A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  For three more weeks Trotsky played for time, while the German High Command became more impatient. Then events finally came to a head on 9 February, when a telegram arrived from the Kaiser in Berlin ordering Kuhlmann to present the German demands as an ultimatum. If it was not signed by the next day, the German and Austrian armies would be ordered to advance. The

  Kaiser had finally been convinced by the German High Command that the peace talks were a waste of time, that the Russians were merely using them to stir up revolt among his troops, and that the treaty with the Rada, signed on the same day as the Kaiser's telegram, opened the door to a military imposition of a separate peace on the Russians through the occupation of the Ukraine. There was clearly no more room for procrastination — and Trotsky was forced to lay down his hand. The next day he told the astounded conference that Russia was leaving the war' but refused to sign the German peace treaty. Nothing quite like it had ever been heard before in diplomatic history — a country that acknowledged defeat and declared its intention not to go on fighting but at the same time refused to accept the victor's terms for an end to the war. When Trotsky finished speaking the diplomats sat in silence, dumbfounded by this coup de theatre. Then the silence was at last broken by the scandalized cry of General Max von Hoffman: ' Unerhort!"89

  Once the initial shock passed, it was clear to the German High Command that Trotsky's bluff had to be called. Since no peace treaty had been signed, Germany was still at war with Russia, the armistice had come to an end and the way was now open for the German invasion of Russia. Despite his own growing fears of a revolution in Berlin, Kiihlmann was forced by pressure from Ludendorff to announce on 16 February that Germany would resume hostilities against Russia on 18 February. Back in the Smolny, on the 17th, the Central Committee met in panic. Lenin's demand that the German treaty should be accepted at once was defeated by six votes to five. Trotsky's policy of waiting for the Germans to launch their attack before signing the peace was adopted instead in the desperate hope that the sight of their troops attacking the defenceless people of Russia might at last inspire the German working classes to rebel.90

  Sure enough, on the 18th the German troops advanced. Dvinsk and Lutsk were immediately captured without resistance. The last remaining Russian troops fell apart altogether — they were quite indifferent to the call of a revolutionary war — and by the end of the fifth day Hoffman's men had advanced 150 miles. It was as much as the whole German army had advanced in the three previous years of fighting. 'It is the most comical war I have ever known,' Hoffman wrote in his diary. 'It is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. We put a handful of infantry men with machine-guns and one gun on to a train and push them off to the next station; they take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops, and go on. This proceeding has, at any rate, the charm of novelty.'91

  As news came in of the German advance, the Central Committee convened in two emergency sessions on 18 February. Lenin was furious. By refusing to sign the German treaty, his opponents in the Central Committee had merely enabled the enemy to advance. Lenin clearly feared that the Germans

  were about to capture Petrograd and oust the Bolsheviks from power — and this necessitated sending a telegram accepting the peace at once. When Trotsky and Bukharin proposed to delay this, Lenin was beside himself with rage. But he still lacked enough votes to enforce his policy, which was defeated by seven votes to six at the morning session of the Central Committee. The Bolshevik leadership seemed on the brink of a fatal division as it stared defeat in the face. But during the afternoon, as rumours came in of a German advance into the Ukraine, Trotsky moved round towards Lenin's view. At the evening session of the Central Committee he proposed to ask the Germans to restate their terms. As Lenin rightly saw it, this was a foolish game to play. It was too late now for diplomatic notes, which the Germans would in any case soon dismiss as a ploy for time; only the firm acceptance of their terms for peace would be enough to halt their advance. After three further hours of heated debate the crucial vote was taken on Lenin's proposal to send the Germans an immediate offer of peace. It was passed by the slenderest of margins, by seven votes to five, with Trotsky switching to Lenin's side at the final moment.92 Though we will probably never find out what went on behind the scenes, it seems that Trotsky's crucial change of mind was largely influenced by the need to avert what could otherwise have turned out to be a fatal division within the party. If Trotsky had joined Bukharin in opposing the peace, Lenin would probably have resigned from the Central Committee, as he had threatened to do, and rallied support from the Bolshevik rank and file. The party would thus have been split and Trotsky, as the leader of its faction against peace, much the weaker for it. Without Lenin, Trotsky's place at the top of the party was extremely vulnerable — as events would later prove.

  At midnight, after the crucial vote in the Central Committee, Lenin personally sent a cable to Berlin accepting the German terms for peace proposed at Brest-Litovsk. For several days, however, the enemy's troops continued to advance deep into Russia and the Ukraine without an acknowledgement of Lenin's telegram being made. It seemed quite clear that the Germans had decided to capture Petrograd and overthrow the Bolshevik regime. Lenin now decided to fight — completely reversing his earlier position — and called for volunteers. Military help was sought from the Allies, who were much more concerned to keep Russia in the war than they were with the nature of its government and readily came up with an offer of military aid.* On Lenin's orders, the Bolsheviks

  * The refusal of the Allies to regard the situation in Russia from anything but the perspective of the war no doubt helped to keep the Bolsheviks in power at this critical moment. The decision of the French government to give the Bolsheviks military aid coincided with its cancellation of support for the Volunteer Army, which was formed to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. The Allied governments were all badly informed of the true situation in Russia, and placed too much faith for far too long in the hope of getting revolutionary Russia to rejoin the war.

  prepared for the evacuation of the capital to Moscow, which threw Petrograd into panic. The railway stations were jammed with people trying to escape, while thousands left every day on foot. Law and order broke down altogether, as armed gangs looted abandoned shops and houses and angry workers, faced with the evacuation of their factories, tried to recoup weeks of unpaid wages by pilfering from the factory stores. It was at this point, with the capital sliding into anarchy, that Lenin issued his Decree on 'The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!' which did so much to fuel the Red Terror.

  On 22 February the Central Committee reconvened to discuss the question of accepting military aid from the Allies. With the support of Trotsky and Lenin (in absentia), the motion in favour of doing so was passed — though only just, for Bukharin and the other advocates of a revolutionary war were violently opposed to taking aid from the imperial powers. When the vote was taken, Bukharin threatened to resign from the Central Committee in protest. 'We are turning the party into a dung-heap,' he complained to Trotsky and then burst into tears.93

  As it turned out, the question of Allied aid was irrelevant. On 23 February the Germans at last delivered their final terms for peace. Berlin now demanded all the territory which its troops had seized in the course of the war, including those they had occupied in the last five days. This meant, in effect, the German annexation of the Ukraine and most of the Baltic. The Central Committee reconvened at once. Lenin threatened to resign if the peace terms were not accepted. Draconian though the new terms were, they at least left the Bolsheviks in power. 'It is a question', Lenin warned, 'of signing the peace terms now or signing the death sentence of the Soviet Government three weeks later.' Trotsky was not convinced of this, but knew that a divided party, which would result from Lenin's resignation, could not fight a revolutionary war, and on this basis he abstained from the crucial vote on Lenin's proposal, which thus passed by seven votes to four with four members abstaining. Only the Bukh
arin faction, which was prepared, in the words of Lomov, to 'take power without Ilich [Lenin] and go to the Front to fight', remained in opposition right to the end and resigned from the Central Committee in order to free themselves for a campaign against the peace both among the party rank and file and in the country at large. Later that night Lenin presented the peace proposals to the Soviet Executive, where they were duly passed by 116 votes to 85. Throughout his speech Lenin was heckled with cries of 'Traitor!' and 'Judas!' from the Left SRs and many on the left wing of his own party. In the early hours of the following morning he sent to Berlin an unconditional acceptance of the German terms.94

  * * * The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was finally signed on 3 March. None of the Bolshevik leaders wanted to go to Brest-Litovsk and put their name to a treaty

  which was seen throughout Russia as a 'shameful peace'. Yoffe flatly refused; Trotsky put himself out of contention by resigning as Commissar for Foreign Affairs; Sokolnikov nominated Zinoviev, whereupon Zinoviev nominated Sokol-nikov. In the end, the delegation had to be made up of secondary party leaders, including G. V Chicherin, the grandson of a nobleman and prominent tsarist diplomat who succeeded Trotsky as Commissar for Foreign Affairs.

  By the terms of the treaty, Russia was forced to give up most of its territories on the continent of Europe. Poland, Courland, Finland, Estonia and Lithuania were all given nominal independence under German protection. Soviet troops were to be evacuated from the Ukraine. All in all, it has been calculated that the Soviet Republic lost 34 per cent of her population (fifty-five million people in all), 32 per cent of her agricultural land, 54 per cent of her industrial enterprises and 89 per cent of her coalmines.95 As a European power, Russia, in economic and territorial terms, had been reduced to a status on a par with seventeenth-century Muscovy.

  As a direct consequence of the treaty, Germany was able to push on unopposed towards the fulfilment of her imperial ambitions in the east. The Ukraine was immediately occupied by half a million German and Austrian troops. On the whole, they were welcomed by the urban propertied classes, most of whom were Russians and fed up with the nationalist and socialist policies of the Rada government. They looked forward to the cities being run by the 'orderly Germans'. But in the countryside, where the troops were engaged in ruthless requisitioning of foodstuffs for the hungry citizens of Austria, the Ukrainian peasants were bitterly opposed to the German presence. To begin with, the responsibility for collecting the grain had been left to the Rada. It was to despatch 300 truckloads of grain per day — a sort of tribute to Berlin, agreed under the Peace Treaty of 9 February, in exchange for the German troops' protection of the Ukraine's independence against Russia. The Ukrainian peasants had been generally supportive of the Rada parties during 1917; but their nationalism did not include the export of Ukrainian grain to a foreign country. They gradually reduced their sowings and concealed their grain from the Rada agents. As the Rada fell behind with its payment of this tribute, the German troops took it upon themselves to go into the villages and collect the grain. They did so indiscriminately, taking vital stocks of food and seed from many peasant farms and, without the approval of the Rada, punishing the peasants who refused to pay the levy in their military courts. Millions of acres of unsown peasant land were turned over to the former landowners with the aim of punishing the peasant saboteurs. The result was a wave of peasant revolts and guerrilla wars designed to disrupt the German requisitions: bridges and railway lines were destroyed and German units were attacked from the woods. The Ukrainian countryside was thrown into chaos. Most of these peasant activities

  were organized by the Left SRs — both the Russians and the Ukrainians (who were soon to break away from the Ukrainian SRs and form the Borotbist or SR Fighters' Party). But the Germans blamed the Rada for failing to control the situation. At the end of April, in a coup supported by the Russified landowners, who were equally opposed to these peasant wars, they arrested the Rada government and replaced it with their own puppet regime under Hetman Skoropadsky, a general in one of the first Ukrainianized army corps and one of the Ukraine's richest landowners who had been an aide-de-camp of Nicholas II. He was now to perform an equally servile role for the Ukraine's new masters in Berlin.

  Within Russia the treaty guaranteed a privileged status for German economic interests. German property was exempt from nationalization — even land and enterprises confiscated after 1914 could be reclaimed by their German owners. It was also possible under the treaty for Germans to buy up Russian assets and thus exclude them from the Bolshevik decrees of nationalization. Hundreds of Russian enterprises were sold to German nationals in this way, thereby giving them a dominant hold over the private sector. The words nemets (German) and 'trader', which had always been linked (and confused with 'traitor') in the minds of the ordinary Russians, were now virtually the same in reality.

  For Russian patriots, who had long been obsessed by the thought of the Slavs being subjected to the economic domination of the Teutons, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was a national catastrophe. Prince Lvov, who was living in Tiumen' at the time, became almost suicidal and, according to his aunt, would not get out of bed for several days. General Brusilov, a stalwart of the pan-Slav cause, was thrown into deep depression by the news. It was uncharacteristic of this great optimist, who had always managed to keep his spirits up, even at the darkest moments of the war. With his leg in plaster, still recovering from the wound inflicted on it during the fighting in Moscow, he lay in bed for days bemoaning Russia's ruin. His wife later claimed that he found solace in religion: God took up the space vacated by the Fatherland in his mental world. It also made him more accepting of what he now saw as 'Russia's tragic destiny'. He was certainly not inclined to join the civil war against the treaty, although the Cheka, which could not understand why such an aristocrat would not join the Whites, later imprisoned him on the assumption that he had done just that. Brusilov's refusal to take up arms against the Soviet regime was based on the conviction, as he put it in a letter to his brother, that 'the people have decided Russia's fate'. Although Brusilov's heart was no doubt with the Whites, he knew only too well that their cause was doomed because they supported the resumption of the war. If there was one thing that Brusilov had learned from the experience of 1917, it was that the Russian people wanted peace at any cost, and that

  all the talk of the patriotic parties about defending Mother Russia and its borders was entirely alien to them.96

  Opposition to the treaty was not limited to anti-Soviet circles. The Bukharin faction and the Left SRs were thrown together by their rejection of the 'shameful peace' and combined to form a powerful opposition in the Soviet Executive. The Left SRs resigned from Sovnarkom in protest at the treaty, and later took up terrorist measures, including the assassination of the German Ambassador, in the futile hope of wrecking it and reviving the revolutionary war. The emergence of the Bukharin faction, the Left Communists, grouped around the journal Kommunist, split the Bolshevik Party down the middle. Many of these young idealists, if not so much Bukharin himself, linked their support for a revolutionary war with their opposition to the rapprochement with the bourgeoisie which Lenin called for in the spring under the programme of 'state capitalism'. They were opposed to the idea of any let-up in the war against the bourgeoisie — either in the form of peace with the imperialists abroad, or of a compromise with the capitalists at home. They saw the revolution as an international crusade against capitalism and, unlike Lenin, believed that this could be sustained through the revolutionary energies of the peasants and the workers within a genuinely democratic and decentralized system of Soviet power.

  * * * The peace of Brest-Litovsk marked the completion of Lenin's revolution: it was the culmination of October. In his struggle over the treaty, as in his struggle for power itself, Lenin had always been uncompromising. There was no sacrifice he was not prepared to make for the consolidation of the revolution on his own terms. As a result of his intransigence, the Bolsheviks had been isolated fro
m the rest of the revolutionary parties and split down the middle on several major issues. The seizure of power, the closure of the Constituent Assembly and the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, all of which had been carried out on Lenin's instigation, had plunged the country deeper and deeper into civil war. Russia itself had ceased to be a major power in the world. It was forced to retreat from the continent of Europe, to turn in on itself, and to look towards the east. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk there was no real prospect of the revolution spreading to the West. Lenin was quite adamant about this, and all his talk of the 'inevitable revolution in Germany' cancelling out the losses of the treaty was no more than bluff for the sake of party morale and propaganda.97 True, during 1919 and 1920, Lenin would flirt with the idea of exporting Communism through the Comintern; but this did not amount to much. To all intents and purposes, the 'permanent revolution' had come to an end, and from this point on, in Lenin's famous phrase, the aim of the regime would be limited to the consolidation of Socialism in One Country.

  The removal of the capital to Moscow symbolized this growing separ-

  ation from the West. Petersburg had always been a European city, 'Russia's window on the West'; Moscow, by contrast, was a physical reminder of its Asiatic traditions. The imprisoned Tsar no doubt would have found the move somewhat ironic, for he had always preferred the old capital to Petersburg. The retreat of the Bolsheviks eastwards, into the heartland of Muscovite Russia, had been largely forced on them by the continuation of the German advance after the ratification of the treaty. On 2 March German planes dropped bombs on Petrograd. Lenin was convinced the Germans were planning to occupy the city and remove the Bolsheviks. Allied aid was once again called for — Kamenev was sent to London and British troops landed at Murmansk — whilst the Bolsheviks fled to Moscow.