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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
We need to start this week with a couple of short corrections. First, I’m not quite sure how I did this, but it was General Krymov who was with Kerensky at the Battle of Pulkovo. I said it was some guy named General Krilov, who — there is no General Krilov. That was just some mistaken mishmash of sounds I made because there are so many generals in the Russian civil war whose name starts with K: Kornilov, Kaledin, Krymov, Kolchak. It’s not a big thing, but I completely invented a general named Krilov, he didn’t exist.
The second thing is, speaking of one of those K generals: Nikolai Krylenko was an ensign when he became commander and chief of the Russian army, not a lieutenant, so again, it was Ensign Krylenko who became commander in chief of the Russian army, not Lieutenant Krylenko. Sorry about that. I get things wrong sometimes.
Now we spent the last two episodes on the Bolshevik’s initial consolidation of power on the home front. This week, we are going to turn our attention to what was happening on the war front. What did the October Revolution mean for Russia’s place in the great war? And beyond that, what did it mean for their standing among the other great powers. And what we will find today, is that as the old stately Quadrille continued to swirl around to polite classical music with everyone wearing tuxedos and sequins, the Bolsheviks are about to come charging onto the dance floor like they’re diving into a mosh pit. And while technically it was a kind of dance, they were also there to just kind of, y’know, trash the scene.
So let’s go back to the night of October 26th. I remember the very first thing the Bolsheviks did after seizing power: issue the Decree on Peace. The Bolsheviks had been the anti-war party going back so long it was arguably the single most distinguishing feature about them going all the way back to 1914. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the most cohesive block in the Zimmerwald left, and they consistently attacked the war as nothing more than a small greedy clique of capitalist imperialists feeding the people of Europe into a meat grinder.
What Lenin wanted to do was reorient the war, to stop make it peoples fighting against peoples, and instead, make it the people rising up to overthrow their common enemy, the ruling classes of Europe. Lenin wanted to turn foreign war into civil war. And a huge amount of Bolshevik strategy, tactics and ideology rested on the belif that World War I represented the final crisis of the old world of capitalism, and from its ashes would be born a new world of socialism. Now that they held power in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks plan to strike out boldly to bring their international socialist dreams to fruition. But, they got off to a rocky and sometimes comical start. Trotsky took over the foreign office as commissar of foreign faced with the consequences of the white collar strike that had greeted the October Revolution none of the functionaries, bureaucrats or clerks who staffed the ministry office showed up for work. Trotsky had trouble tracking down the people who had the keys to the doors and the safes of the building. Now he responded to these insulting hitches with a kind of breezy disdain. Trotsky said that one of the consequences of the revolution would be an end to all this old style European diplomacy where fat cats congregated behind closed doors and treated the people of the world as expendable and exploitable ponds over brandy and cigars. “What sort of diplomatic work will we be doing, anyway?” Trotsky said. “I shall issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples and then shut up shop.”
But despite this posturing, it was going to be a wee bit more complicated than all that. On November 9th, the Soviet government transmitted the Decree on Peace to all the other belligerent powers, inviting everyone to take it as the starting point for a general peace. But if you will recall, it also aimed itself over the head of the governments of Europe and spoke directly to the people. Lenin had very few illusions about the response from the other powers. “The proposal of peace will be met with resistance on the part of the imperialist governments,” he said. ” We don’t fool ourselves on that score. But we hope that revolution will soon break out in the belligerent countries and that is why we address ourselves to the workers of France, England, and Germany.”
By issuing this call to all the belligerent powers, Lenin was also engaging in a little bit of public relations work. Because while Lenin did not expect the governments of France or Britain to respond favorably, he absolutely expected the Central Powers to jump at the chance to sign a peace treaty with Russia. One of the things that had dogged Lenin and the Bolsheviks for all of 1917 was the accusation that they were a bunch of paid German agents, that they had been delivered to Petrograd in a German train car with instructions to wreck Russia from the inside. Now, Lenin did absolutely take from the kaiser what the kaiser offered in 1917: logistical and monetary support. But Lenin is not a German agent.
It is, however, somewhat of a creative puzzle to imagine how exactly Lenin could have behaved differently if he was a German agent. Because after returning to Russia, he spent every waking moment attacking the legitimacy of the provisional government, denouncing the war, and fomenting an atmosphere of chaos. All of this culminated with an armed seizure of power, with their very first decree being a call for the Russian army to stop fighting the Germans. I mean, back in Berlin, the decision to put Lenin on a train in March 1917 was looking like the single best decision they had made since the war began.
To help paper over this German agent narrative, Lenin issued a call for a general peace, so that when the allies inevitably rejected this call, he could move to direct negotiations with the Central Powers without making it look like he was just a puppet dancing for its masters. And the Russians never failed to mention that the other powers were always welcome to join the peace talks at any time.
But the Allied Powers were not biting, and as much as Berlin and Vienna thrilled at the events of October, Paris and London were a gast policy towards Russia was to keep Russia in the war. Hell, it was French foreign policy going all the way back to the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 that French national security depended on keeping a massive Russian army pinning down Germany’s east flank. You might remember that when Nicholas and Alexandra appeared personally responsible for Russian wartime dysfunction, France and Britain were very quick to shrug their shoulders at the overthrow of the monarchy and recognize the provisional government within a matter of days.
Not so much for the Bolsheviks in October. France and Britain did not recognize Lenin’s government, and in fact in the days after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the allied governments directed most of their diplomatic recognition to General Dukhonin at Russian military headquarters.
As events unfolded over the next several months and years, Russia’s now former allies would have ideological and political reasons for opposing the Bolshevik regime, but in late 1917, their interest was in supporting anyone who would keep Russia in the war, and Lenin and his government very much did not appear to be those people. With the Allies literally not responding to the offer of a general peace, Trotsky cabled the central powers on November 14, indicating Russian willingness to deal with them directly. As you can imagine, the Bolshevik seizure of power was something of a miracle for the Germans and Austrians and Turks. No less than the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were both themselves tottering on the brink of total collapse, while the Germans saw an opportunity to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat come the spring of 1918. If they signed a treaty with the Russians to shut down the eastern front of the war, they could pour men guns and material into one last decisive offensive in the west. And the Germans were themselves in desperate straits and things looked pretty terrible, both at home and abroad, including the depressing reality that the United States had just joined France and Britain.
But there was still time to sneak in a knockout blow before American weight became decisive. But the Germans absolutely needed the Russians out of the war, or they were done for. So the Central Powers cabled their willingness to negotiate an armistice, followed by a formal peace treaty. They invited a Russian delegation to come to Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German army in what is now Belarus. Brest-Litovsk was a bombed out shell of itself, with only the former military fortress still standing. But the fact that the talks went on there spoke volumes for the military realities underlying the talks. The June Offensive had resulted in the Germans advancing hundreds of miles. They presently occupied large chunks of Russian territory in Poland and up in the Baltic. The German army stood poised to capture Petrograd, which was absolutely a huge background crisis that drove events towards the October Revolution. That the Russian delegation had to come to German military headquarters to work out a peace rather than mutually agreeing to a neutral location spoke volumes for how much this was effectively the Russians coming to surrender.
The Bolshevik delegation left Petrograd for Brest-Litovsk on November 18th. The head negotiator was a guy named Aldolph Joffe, a former Menshevik and friend of Trotsky’s who had wholeheartedly embraced radical Bolshevism after returning from Siberian exile after the February Revolution. Also on the negotiating team was Kamenev, who was welcomed back into the Bolshevik fold after realizing that he kept resigning in protest from the winning team. Lenin and the others led him back into the inner circle, but would forever bring up his October episode when they wanted to rub his face in the fact that Kamenev had spent those crucial days in October trying to derail them from their date with historical destiny.
But though it looked like the Russian delegation was coming hat in hand to beg for peace at Brest-Litovsk, they were not there to just surrender and sign peace at any price. They planned to use the negotiations as a platform to spread revolutionary gospel. And they very visibly positioned themselves as a completely new political animal on the world stage, one that represented the people, not just the ruling class. Though their principle negotiators were intellectuals, they also brought as equal members of their negotiating team, a soldier, a sailor, a worker, a peasant, and a woman. Now the woman on the team was a left SR named Anastasia Bitsenko, who was famous for assassinating the former minister of war in November 1905. She shot him dead at point blank range in the home of the governor of Saratov, who you might remember, was Peter Stolypin. Bitsenko spent more than a decade in Siberian exile before coming home after the February Revolution. Having a terrorist assassin sitting amidst the Russian negotiators certainly signaled that this was not the, uh, same old negotiating team everyone was used to.
There’s also a great story about the peasant delegate, a guy called Roman Stashkov. As the negotiating team was on their way to the train station, Joffe and Kamenev realized they had forgotten to secure a peasant delegate. Then they saw this old peasant walking on the side of the road, and they pulled over and offered him a ride. When he got in, they quizzed the perplexed old man about his politics. When he said he was an SR like everyone in his village, they said, come with us to Brest-Litovsk to make peace with the Germans. Now, he was understandably reluctant, but they offered him a chunk of cash to overcome his doubts and off he went, as the newly minted plenipotentiary representative of the Russian peasants.
The conference formerly began on November the 20th, with this motley array of scruffy Russian revolutionaries seated across the table from a phalanx of aristocratic old world diplomats and generals. The leader of the central powers negotiating team was German foreign secretary Baron von Kühlmann. Kühlmann was worldly, cultured, polite, and just the prototypical European diplomat. He also fancied himself something of a self-styled expert on Russia. While negotiating from a position of strength, Kühlmann believed his job was to provide language and terms that would allow the Russians to sign an honorable peace. He was convinced Germany was done for if the two-front war continued, but also convinced that if the Germans came off as punitive or vindictive towards the Russians, it would maybe drive the Russians back into arms, and almost certainly convince France and Britain to fight to the last man.
Seated beside the German foreign minister was the Austrian foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin, who was acutely aware that catastrophe loomed over the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and they absolutely could not go on fighting the Russians. He was there to make sure the Russian signed a peace treaty on whatever terms got them to sign a peace treaty.
Beside both of them was General Max Hoffman, chief of staff of Germany’s armies on the eastern front, who had just overseen the capture of Riga. He was there to make sure the Russians understood they had lost the war and were in no position to bargain.
The two teams quickly agreed to a temporary ceasefire, as a prelude to a more stable armistice, as a prelude to an official peace treaty. But as negotiations commenced at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky finally got the safes open at the Russian foreign ministry, and proceeded to publish all the secret terms of all the secret treaties the tsar’s government had signed with France and Britain. Things like Russia being promised Constantinople and hegemony over the Balkans. That the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires would be dismembered. That France and Britain’s imperial projects would be protected and expanded.
All of this made Russia, France and Britain looked pretty bad. But Trotsky published these terms along with a note to the peoples of the world who would read all about this in their local newspaper. Trotsky said, “The bourgeois politicians and newspapers of Germany and Austria Hungary will no doubt seize upon the published documents and will try to represent the diplomatic work of the central empires in a favorable light. Such an attempt is fordoomed to failure, and this for two reasons. In the first place, we intend in a short time to present at the bar of public opinion a series of secret documents which amply illustrate the diplomatic methods of the central empires; in the second place, and this is most important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as international as those of imperialistic plunder. When the German proletariat by revolutionary means gets access to the secrets of the chancelleries of its government, it will discover documents in them of just the same character as those we are about to publish. It is to be hoped that this will happen at an early date.”
So this is basically an open call from the Russian foreign minister for the German people to rise up and overthrow the head of state of an empire he is currently in peace negotiations with. This is well outside of established diplomatic protocol. But though the publication of the secret treaty sent a wave of heartburn through the capitals of Europe, it did not derail the peace talks in Brest-Litovsk, because both sides needed a peace. On December 2nd, the two sides agreed to a month long armistice. Now for the Russians, signing the armistice was simply giving official designation to an already existing reality that was far beyond the control of their negotiators or their government. Since the October Revolution — and really for all of 1917 — the Russian military had been undergoing what one might call self-demobilization: Russian soldiers were simply quitting and going home. Now that they had the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land in hand, the mostly peasant soldiers were just going home. They were pushed by a desire to get as far away from the trenches as possible, and pulled by the promise of radical land redistribution back in their home villages. So the Russian empire was just disintegrating. An American observer said that when it came to the Russian government needing to sign a peace, it was “indeed urgent and active, but it was much the case of a man blowing with his breath in the same direction with a full grown natural tornado.”
The Russian army was going home, and even if Lenin and Trotsky wanted to keep fighting, there was no way they could have made that army keep fighting. Lenin considered peace essential to the long-term stability of his regime. If he tried to keep the Russian army in the field, he said, “the peasant army unbearably exhausted by the war will overthrow the socialist workers’ government.”
But though the Russians needed a piece because they didn’t really have an army to continue the war, the Bolshevik negotiators were not in Brest-Litovsk to sign peace at any price. The main sticking point was what to do about the territory currently occupied by the armies of the Central Powers. The Bolshevik government had issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of russia just a few weeks earlier, which promised everyone autonomy and self-determination. The Bolshevik negotiators at Brest-Litovsk insisted that peace with Germany meant the mutual evacuation of all occupied territories on all sides, and recognition of the right of all peoples to determine their own fates. And though the immediate sticking point was territory in Poland and the Baltic, the biggest issue loomed just in the background: Ukraine.
Ukraine was a vital importance to the Russian Empire. Ukrainians made up the single largest block of non-Russians in the empire, just about 30 million people, making them a majority of the population in a half-dozen provinces down in the southwestern corner of the empire. More importantly, Ukraine accounted for like 75% of all the coal produced in the Russian Empire, 66% of its iron ore, 75% of its magnesium, 66% of its salt, 80% of its sugar, and 90% of all wheat exports. It was a vital part of the Russian Empire’s economy, and for all the talk about autonomy and self-determination, both the Russians and Germans saw Ukraine as a vital part of their post-war economies. The Germans had been cultivating Ukrainian separatists since the beginning of the war, hoping to turn a nominally independent Ukraine into a German client state. After the February Revolution, a group of Ukrainian leaders formed what they called the Rada. Self-appointing themselves as the legitimate leaders of Ukraine, they spent the next six months and occasionally hostile relations with the various Russian provisional governments. In fact, one of the proximate causes for the Kadets quitting Kerensky’s government over the summer was that Kerensky recognized the legitimacy of the Rada’s authority in Ukraine. Now that the Bolsheviks were in charge, the wheel of revolution turned again. And with the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia in hand, the Rada prepared to declare independence.
But, not so fast. While Lenin and Trotsky very publicly proclaimed that they had no problem with the people of Ukraine charting their own destiny, the self-organized Rada wasn’t necessarily the true voice of the people. And while the countryside was almost universally Ukrainian, the cities and larger towns were very much more ethnically mixed. The population of Kiev for instance, was actually a majority Russian and Jewish. The government in Petrograd was not thrilled with reports it received that the Rada was allowing free passage of officers, men, and volunteers moving towards the Cossack regions to join what was fast becoming the anti-Bolshevik White Armies.
On December 3rd, Lenin issued a manifesto to the Ukrainian people with an ultimatum to the Ukrainian Rada. It opened, “The Council of People’s Commissars, the socialist government of Russia, reaffirms that the right to self determination belongs to all nations oppressed by tsarism and the great Russian bourgeoisie, up to and including the right of these nations to secede from Russia. Accordingly, we, the Council of People’s Commissars, recognize the people’s Ukrainian republic, and its right to secede from Russia or enter into a treaty with the Russian Republic on federal or similar relations between them.”
Okay. So what exactly is the problem here? The problem was the Rada, who Lenin then rattled off a bunch of charges against, including:
“The Rada has been extending support to the Kadet-Kaledin plot and revolt against Soviet power. The Rada has allowed its territory to be crossed by troops on their way to Kaledin, but has refused transit to any anti-Kaledin troops.” Because of this, Lenin said, “… even if the Rada had received full formal recognition as the uncontested organ of supreme state power of an independent bourgeois Ukrainian republic, we would have been forced to declare war on it without any hesitation, because of its attitude of unexampled betrayal of the revolution.”
Then he issued the ultimatum:
“In the event, no satisfactory answer is received to these questions within 48 hours, the Council of People’s Commissars will deem the Rada to be in a state of open war with the Soviet power in Russia and the Ukraine.”
Lenin would not receive a satisfactory answer from the Rada within 48 hours, but Germany promptly issued an invitation to the Ukrainian Rada to send representatives to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate the recognition of an independent Ukraine, and a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers. Ukraine was now a theater of the blossoming Russian civil war.
Meanwhile, at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans were growing impatient and very suspicious of Russian intentions. On December 13th, the Russian government proudly proclaimed their allocation of 2 million rubles to create and spread revolutionary propaganda throughout Europe. It seemed increasingly obvious that the Russian goal was to stall long enough for revolutions in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere to render the peace talks at Brest-Litovsk totally moot. On December 21st, the Executive Committee of the Soviet issued a public statement for worldwide consumption.
It said, “The joint meeting appeals to you, workers of Germany, you to whom the predatory aims of German imperialism are as alien as the aggressive aspirations of Russian imperialism are to us. You should support in every way the struggle of the Russian people for a just and universal peace. For three years now, the people have been shedding blood on all fronts, but neither victory nor defeat have brought nearer the longed for peace. Only the will of the peoples can compel the imperialists of all countries to conclude a democratic peace.”
Then they broadened their appeal beyond just the Germans:
“Workers of France, Britain, and Italy, peoples of blood-soaked Serbia and ravaged Belgium! You too should raise your voice. Let your governments know that you are no longer willing to shed blood for annexationist aims alien to you. We do not want a piece that would sanctify the old injustices, forge new chains, and burden the working people with the grievous consequences of the war. We want a peace of the peoples, a democratic peace, a just peace. And we shall secure such a peace only when the peoples of all countries dictate its terms by their revolutionary struggles.”
So this was the new style of Russian diplomacy: calling on the peoples of the world to overthrow their governments.
With the leaders in Germany getting increasingly impatient, quite correctly recognizing the Russian negotiators simply stalling for time until revolution broke out in Berlin, they leaned on Baron von Kühlmann to press harder for a final treaty. To resist this pressure, Lenin sent Trotsky to take over negotiations personally, telling Trotsky before he left, “we need someone to do the delaying, and you will do it better than anybody. String out the talks until there is a revolution in Germany, or as long as possible.”
Trotsky’s arrival at Brest-Litovsk was his arrival on the world stage as an international figure. He spent most of his life as an incredibly obscure radical intellectual, activist, and journalist. He had earned himself enormous celebrity inside Russia as the dynamic face and voice of Bolshevism, but it was here at Brest-Litovsk that he really came to the attention of the international press, who were all on hand to cover the momentous negotiations.
Trotsky absolutely reveled in the opportunity to cross rhetorical swords with the high and mighty representatives of the old world aristocracy, who were used to dealing with men of the same class, breedings, and manners as themselves, not scruffy exiled revolutionaries who spent their formative years couch surfing through the underground of Europe. Trotsky turned all of his talents up to 11, and dazzled the packed house of diplomats and observers with his undeniably brilliant oratorical and intellectual skills. Baron Von Kühlmann, for his part, seemed content to let Trotsky lead the discussion through a variety of philosophical digressions, including long abstract debates about the nature of self-determination, a monologue on the basic tenants of Marxism, and pointed demands to investigate the meaning of practically every word in the draft of the treaty. On December 30th, for instance, Trotsky amused the audience by demanding that the stock phrase about the two parties living in peace and friendship be amended. “I would take the liberty to propose that the second phrase,” Trotsky said, mentioning the bit about friendship, “be deleted. It’s thoroughly conventional ornamental style does not correspond, so it seems, to the dry business-like sense of the document. Such declarations copied from one diplomatic document into another have never yet characterized the real relations between states.” He did not want to be friends with the Germans, he wanted peace with the Germans, and that was very different.
He also continued to object to the German plan to keep occupying captured territory, demanding instead, the total evacuation and renunciation of any plans for permanent annexation. Baron von Kühlmann appears to have let all of this go on because he remained convinced that this was just the Russians allowing themselves to rationalize and endorse the final terms of the treaty, which Kühlmann still expected to dramatically favor Germany. But his political masters back in Berlin, Ludendorff and Hindenburg especially, were getting awfully testy, and they prevailed upon the kaiser to demand his majesty’s negotiators skip to the end of the page, and issue an ultimatum.
At the negotiating table, General Hoffman voiced this frustration on behalf of the German military: “The Russian delegation has spoken as if it represented a victorious invader of our country. I should like to remind its members the facts point to the contrary. Victorious German troops are on Russian soil. I should further like to say that the Russian delegation demands that we should recognize the right of self-determination in a form and on a scale which its own government does not recognize. German supreme command thinks it necessary to repudiate it interference in the affairs of the occupied areas.” Hoffman said bluntly there would be no further negotiations about any evacuation. The Germans would keep what they had won. The German armies were not going anywhere.
Trotsky tried to dance around a little bit more, but on January the fifth, 1918, the other side had had enough. General Hoffman rolled out a map, which he said would be the basis of all future relations between Germany and Russia. It laid out new borders between Germany and Russia, and what it showed was the effective dismemberment of the Russian Empire. It would leave Germany much, much stronger and Russia, much, much weaker. Hoffman’s point, of course, was at the Bolsheviks may have won their little revolution, but they had lost the war, and it was time for them to quit stalling and admit it. Trotsky’s theatrical may have dazzled, but they were no match for the material and military reality of the situation. The Russian army was in a state of acute disintegration. For all their own internal problems, the Central Powers had been humoring the Russians. They could steamroll the eastern front anytime they wanted, and now that threat was on the table. Trotsky was told, accept this, or we will advance. Trotsky took this ultimatum and said, look, I cannot accept this at the moment. I have to go home and confer with my government. The testy Central Power negotiators allowed this final delay, but they were now prepared to resume the war.
Next week, we will recombine our narratives, and look at the massive and potentially fatal dilemmas facing Lenin’s government at home and abroad, because back in Petrograd on that very same January 5th, 1918, a long awaited constituent assembly finally convened. With its majority of delegates likely hostile to the Bolsheviks, they posed just as much of a threat to Lenin as the Germans, who were themselves gearing up to invade further if their demands were not met.
It would appear that though the Bolsheviks had survived longer than anyone expected, there was very little chance they would survive the winter.