From the Decree on Peace to the armistice: why the Bolsheviks had to sit down

On 8 November 1917 (26 October, old style), the day after the seizure of power, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets adopted the Decree on Peace that Lenin had drafted. It proposed to every belligerent government and people an "immediate democratic peace without annexations or indemnities", renounced secret treaties and asked for a three-month armistice. The Bolsheviks expected the appeal to stir Europe's workers; the Allied governments did not reply. When the commander-in-chief, General Dukhonin, refused an order to offer the Germans an armistice, the Council of People's Commissars dismissed him and put Nikolai Krylenko, a Bolshevik ensign, in his place. Krylenko's soldiers reached headquarters at Mogilev on 3 December and killed Dukhonin on the station platform. The scene showed how the old army's chain of command was dissolving.

Germany agreed to talk out of calculation, not sympathy. The general staff meant to move its eastern divisions west and force a decision before American troops arrived in strength, and the grain and raw materials of the east were desperately needed in a blockaded Germany and Austria-Hungary. An armistice was signed on 15 December at Brest-Litovsk, headquarters of the German army in the east, and peace talks opened there on 22 December. Adolph Joffe led the Soviet delegation, which included Kamenev, Sokolnikov and the Socialist Revolutionary Anastasia Bitsenko. A peasant named Stashkov, picked up at a Petrograd station to serve as a "representative of the people", asked the German aristocrats at dinner which wine to choose; the anecdote sums up the two worlds facing each other. Across the table sat the German foreign secretary Kühlmann, the Austrian foreign minister Czernin and Max Hoffmann, chief of staff of the eastern army.

Strength at the table came from the state of the armies. Russian soldiers were already sharing drink and tobacco with the Germans, and peasant soldiers who had heard of the Decree on Land were throwing away their rifles and boarding trains so as not to miss the division of land in their villages. The Soviet government could not rebuild the front. When Joffe laid out six principles for a peace without annexations, Czernin accepted them "in principle" on 25 December, on condition that the Allies accept them too. After ten days of Allied silence Hoffmann produced the real terms on 27 December: Poland, Lithuania and Courland had already exercised "self-determination" through bodies set up under German occupation and were therefore separated from Russia. Whether the declaration of a local body recognized by an occupying army was the same thing as the free choice of the population became the central dispute of the negotiations.

"Neither war nor peace": three timetables inside the party

Trotsky arrived at Brest as head of the delegation on 9 January 1918. His tactic was to spin out the talks and turn each day's speeches into propaganda aimed at Europe's workers while waiting for revolution in Germany and Austria. In mid-January mass strikes did break out in Vienna and Berlin. But on 18 January Hoffmann unrolled a map showing a line from Brest to the Baltic: the frontier Germany demanded. Trotsky went back to Petrograd for a party decision.

Three timetables competed inside the party. Nikolai Bukharin and the Left Communists argued for revolutionary war: accepting German terms betrayed the international revolution, and partisan warfare would hold out until Europe rose. Lenin's Theses of 20 January said the opposite. A country without an army that kept fighting would lose Soviet power itself; the German revolution would surely come, but no one knew when. If harsh terms bought a "breathing space" until Europe's revolution arrived, they had to be paid. Trotsky's line lay between the two: end the war unilaterally but sign no annexationist treaty, "neither war nor peace". He judged that a renewed German offensive would be politically difficult, and that if it came anyway the forced character of the peace would be plain to the workers of the world.

At a meeting of party activists on 21 January Bukharin's position won 32 votes, Trotsky's 16 and Lenin's 15. On 24 January the Central Committee adopted Trotsky's line over Lenin's objection by 9 to 7. Back at Brest, Trotsky declared on 10 February that Russia was leaving the war and demobilizing its army but would not sign, and walked out. Hoffmann noted that the move was "unheard of". After a few days of argument the German leadership answered. On 16 February Germany announced that the armistice would end at noon on the 18th.

Faustschlag: a front that collapsed in eleven days

On 18 February German forces advanced along the whole front from the Baltic to Ukraine. The operation was called Faustschlag, "fist blow". Dvinsk fell on the first day, and German detachments rode trains with a few machine guns to the next station and took towns with a handful of infantry. Hoffmann wrote in his diary that it was "the most comical war I have ever experienced". In eleven days the Germans advanced some 250 kilometres; Pskov fell on 24 February and Narva on 4 March. There was almost no resistance. Later commemoration made a skirmish near Narva on 23 February the Red Army's first victory, but what actually happened that day was a mass volunteer enrolment in Petrograd. The 23rd became Red Army Day because of that mobilization, not because of a battle won.

On the evening of the first day of the offensive the Central Committee voted 7 to 6 to accept the German terms, and the government radioed its acceptance before dawn. Germany kept advancing and on 23 February presented harsher terms with a 48-hour deadline. That night Lenin delivered an ultimatum of his own: if the terms were not accepted he would leave the government and the Central Committee. Trotsky abstained to avoid a split, and the vote was 7 for, 4 against, 4 abstentions. Bukharin, Lomov, Uritsky and Bubnov resigned their Central Committee posts and the Left Communists began their own paper, Kommunist.

Sokolnikov led the signing delegation, a task Trotsky refused and Joffe declined. On 3 March Sokolnikov announced that the delegation would not "discuss" the terms and signed. A peace imposed by force did not deserve an argument about its justice. The Seventh Party Congress of 6 to 8 March approved ratification 30 to 12 and renamed the party the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). On 15 March the Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified the treaty 784 to 261. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, partners in the coalition, voted against and left the Council of People's Commissars. Trotsky resigned as commissar for foreign affairs and became commissar for war. The army born as the price of this peace is the subject of the Russian Civil War document.

The terms: what was lost, and how much

Under the treaty of 3 March Russia renounced all rights over Poland, Lithuania, Courland, Livonia and Estonia; their future was to be settled by Germany and Austria-Hungary "in agreement with their populations". Russia had to make peace at once with the Ukrainian People's Republic and withdraw its troops and Red Guards from Ukraine, and to withdraw from Finland and the Åland Islands. Kars, Ardahan and Batum passed to the Ottoman Empire after a plebiscite. Russia also accepted a ban on agitation and propaganda in the territory of the other parties. A supplementary treaty signed in Berlin on 27 August separated Estonia and Livonia from Russia outright and fixed an indemnity of six billion marks. The Soviet government made the first two gold deliveries in September.

In numbers, Russia lost about a third of the former empire's population, some 55 million people, a third of its arable land, a third of its railways, 73 percent of its iron ore output and 89 percent of its coal. Yet the treaty should not be read as fixing today's frontiers at a stroke. It settled nothing about how Germany would rule these lands or how much territory the Baltic and Ukrainian national movements would actually secure. "Self-determination" under a German umbrella and self-determination after Germany's collapse turned out to be different things. The borders that followed were drawn not by this treaty but by the wars and treaties of 1919 and 1920.

Two treaties of Brest: Ukraine's separate peace and the "bread peace"

Two treaties were signed at Brest. Ukraine's Central Rada sent its own delegation at the end of December, and on 12 January 1918 the Central Powers recognized it as the official representative of the Ukrainian People's Republic, a move that undercut the Russian delegation and aimed at Ukrainian grain. In the early hours of 9 February Ukraine and the Central Powers signed. Ukraine undertook to deliver a million tons of grain and other food and raw materials by summer; in return it received the Kholm region, and Austria secretly promised a separate crown land for the Ukrainians of Galicia. In Germany the treaty was called the "bread peace".

On the night of the signing Muravyov's Soviet troops entered Kyiv. The Rada, which had retreated to Zhytomyr, asked Germany for military help, and German and Austro-Hungarian troops moved into Ukraine from 18 February, retaking Kyiv on 1 March. The occupation force reached about 450,000 men. The German commander Eichhorn ordered peasants on 6 April to sow the landlords' fields and on 25 April extended German courts martial to Ukraine. The Rada's law socializing land could not coexist with the occupiers' grain demands. On 28 April German soldiers entered the Rada chamber and searched the deputies, and on 29 April a congress of landowners proclaimed Pavlo Skoropadsky Hetman. A regime restoring landed property and administrative order under German protection soon collided with peasant revolts, and on 30 July Eichhorn was killed in Kyiv by a bomb thrown by the Left SR Boris Donskoy. Only a small part of the promised grain was ever shipped. Ukraine's course from the Rada through the Hetmanate to the Directory is told in Ukraine's revolution and wars.

Finland: recognized independence, civil war and a German landing

Finland's parliament declared independence on 6 December 1917 and the Soviet government recognized it on 31 December. Recognition came easily; peace at home did not. Food shortages, unemployment and the standoff between armed Red Guards and White Guards lasted all winter. On the night of 27 to 28 January 1918 Helsinki's Red Guards occupied the government buildings and civil war began. A Finnish People's Delegation headed by Kullervo Manner, with Otto Kuusinen among its members, held the industrial towns of the south, while Pehr Evind Svinhufvud's Senate moved to Vaasa and appointed Carl Gustaf Mannerheim to command the Whites. Finnish Jäger troops trained in Germany landed at Vaasa in late February and became the backbone of the White army.

Svinhufvud's government asked Germany to intervene. Mannerheim objected that Finland could win on its own, but on 7 March Germany and Finland signed treaties. German troops landed on the Åland Islands on 5 March, and the Baltic Sea Division of about 10,000 men under Rüdiger von der Goltz landed at Hanko on 3 April and took Helsinki on 13 April. Meanwhile the Whites captured Tampere on 6 April after the largest battle of the war, and Vyborg fell on 29 April, where the Whites massacred several hundred Russian civilians. Mannerheim held a victory parade in Helsinki on 16 May.

More people died after the fighting than in it. Red terror executed about 1,500 people and White terror more than 7,000; some 80,000 were put in camps, where more than 10,000 died of hunger and disease before the summer was out. In a country of three million, more than 36,000 died. This was not a proxy war between Germany and Russia. Soviet Russia withdrew most of its remaining troops under the Brest treaty, and in April the Baltic Fleet fought its way through the ice from Helsinki to Kronstadt. It was a war in which class conflict and the collapse of state authority combined with foreign support. The victorious Whites leaned on Germany: in October Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse was elected king of Finland, only to renounce the throne in December when Germany fell. Mannerheim, who had resigned his command in May in protest at German dominance, became regent in December and turned the country westward. Finnish volunteers in Estonia and the Treaty of Tartu of 1920 follow in the Baltic wars of independence.

Ober Ost and the Baltic: whose self-determination?

From 1915 Germany ruled Lithuania, Courland and the Białystok-Grodno district as a military zone called Ober Ost. The population was registered, movement controlled, timber and food requisitioned, and propaganda painted the region as a "land without order" awaiting German culture. In the spring of 1918 Faustschlag extended the occupation to all of Estonia and Livonia. Here "self-determination" proceeded under German management.

The Lithuanian Council, the Taryba, declared independence on 11 December 1917 on the premise of an "eternal alliance" with Germany, and again without conditions on 16 February 1918. Germany recognized only the December version, on 23 March. In July the Council elected Duke Wilhelm of Urach as King Mindaugas II. The Courland diet asked the Kaiser for the ducal crown on 8 March, and on 12 April in Riga a united assembly of the provincial diets, dominated by Baltic German nobles, resolved to join Estonia, Livonia and Courland into a "United Baltic Duchy" in personal union with Prussia. Wilhelm II recognized it on 22 September and a regency council was formed on 5 November. All of these were attempts to build different states under a German umbrella.

Other declarations came from the same soil. Estonia's Salvation Committee declared independence in Tallinn on 24 February 1918, in the one-day gap between the Red withdrawal and the German arrival. German troops entered the next day, refused to recognize the government and interned its leaders. Latvia's Provisional National Council demanded independence but could not act under occupation. Inside Russia, meanwhile, the Latvian Riflemen had become the most reliable troops of Soviet power. Baltic German landowners, the national movements and the Bolshevik riflemen each imagined a different Baltic, and which one would prevail depended on whether Germany won the war.

The Mirbach assassination and the price of the breathing space

Even after the treaty, relations between Soviet Russia and Germany hardly deserved the name of peace. German troops stretched from Ukraine to the Don, supplying arms to Krasnov's Don Cossack government; they occupied Crimea and the Black Sea coast and made Georgia a protectorate by treaty, while Ottoman forces marched on Baku. The Soviet government faced Germany in the west and Allied intervention forces at Murmansk and in the east. Lenin went so far as to say that German help against the Allies could not be ruled out if it became necessary.

The Left Socialist Revolutionaries could not bear this "peace". On 6 July the Cheka officers Yakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreyev shot Ambassador Mirbach dead at the German embassy in Moscow, hoping to reopen the war with Germany. The Left SR rising was crushed within a day and Lenin called at the embassy to express condolences. Germany demanded, then withdrew, the right to station a battalion in Moscow. The supplementary treaty of 27 August, the six-billion-mark indemnity and the September gold deliveries were the price the Soviets paid under this strain. The episode shows that Germany and Soviet power used each other without ever becoming allies.

November: annulment, and the German troops that Article 12 left behind

In the autumn of 1918 Germany began to collapse. On 5 November the German government expelled Joffe and the Soviet mission for smuggling revolutionary propaganda. Revolution broke out in Berlin on 9 November and the Kaiser abdicated; the western armistice was signed on 11 November. Its Article 15 obliged Germany to renounce the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. On 13 November the All-Russian Central Executive Committee declared the treaty and its supplements void. Lenin's breathing space had lasted eight months, and what ended it was not Soviet arms but Germany's own defeat.

Article 12 of the armistice, however, required German troops to withdraw from former Russian territory only "as soon as the Allies shall think the moment suitable, having regard to the internal situation of these territories". The Allies wanted the German army left in the Baltic as a barrier against the Bolsheviks. In Ukraine the German soldiers formed councils and hurried home; the Hetman proclaimed a federation with a future non-Bolshevik Russia on 14 November and left Kyiv with the Germans on 14 December. In the Baltic things went differently. The Red Army moved into the space the Germans vacated, and Soviet governments were proclaimed at Narva for Estonia on 29 November, for Lithuania on 16 December and for Latvia on 17 December. The German troops that stayed, and the Freikorps recruited to join them, remained in Latvia with Allied approval and became the third party in the next year's Baltic wars.

What Brest left behind was not a stable peace but a short span of survival and a space for new wars. Behind the retreating Germans, the Red Army, the national governments, the Russian Whites and German armed formations each tried to build a different order. Nor did the annulment of the treaty mean the automatic restoration of the old empire. The overall course of the conflict continues in the Russian Civil War, and the north-western wars and settlements in the Baltic wars of independence.

Assessment: betrayal or realism?

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was controversial from the moment it was signed. Official Soviet accounts presented it as a masterpiece of Lenin's foresight: Soviet power was kept alive until Europe's revolution, and Germany's own collapse voided the treaty, so Lenin's prediction was proved right. This account blurs the fact that Lenin did not so much predict the outcome as decide that holding power came before any other consideration. The opposition of Bukharin and the Left Communists was later filed away as an "infantile disorder", and Trotsky's middle course became ammunition against him in the power struggles of the 1920s.

The classic Western study is John Wheeler-Bennett's The Forgotten Peace (1938), which read Brest as a prelude to Versailles: the peace Germany imposed in the east was harsher than the one it received in the west, and imposed peaces did not last. Fritz Fischer's Germany's Aims in the First World War (1961) saw Brest as the realization of an eastern empire that Germany's ruling class had pursued throughout the war. Vejas Liulevicius's War Land on the Eastern Front (2000) argued that the governing experiment of Ober Ost bred a way of seeing the east as space to be conquered and cleansed, leaving a mark on the next generation's German policy.

In Baltic, Ukrainian and Finnish historiography Brest means something else: the occasion of independence and, at the same time, the beginning of German occupation. Ukrainian historians note that the "bread peace" gave the Rada recognition at the cost of inviting in an occupying army and a landlords' regime. In Finland, research on the scale of the terror and the deaths in the camps led after the 1990s to a state-sponsored count of the dead. In none of these accounts is Brest an end. Who would hold the land once the German order collapsed decided the wars of 1919.