The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  Hindenburg disagreed. Unless decisive steps were taken in the east, the war on the Western Front could drag on for a long time. He wanted to “smash the Russians [and] topple their government.”

  The Kaiser sided with the generals. Trotsky had come to Brest not to make peace, he said, but to promote revolution, and he did so with Allied support. The British envoy in Russia should be told that the Bolsheviks are enemies: “England should fight the Bolsheviks alongside the Germans. The Bolsheviks are tigers, they must be exterminated in every way.”49 In any event, Germany had to act, otherwise Britain and the United States would take over Russia. The Bolsheviks, therefore, “had to go.” “The Russian people have been turned over to the vengeance of Jews, who are connected with all the Jews in the world—that is, the Freemasons.”*

  The conference decided that the armistice would expire on February 17, following which German armies would resume offensive operations against Russia. Their mission was not clearly spelled out. The military plan to overthrow the Bolsheviks was soon given up, however, because of the objections of the civilian authorities.

  In accord with these instructions, the German staff at Brest informed the Russians that Germany would recommence military operations on the Eastern Front at noon, February 17. The Mirbach mission in Petrograd was ordered home.

  Despite their bravado, it is by no means clear that the Germans knew what they wanted: whether to compel the Bolsheviks to accept their peace terms or to remove them from power. Neither then nor later were they able to decide on their priorities: whether they were primarily interested in seizing more Russian territory or installing in Russia a more conventional government. In the end, territorial greed prevailed.

  The German notification of impending military action reached Petrograd on the afternoon of February 17. At the meeting of the Central Committee, which convened immediately, Lenin renewed his plea to return to Brest and capitulate, but he again suffered a narrow defeat, 6–5.50 The majority wanted to wait and see whether the Germans would carry out their threat: if they indeed marched into Russia and no revolution broke out in Germany and Austria, there would still be time to bow to the inevitable.

  The Germans were true to their word. On February 17, their troops advanced and occupied Dvinsk without encountering resistance. General Hoffmann described the operation as follows:

  This is the most comic war that I have ever experienced—it is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece, and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks, entrains another detachment, and moves on. The procedure has in any event the charm of novelty.

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  For Lenin, this was the last straw. Though it was not entirely unexpected, he was appalled by the passivity of Russian troops. Given their unwillingness to fight, Russia lay wide open to the enemy’s advance. Lenin seems to have been in possession of the most sensitive decisions of the German Government, possibly supplied by German sympathizers through Bolshevik agents in Switzerland or Sweden. On the basis of this information, he concluded that the Germans contemplated taking Petrograd and even Moscow. He was infuriated by the smugness of his associates. As he saw it, there was nothing to prevent the Germans from repeating their coup in the Ukraine—that is, replacing him with a right-wing puppet and then suppressing the Revolution.

  But when the Central Committee reassembled on February 18, he once again failed to win a majority. His resolution in favor of capitulation to the German demands received six votes against seven cast for the motion jointly presented by Trotsky and Bukharin. The party leadership was hopelessly deadlocked. There was a danger that the division would split the party’s rank and file, destroying the disciplined unity which was its main source of strength.

  At this juncture, Trotsky came to Lenin’s assistance: switching sides, instead of supporting his own resolution he voted for Lenin’s. Trotsky’s biographer believes that he did so partly in fulfillment of a promise to Lenin to give in if the Germans invaded Russia and partly to avert what could have been a disastrous cleavage in the party.52 When another vote was taken, seven members voted in favor of Lenin’s motion and six opposed it.53 On the basis of this slenderest of majorities, Lenin drafted a cable informing the Germans that the Russian delegation was returning to Brest.54 Several Left SRs were shown the text, and when they approved it, it was transmitted by wireless.

  Then came the shock. The Germans and Austrians, instead of immediately suspending their offensive, kept on advancing into Russia’s interior. In the north German units entered Livonia, while in the center they moved, still unopposed, on Minsk and Pskov. In the south the Austrians and Hungarians also went forward. On the face of it, these operations, carried out after the Russians had signaled their readiness to accept German terms, could have only one meaning: Berlin was determined to seize the Russian capitals and topple the Bolsheviks. This was where Lenin drew the line: according to Isaac Steinberg, he said on February 18 that he would fight only if the Germans demanded of his government to give up power.55

  Days passed and there was still no response from the advancing Germans. At this point, panic seized the Bolshevik leaders: they passed emergency measures, one of which was to have especially grave consequences. On February 21–22, still without a word from the Germans, Lenin wrote and signed a decree entitled “The socialist fatherland in danger.”56 Its preamble stated that the actions of the Germans indicated they had decided to suppress the socialist government of Russia and restore the monarchy. To defend the “socialist fatherland” urgent measures were required. Two of these turned out to have lasting consequences. One called for the creation of battalions of forced labor made up of “all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class” to dig trenches. Resisters were to be shot. This initiated the practice of forced labor, which in time would affect millions of citizens. Another clause read: “Enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, German spies, are to be executed on the spot.” The provision introduced irrevocable penalties for crimes which were neither defined nor on the statute books, since all laws had by then been annulled.57 Nothing was said about trials or even hearings for the accused liable to capital punishment. In effect, the decree gave the Cheka the license to kill, of which it soon made full use. The two clauses marked the opening phase of Communist terror.

  Lenin had warned his colleagues that if the Germans resumed military operations, the Bolsheviks would have to seek French and English help, which is what they now proceeded to do.

  Although the Germans could not decide which to give precedence, they at least drew a distinction between their short-term interests in Russia, connected with the war, and Russia’s long-term geopolitical importance to them. The Allies had only one interest in Russia, and that was to keep her in the war. Russia’s collapse and the prospect of a separate peace were for the Allies calamities of the first order, likely to lead to a German victory, for with dozens of divisions transferred to the west, the Germans could crush the exhausted French and British forces before the Americans arrived in significant numbers. For the Allies, therefore, the uppermost priority in regard to Russia was reactivating the Eastern Front, with Bolshevik cooperation, if possible, and if not, then with any other force available: anti-Bolshevik Russians, Japanese, Czech prisoners of war interned in Russian camps, or, as a last resort, their own troops. Who the Bolsheviks were, what they stood for, was of no concern to them: they showed interest neither in the internal policy of the Bolshevik regime nor in its international objectives, which increasingly preoccupied the Germans. Bolshevik “fraternization” policies, their appeals to workers to strike and soldiers to mutiny, found as yet no response in Allied countries and hence gave no cause for alarm there. The Allied attitude was clear and simple: the Bolshevik regime was an enemy if it made peace with the Central Powers, but a friend and ally if it stayed in the fight. In the words of Arthur Balfour, Britain’s Foreign Se
cretary, as long as the Russians fought the Germans their cause was “our cause.”58 The U.S. Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, expressed the same sentiments in a message of January 2, 1918, meant for transmittal to Lenin’s government, although never sent:

  If the Russian armies now under the command of the people’s commissaires commence and seriously conduct hostilities against the forces of Germany and her allies, I will recommend to my Government the formal recognition of the de facto government of the people’s commissaires.

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  Because of their lack of interest in the subject, the Allies possessed very inadequate information on the internal conditions in Bolshevik Russia. They were not particularly well served by their diplomatic missions there. George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, was a competent but conventional foreign service officer, while Francis, a St. Louis banker, was, in the words of a British diplomat, “a charming old gentleman” but presumably no more than that. Neither seems to have been aware of the historic importance of the events in the midst of which they found themselves. The French envoy, Joseph Noulens, an ex-Minister of War and a socialist, was intellectually better prepared for his job, but his dislike of Russians and his brusque, authoritarian manner reduced his effectiveness. To make matters worse, in March 1918, the Allied missions lost direct contact with the Bolshevik leaders because they would not follow them to Moscow: from Petrograd they moved first to Vologda, and from there, in July, to Archangel.* This obliged them to rely on secondhand reports provided by their agents in Moscow.

  The latter were young men who threw themselves body and soul into the Russian drama. Bruce Lockhart, a onetime British Consul in Moscow, served as a link between London and the Sovnarkom; Raymond Robins, head of the U.S. Red Cross mission to Russia, did the same for Washington; and Captain Jacques Sadoul, for Paris. The Bolsheviks did not take these intermediaries terribly seriously, but they realized their utility: they cultivated and flattered them, and treated them as confidants. In this manner they managed to persuade Lockhart, Robins, and Sadoul that if their countries offered Russia military and economic aid, the Bolsheviks would break with the Germans and perhaps even return to the war. Unaware that they were being used, the three agents adopted these views as their own and championed them vigorously with their governments.

  Sadoul, a socialist, whose mother had taken part in the Paris Commune, felt the strongest ideological attraction for the Bolsheviks: in August 1918 he would defect to them, for which he would be condemned to death in absentia as a deserter and traitor.†

  Robins was a devious individual who in his communications with Lenin and Trotsky expressed enthusiasm for their cause but on returning to the United States pretended to oppose Bolshevism. An affluent social worker and labor organizer with socialist leanings, the self-styled colonel, on the eve of his departure from Russia, sent Lenin a farewell note in which he wrote:

  Your prophetic insight and genius of leadership have enabled the Soviet Power to become consolidated throughout Russia and I am confident that this new creative organ of the democratic life of mankind will inspire and advance the cause of liberty throughout the world.

  *

  He further promised, on his return, to “continue efforts” in interpreting “the new democracy” to the American people. However, testifying soon afterward before a Senate committee on conditions in Soviet Russia, Robins urged economic assistance to Moscow on the disingenuous grounds that it was a way of “disorganizing Bolshevik power.”†

  Lockhart was ideologically the least committed of the three, but he, too, allowed himself to be turned into an instrument of Bolshevik policy.‡

  Sadoul and Robins had met occasionally with Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Communist leaders after the Bolshevik coup. These contacts multiplied in the second half of February 1918, during the interval between the Bolshevik acceptance of the German ultimatum (February 17) and the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (March 14). During these two weeks, the Bolsheviks, afraid that the Germans wanted to remove them from power, put out urgent appeals to the Allies for help. The Allies responded positively. The French were especially forthcoming. They abandoned now the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army being formed in the Don Region, which Noulens had supported financially because of its anti-German stand: on his recommendation the French Government had previously contributed 50 million rubles to General Alekseev to help organize a new Russian army. At the beginning of January 1918, General Henri Niessel, the new head of the French military mission in Russia, advised cutting off Alekseev on the grounds that he headed a “counterrevolutionary” force. The advice was adopted: assistance to Alekseev was terminated and Niessel received authority to open negotiations with the Bolsheviks.§ Lockhart similarly opposed support for the Volunteer Army, which he, too, depicted in dispatches to the Foreign Office as counterrevolutionary. In his judgment, the Bolsheviks were the most reliable anti-German force in Russia.60

  During the hectic days that followed the resumption of German offensive operations, the Bolshevik high command decided to seek Allied help. On February 21, Trotsky communicated, through Sadoul, with Niessel to inquire whether France would be willing to help Soviet Russia stop the German offensive. Niessel contacted the French Ambassador, and received an affirmative response. That day Noulens cabled Trotsky from Vologda: “In your resistance to Germany you may count on the military and financial cooperation of France.”61 Niessel advised Trotsky on the measures Soviet Russia should take to impede the Germans and promised military advisers.

  The French response was discussed by the Central Committee late in the evening of February 22. By this time Trotsky was in possession of a memorandum from Niessel outlining the measures which France was prepared to take to help the Russians.62 The document, said to be lost, contained concrete proposals of French monetary and military aid. Trotsky urged acceptance and moved a resolution to this effect. Lenin, who could not attend, voted in absentia with a laconic note: “Please add my vote in favor of taking ’tatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.”63 The motion barely passed, with six votes for and five against, because of the opposition of Bukharin and the other advocates of “revolutionary war.” After he was defeated, Bukharin offered to resign from the Central Committee and the editorship of Pravda, but did neither.

  As soon as the Central Committee had ended its deliberations—it was during the night of February 22–23—the issue was Put before the Sovnarkom. Here Trotsky’s motion carried as well, over the objections of the Left SRs.

  The following day, Trotsky informed Sadoul of his government’s readiness to accept French help. He invited Niessel to Smolnyi to consult with Podvoiskii, General Bonch-Bruevich, and other Bolshevik military experts on anti-German operations. Niessel was of the opinion that Soviet Russia had to form a fresh military force with the assistance of former tsarist officers, secured by appeals to patriotism.64

  The Bolsheviks now positioned themselves to switch sides in the event the Germans tried to topple them. They knew that the Allies paid little attention to their policies at home and abroad and would give them generous help in return for a reactivation of the Eastern Front. There can be little doubt that if the Germans had followed through on the recommendations of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the Bolsheviks, in order to stay in power, would have made common cause with the Allies and allowed them the use of Russian territory for military operations against the Central Powers.

  It is indicative of how far along Russo-Allied cooperation had progressed that late in February Lenin dispatched Kamenev to Paris as Soviet “diplomatic representative.” Kamenev traveled by way of London, arriving already after his government had ratified the Brest Treaty. He had a chilly reception. France refused him entry, following which he headed back home. En route to Russia he was intercepted by the Germans, who detained him for four months.65

  Whether the Germans had gotten wind of Bolshevik negotiations with France or by mere coincidence, it so happened that their impatiently awaited
response arrived on the very morning the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom had voted to seek Allied help.66 It confirmed Lenin’s worst fears. Berlin now demanded not only the territories that its troops had seized in the course of the war but also those they had occupied in the week following the breakdown of the Brest negotiations. The Russians were to evacuate the Ukraine and Finland, as well as demobilize; they were to pay a contribution and make a variety of economic concessions. The note was phrased as an ultimatum requiring an answer within forty-eight hours, following which a maximum of seventy-two hours was allowed for the treaty to be signed.

  The next two days, the Bolshevik leadership sat in virtually continuous session. Lenin found himself time and again in a minority. He eventually prevailed only by threatening to resign from all posts in the party and government.

  As soon as he had read the German note, Lenin convened the Central Committee. Fifteen members turned up.67 The German ultimatum had to be accepted unconditionally, he said: “The politics of revolutionary phrasemongering have come to an end.” The main thing was that the German demands, humiliating as they were, “did not affect Soviet authority”—that is, they allowed the Bolsheviks to stay in power. If his colleagues persisted in their unrealistic course of action, they would have to do so on their own, because he, Lenin, would leave both the government and the Central Committee.