which Germans lorded it over a million-strong helot class. The radical leader of the pan-Germans, Heinrich Class, was even willing to contemplate mass clearances of native populations to create land in the East ‘free of people’. Such fantasies were encouraged in 1917 by the flight of a large part of the pre-war population.16 In Courland, one of the prime targets of German annexiationists, more than half of the pre-war Latvian population of 600,000 souls had fled by 1918.17 The methods that Turkey had used to dispose of its Armenian population were no secret to the German political class. But most viewed the Turkish example with revulsion. Even diehard conservatives dismissed pan-German talk of enslaving the Belgian population and clearing the East as dangerous and impractical.18 During the debate over the peace resolution in July 1917 Erzberger announced to a cheering Reichstag that it would be far cheaper to provide insane-asylum beds for the pan-Germans than it would be to indulge their imperialist delusions. As a spokesman for the Social Democratic Party declared, the times were long gone when ‘peoples can be distributed, divided and shoved together like a herd of sheep’.19
Since the publication of Friedrich Naumann’s much misunderstood book on the vision of a unified Mitteleuropa in October 1915, there had been a lively discussion of a zone of German hegemony in central Europe, based on some kind of federative imperialism.20 Gustav Stresemann, the nationalist liberal, called for Germany to consolidate a bloc of 150 million consumers, on the basis of which it might hope to face the power of American industry.21 At that point Russia had still been in the fight. Once Tsarist power collapsed in 1917 and America entered the war, it was obvious to the more intelligent strategic thinkers in Germany that there was no better means with which to dynamite the Tsarist Empire than for Berlin to espouse the demand for self-determination.22 Ironically, the Bolsheviks agreed. Within ten days of seizing power on 15 November (2 November old style), Lenin and his trusted lieutenant Joseph Stalin had issued their Declaration of the Rights of the People of Russia, which appeared to grant the right to self-determination up to and including secession.23 To Foreign Secretary Kühlmann the Brest-Litovsk negotiations thus seemed to offer an opportunity to found a new order in the East not merely on Germany’s undoubted military dominance, but on the emphatic embrace of a new principle of legitimacy. Germany would secure power on a continental scale not through annexation, but through the formation of an economic and military bloc of smaller eastern European states under German protection. The autonomous Polish entity carved by Germany and Austria out of Russian territory in the autumn of 1916 was a start. While in economic and military terms the new Poland would be bound tightly and irrevocably to Germany, in the social and cultural sphere it would be given the freedom ‘to express itself nationally’.24 As Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had put it in 1916, ‘the times are no longer for annexation, but rather for the cuddling up [sic] of smaller state-entities to the great powers, to mutual benefit’.25 If only Germany were willing to embrace self-determination and domestic reform, Eduard David, a leading Social Democrat, explained to General Max Hoffmann at his headquarters in Brest, it could exceed even the wildest ambitions of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik. In cooperation with Russia and a cluster of new Eastern states, Germany would escape the narrowness of mere Mitteleuropa, extending its influence over all of Eurasia, from the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.26
Such a vision was self-serving of course. But the advocates of this alternative version of German hegemony should not be dismissed either as dupes or as forerunners of Nazi empire.27 Their opponents on the German right regarded them as a real threat. The bitterness of the nationalist vitriol poured on Philipp Scheidemann, the leader of the SPD, for his advocacy of a German version of a democratic peace was shocking even to hardened veterans of the Bismarckian era. During the battles over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Erzberger twice risked prosecution in the military courts for his defence of Lithuanian and Ukrainian independence.28 Even men like Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg and staffers such as Kurt Riezler were not merely cynical. They believed that history refuted the choice, supposed by simplistic advocates of nationalism, between slavery and full, unfettered sovereignty. For most, full sovereignty was always a chimera. Even neutrality was an option only under exceptional circumstances. As Woodrow Wilson had discovered, even the greatest power could uphold it only through isolation. For most the real choice was one between hegemons. The Baltic states, if broken away from Russia, would inevitably fall into the orbit of another great power, if not Germany or Russia, then Britain. What the more far-sighted strategists in Imperial Germany were advancing was a vision of negotiated sovereignty in which economic and military independence was pooled by smaller states with larger states.29
The fact that the proposal was coming from Imperial Germany should not lead us to dismiss it out of hand. In light of twentieth-century experience the legitimacy of such a vision can hardly be denied in principle. Since 1945 it has formed an essential building block of the relative peace and prosperity established in Europe and East Asia.30 Furthermore, this vision of a new order in eastern Europe was tied to a programme of domestic reform that would not have left Imperial Germany unchanged. At Brest the Germans were arguing not only over a new order in eastern Europe. They were engaged in a struggle over Germany’s own political future.31 But if we grant that the terms of the armistice on 2 December 1917 were not empty, if the espousal of the Petrograd formula by the German side was not mere verbiage, then this makes it all the more important to explain how relations between Germany and the Bolsheviks degenerated into a brutal power struggle – and how by the summer of 1918 the Kaiser’s armies found themselves in occupation of a zone of Russian territory almost as extensive as that conquered by Hitler’s Wehrmacht on its march to Stalingrad in 1942.
II
Beginning on 22 December 1917 the first round of formal peace talks at Brest went eerily well.32 The agreement on the armistice principles of ‘self-determination, no annexations and no indemnities’ held. On Christmas Day the Central Powers and the Bolshevik negotiators issued a communiqué announcing their agreement on the basic principles of a peace of no annexations and a withdrawal of occupying forces, a formula to which they still hoped the Entente might adhere. Anticipating the imminent announcement of a long-awaited peace, large crowds gathered in Vienna. As was the intention of both sides, the success of the talks wrong-footed the Entente. If a peace could be made in the East on liberal terms, why was the Western Front still consuming thousands of men by the day? Trotsky added to the Entente’s embarrassment by publishing the full text of the secret London Treaty of 1915, which revealed the imperialist carve-up with which London and Paris had purchased Italy’s entry into the war. Already in November, London and Washington had agreed on the need to make a new statement of war aims. But it soon became clear that neither the French nor the Italians would tolerate any such flexibility.33 The Italians were reeling from Caporetto. In Paris, Georges Clemenceau had come into office determined to prosecute the war to the end, not to open a divisive debate about the peace. When London hosted the first Inter-Allied Conference attended by the United States at the end of November 1917, the risk of a humiliating dispute over war aims was thought so severe that the plenary sessions were restricted by Clemenceau’s forceful chairmanship to no more than eight minutes.34 Both Wilson and Lloyd George concluded that they would have to take the initiative independently.
But if the situation in Washington and London was tense, anyone close to the Brest negotiations could sense that there too a storm was waiting to break. As was always clear to the more sophisticated operators on the German side, the much-hailed Christmas Day declaration was not a selfless German gift to the Bolsheviks, but an explosive charge placed beneath the Russian Empire. As a basic preliminary both sides had agreed to withdraw their combat forces
from the contested areas of Russia. The Bolsheviks convinced themselves that by this agreement the Germans had miraculously conceded the status quo of 1914, prior to holding plebiscites in the contested regions. It was this same misinterpretation that fuelled the vicious attacks on Kühlmann from the German right. In fact, the German negotiators never had any intention of leaving it up to Lenin and Stalin to extend their idea of self-determination throughout the pre-war territory of the Russian Empire. As far as Kühlmann was concerned, following their liberation from the oppressive rule of the Tsar, the populations of Poland, Lithuania and Courland had made a de facto declaration of independence. They no longer belonged to Russia and did not fall under the terms of the Christmas Day agreement regarding troop withdrawal. Under German protection these nationalities had exercised their right to opt out of the civil war that Lenin was openly advocating.35
Kühlmann had entangled his opposite numbers in a web. But it was woven as much of Bolshevik self-deception as of German deceit. In taking the first dangerous steps towards a separate peace, it suited Lenin and Trotsky only too well to present the negotiations as an unexpected triumph. But the jubilation on the Soviet side following the apparently generous Christmas Day agreement was such that the leadership of the German delegation began to worry that, once the Bolsheviks were forced to confront the true nature of the agreement, the shock would derail the entire peace process. General Hoffmann, the highest-ranking German officer at the talks, who liked to think of himself as an honest exponent of Realpolitik, opposed both to the excesses of the pan-German annexationists and the sweet-talking obfuscation of German liberals, was ill at ease with Kühlmann’s manipulative approach. It was with some relish that he took on the task of bringing home to the Soviets over luncheon on 27 December what was in fact in store for them. The territories to which the Christmas Day agreement applied, the territories from which the German Army would progressively withdraw and to which the principle of self-determination would then be applied, were not the border regions occupied by Germany since 1915, but those further to the north and east, including Estonia and segments of Belorussia and Ukraine that had been occupied only in the final phase of the German advance. The result was a public relations disaster that permanently discredited the Brest-Litovsk peace. The ‘deceit’ of German imperialism was revealed. Whilst Lloyd George and Wilson put the finishing touches to their liberal war manifestos, allied propagandists had open season. General Hoffmann became internationally notorious as an extreme exponent of militarism. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian or Latvian causes, however dubious the counter-claims of the Bolshevik regime, the espousal of self-determination by Imperial Germany now appeared as nothing more than a manipulative ruse. Events in Berlin and Vienna over the following weeks should have been enough to demonstrate that far more was at stake.