The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  On 12 January, after sitting through an infuriating lecture from the Soviets on the ‘legitimate’ procedures for self-determination, General Max Hoffmann, who since the Christmas crisis had been pilloried in the international press as the archetypal German militarist, lost his temper. Why, he demanded to know, should the representatives of Imperial Germany take lessons in legitimacy from the Bolsheviks, whose own regime was ‘based purely on violence, ruthlessly suppressing all who think differently’.5 The Bolsheviks were already attacking the national Constituent Assembly of Ukraine. If the Germans were to evacuate the Baltic, the same would happen there. But Trotsky was unabashed. His retort was a classic dose of Marxist state theory: ‘... the General is completely right when he says that our government is founded on power. All history has known only such governments. So long as society consists of warring classes the power of the government will rest on strength and will assert its domination through force.’ What the Germans were objecting to in Bolshevism was ‘the fact that we do not lock up the strikers, but the capitalists who lock out the workers, the fact that we do not shoot the peasants who raise their claim to the land, but that we arrest the large landowners and officers who want to shoot the peasants . . .’ And, Trotsky went on, the ‘violence’ that Bolshevism applied, ‘the violence that is supported by millions of workers and peasants and that is directed against a minority which seeks to keep the people in servitude; this violence is a holy and historically progressive force.’ Reading the transcript from Brest, the Kaiser added in the margin: ‘For us the opposite!’6

  Trotsky’s statement was of such stark clarity that it echoed down the century. If he was right and if government was always ultimately founded on violence, how could political action ever be squared with a moral standpoint? If taken at face value, the implications of this irreconcilability between the pragmatic demands of power and the imperatives of morality were either tragic or revolutionary.7 On either view, short of a world-changing revolution, no compromise, no civilizing of the violent foundations of power could be taken seriously. For the Brest talks, this remarkably frank exchange spelled a disastrous degeneration. How could a peace negotiated between actors with such diametrically opposed views, who could agree only on the historical efficacy of force, ever be anything more than an armed truce? As the German and Ukrainian advocates of a constructive peace looked on, the revolutionary cynicism of Trotsky and the Realpolitik of General Hoffmann combined to empty the principle of self-determination of any substantial meaning. Together they ended the negotiations as a search for agreement and reduced them instead to a naked trial of strength.

  Within days of Trotsky’s revealing retort, the Bolsheviks provided a vivid demonstration of their uncompromising commitment to violence as a means of making history. On the morning of 18 January, the negotiations were halted to allow Trotsky to return to Petrograd with a map showing the full extent of Germany’s demands. But the first item on the Bolsheviks’ agenda that day was not the peace, but the final liquidation of the democratic revolution in Russia. The date of 18 January 1918 had been set for the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly. As Trotsky was haggling with the Germans in Brest, heavily armed Red Guards were sweeping anti-Bolshevik protestors from the streets of the Russian capital, killing several dozen.8 The Assembly opened at 4 p.m. and promptly elected Victor Chernov, leader of the Social Revolutionaries, the winners of the election, as its president. Outside, Red Guard cannons were trained on the Assembly building. Inside, the majority faced the continuous, raucous barracking of the Bolshevik faction, with Lenin and the rest glaring down from the balcony. Despite the attempt at intimidation, the Assembly persisted in hearing speeches by the leaders of the February revolution, including the Georgian Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli, who since being declared an outlaw had been living in hiding. He warned that if the Constituent Assembly were ‘destroyed . . . then . . . civil war shall come to suck the life blood of democracy’. The Bolsheviks ‘would . . . open the door to counterrevolution’.9 In the early hours of the morning of 19 January, as the Bolshevik delegation contemptuously withdrew, leaving the closing of the chamber to the janitorial staff and Red Guards, the Russian Constituent Assembly voted into effect the egalitarian land law that had been the prized ambition of generations of Russian radicals. As the lights went out, Chernov could be heard solemnly proclaiming the birth of the ‘Russian Democratic Federated Republic’.10

  The Assembly was never to reopen. Its violent suppression was a shattering blow to the democratic hopes once placed in the revolution. As Maxim Gorky wrote, ‘For almost a hundred years the finest Russians have lived by the idea of a Constituent Assembly . . . in the struggle for this idea, thousands of the intelligentsia and tens of thousands of workers and peasants have perished . . .’. Now, Lenin and his regime of People’s Commissars had ‘given orders to shoot the democracy that demonstrated in honor of this idea’.11 But the Bolsheviks were unabashed. Pravda’s headlines denounced Chernov and Tsereteli as ‘The hirelings of bankers, capitalists, and landlords . . . slaves of the American dollar.’12 Lenin offered a chilling obituary for parliamentary politics. Under the title ‘People from Another World’, he described the anguish he felt at having to attend even one meeting of the Constituent Assembly.13 It was for him the experience of a nightmare. ‘It is as though history had accidentally . . . turned its clock back, and January 1918 became May or June 1917!’ To be plunged from the ‘real’, ‘lively’ activity of the Soviet of workers and soldiers into the world of the Constituent Assembly, was to be plunged into a ‘world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations, of promises and more promises based . . . on conciliation with the capitalists’. ‘It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odour of the dead, to hear those mummies with their empty “social” . . . phrases, to hear Chernov and Tsereteli, was simply intolerable.’ The elected delegates of the Social Revolutionaries, who had braved Bolshevik intimidation to applaud the appeal to unite against the threat of civil war, Lenin mocked as the un-dead, who after sleeping in their coffins for the last six months, had arisen to mechanically applaud the counter-revolution. The Bolsheviks and the men of the February revolution were now on different sides of the barricades. Against those who called for peace, Lenin hailed ‘the class struggle that has become civil war, not by chance . . . but inevitably . . .’ Lenin, of course, was making his own inevitabilities. Nothing was more likely to provoke a civil war than the attempt to found a one-party dictatorship on a humiliating, separate peace with Germany.

  Furthermore, nothing was more likely to isolate that dictatorship from Russia’s allies in the Entente than the decision, anticipated in London and Paris since December 1917, and finalized by the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee on 3 February 1918, to repudiate Russia’s massive foreign debts: $4.92 billion piled up in the pre-war era, $3.9 billion since the start of the war, the latter sum formally guaranteed by the British and French governments. The Soviet government’s refusal to accept responsibility for the liabilities of its predecessor was, as London protested, a challenge to the ‘very foundations of international law’. The Bolsheviks responded that the loans to the Tsar’s government were part of an imperialist web designed to make Russia the servant of Western capitalism. The Russian people had ‘long since redeemed’ anything they owed, with ‘a sea of blood and mountains of corpses’. Henceforth the issue of debt repudiation would pose a fundamental obstacle to any rapprochement between the Soviet regime and the Western Powers. Lenin and Trotsky had burned their boats.14

  II

  Meanwhile at Brest, faced with the full demands of the Central Powers, the Bolshevik strategy was one of delay and it fell to Trotsky to manage the strategic retreat. If the outcome of the negotiations depended ultimately on brute force, then clearly the Central Powers had the upper hand, but not entirely so. In the East the Germans might have military predominance, but in the wider war time was not
on their side. To capitalize on their victory over Russia, Ludendorff and Hindenburg were now planning a massive effort in the West. Given the timetable for what must surely be Germany’s final offensive, the High Command urgently needed to settle the situation in Russia. Furthermore, though Trotsky and the left of the Bolshevik Party exaggerated the prospect of a revolutionary overthrow, the solidity of the home front in both Germany and Austria was now seriously in question. The massive strikes that swept Austria in January 1918 culminated in a mutiny of the Austrian fleet in the Adriatic.15 In Germany too, tensions were rising to an unbearable pitch. On 28 January, a week after the protests in Vienna had ebbed away, the factory cities of Germany were swept by an unprecedented wave of industrial action. The strikers’ demands were openly political – a reasonable peace with Russia and domestic political reform, an end to martial law and the abolition of Prussia’s three-tiered electoral system. For the first time the Majority SPD leadership felt compelled to throw its full weight behind the strike movement.16 Not that there was any suggestion that the strikes were pro-Bolshevik. The violence in Russia led both the MSPD and the USPD to distance themselves from Lenin. Democracy, not a dictatorship of the proletariat, was their goal. But despite the moderation of these demands, the strike split the SPD from its bourgeois friends in the Reichstag majority. With the Vaterlandspartei baying from the right, the Catholic Centre Party and the Liberals could ill afford to associate too closely with the ‘disloyal’ Socialists. Just as the negotiations at Brest reached their most critical point, just as President Wilson was demanding to know who spoke for Germany, the progressive Reichstag coalition was in disarray.17

  In the first days of February, in the hope of rescuing something from the wreckage of their vision of a legitimate order in the East, Kühlmann and Count Czernin, Austria’s chief negotiator, made one last effort to force Trotsky to take seriously the question of self-determination. First they staged a confrontation between the main Soviet delegation and the delegation of the Rada. Predictably, the Bolsheviks launched into vituperative denunciation. But with the Germans holding the ring, the Ukrainian delegates were not cowed. ‘The government of the Bolsheviks, which has broken up the Constituent Assembly and which rests on the bayonets of hired red guards, will never elect to apply in Russia the very just principle of self-determination, because they know only too well that not only the republic of the Ukraine, but also the Don, the Caucasus, Siberia, and other regions do not regard them as their government, and that even the Russian people themselves will ultimately deny their right.’18 Trotsky was visibly embarrassed by this retort. But his answer to the Rada was the same as the answer he had given to Hoffmann. Troops loyal to the Soviet had just captured Kiev. With the Rada government in flight, the territory actually represented by their articulate young representatives at Brest was little larger than the conference room in which they were currently sitting. This was true enough. But, as should have been obvious, if it came down to a simple trial of strength, it was General Hoffmann, not Trotsky, who held by far the strongest cards. Confident of their ability to create a fait accompli, the Central Powers ignored Trotsky’s threats and ended the session by formally recognizing the Rada delegation.

  The Austrians, however, needed more than this. Given their utterly depleted state, they required not only a formal treaty with a vestigial Ukrainian government, but a workable grain-delivery contract. With Bolshevik forces occupying much of northern Ukraine, Count Czernin could not abandon his efforts to reach an agreement with Trotsky. This meant that they had to return to the question of the Baltic states and establish ground rules for what was actually meant by self-determination. On 6 February in a personal meeting with Trotsky, Czernin elaborated the basis for a compromise over the assemblies that would bring self-determination to the Baltic. Why should they not include elements approved by both the Central Powers and the Soviets? Trotsky refused to be entrapped in such constructive talk. Whatever concessions the desperate Austrians were offering, in the hands of his imperialist antagonists, Trotsky insisted, the principle of self-determination could never be anything more than an ideological snare. As to the peace, he was no fool. Trotsky understood that the Germans could take what they wanted. Given this reality, what concerned him was not what the Germans took, but how they took it. ‘Russia could bow to force, but not to sophistry. He would never . . . admit German possession of the occupied territories under the cloak of self-determination, but let the Germans come out brazenly with their demands . . . and he would yield, appealing to world opinion against an act of brutal brigandage’. As the German radical Karl Liebknecht wrote from prison, from the point of view of the revolution the result of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was ‘not nil, even if it’ resulted in a ‘peace of forced capitulation’. Thanks to Trotsky ‘Brest-Litovsk has become a revolutionary tribunal whose decrees are heard far and wide . . . it has exposed German avidity, its cunning lies and hypocrisy’. But it had exposed not only General Hoffmann and Ludendorff. Even more important for Trotsky, as for Liebknecht, was ‘the annihilating verdict’ that the peace would pass on the reformist illusions of Germany’s democratic majority.19 As in Russia, there must be no compromise, no hypocrisy, no possibility of a democratic peace short of total revolution.

  The room for agreement in any meaningful sense of the word had now been exhausted. On 10 February the Central Powers announced to the Russian delegation that they had signed a separate peace with Ukraine, which the Soviet delegation must recognize. The treaty with Ukraine provided Berlin and Vienna with the right to purchase the entire grain surplus. But the Ukraine was neither to be starved nor robbed. Nor would the Central Powers be permitted to buy grain on credit. It was to be paid for by deliveries of industrial goods.20 And the Ukrainian negotiating team, representing a government that was in flight on a train provided to them by the Germans, were able to extract remarkable concessions. Vienna was so desperate for a peace that Count Czernin agreed to upgrade the Ukrainian minority within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by creating a new province of Ruthenia with full cultural rights.21 Even more remarkably, Czernin agreed to the secession to Ukraine of the city of Cholm, which had previously been promised to the Polish state whose right to self-determination the Austrians and Germans had notionally acknowledged in November 1916. By the first weeks of 1918, Germany and Austria needed the Ukrainians more than they needed the Poles.

  Having invited a trial of strength, the Bolsheviks now faced a critical decision. To the conventionally minded there were only two choices. Overwhelmingly the most popular option in Petrograd and Moscow, if not on the front line amongst the troops themselves, was to refuse the German terms and to relaunch the war. No Russian government had ever surrendered. The revolution should not be the first. A majority on the party’s Central Committee supported Trotsky’s idea of rebuilding Russia’s links to the Entente.22 Nikolai Bukharin and other purists on the Bolshevik left counted on the revolutionary energy of the Russian peasants and workers. From Lenin such talk attracted nothing but sardonic scorn. The hopes of a revolutionary war were ‘capable of giving satisfaction to those who crave the romantic and the beautiful’, but failed completely ‘to take into consideration the objective correlation of class forces . . .’23 Lenin now openly demanded a peace at any price. Trotsky had seen too much of Russia’s dilapidated Northern Front not to appreciate the force of Lenin’s point. But unlike Lenin, Trotsky thought that there might be a third position between Bukharin’s revolutionary war and Lenin’s ruinous peace. Counting not on revolution in Germany, but on the ability of the Reichstag majority to prevent a resumption of fighting, Trotsky proposed simply to end the talks by announcing that Russia was unilaterally abandoning the war. On 22 January, after Lenin’s appeal for an immediate settlement was rejected by the Executive Committee of the party, Trotsky narrowly won its backing for his daring new strategy. Rather than recognizing the treaty with Ukraine, on 10 February Trotsky broke off the negotiations declaring: ‘No peace. No war.’ In Petro
grad, there was an euphoric reaction. If Trotsky had not delivered ‘peace without victory’ – the great hope of 1917 – he had, at least, secured an end to the fighting without the explicit acknowledgement of defeat.24

  III

  Everything now depended on the response of the Germans. Following Trotsky’s startling declaration, the Bolshevik delegation was delighted to see their relentless tormentor General Hoffmann reduced to spluttering expostulation. The idea of unilaterally and one-sidedly suspending a war was simply ‘unheard of . . . unheard of’.25 As Kühlmann’s legal experts confirmed, in three thousand years of international law there had been only one single precedent of a Greek city state during the classical period refusing both to continue fighting and to make peace.26 Trotsky had gambled that the moderate forces in Germany would be strong enough to hold back the militarists. And if something like Trotsky’s strategy had been attempted in the summer of 1917, when the momentum had been on the side of the Reichstag majority, perhaps a stand-pat strategy of ‘No peace. No war’ could have been made to stick. But in February 1918 Trotsky overestimated the strength of the progressive coalition in Germany, which his own negotiating tactics had done so much to undermine.