The peace talks that opened at Brest-Litovsk in December 1917 turned within three months into a surrender that cost Russia a third of its imperial territory. In between came Trotsky's experiment of 'neither war nor peace', the German offensive, and a harsh reckoning inside the Bolshevik camp itself.
The road to Brest-Litovsk
The Bolsheviks who took power in Petrograd in October 1917 knew the front had already collapsed. Soldiers had gone home, and those still in the trenches had begun trading bread and tobacco with the Germans opposite. Lenin's first decree in power was a decree on peace; how that peace would arrive was another matter.
In December 1917 the Soviet government signed an armistice with Germany and its allies at Brest-Litovsk. The talks were held in an old fortress town under the shadow of the German high command. The Soviet delegation was led first by Adolf Joffe; in January Trotsky took over.
The peace decree was addressed not only to Russia but to every belligerent; the Entente governments did not answer. At the front the truce had come of its own accord: soldiers talked across to the opposing trench and the officers could not stop them. The table at Brest-Litovsk rested on that broken army.
The parties at the table
Across the table sat Richard von Kühlmann and General Max Hoffmann for Germany, and Ottokar Czernin for Austria-Hungary. Czernin stood with Germany but followed a more conciliatory line; Vienna's stores were running out. Berlin, for its part, wanted land in the east.
The Bolsheviks came to the table with an unusual file. Trotsky, as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, had opened the tsarist archives and published the secret treaties. The 1915 promises over the Straits were among those documents. The aim was not only moral advantage: they wanted to show the war as an imperialist division of spoils. The Ukrainian Central Rada in Kiev had sent its own delegation, and Berlin recognized it as a separate party.
Neither war nor peace
At the start of February 1918 Trotsky rejected the German territorial demands and announced his formula: neither war nor peace. Russia would not fight, but neither would it sign. He declared the army demobilized and left the table.
His calculation was this: German workers would rise against the offensive and the regime in Berlin would shake. But nothing had yet happened in Berlin; the German army had simply been freed in the east.
Three lines existed among the Bolsheviks: Lenin wanted to sign at once, Trotsky wanted to wait, and Bukharin's left communists wanted to fight. Trotsky's manoeuvre was to delay the signature and buy time for the German working class to rise. The February offensive wrecked that calculation within days.
The February offensive
On 18 February 1918 the Germans attacked. There was almost no resistance. Pskov and Narva fell within days and German units came up to the gates of Petrograd. Panic broke out in the city; the government moved to Moscow in March.
Lenin pressed his own party: the peace had to be signed, or the government would fall. His answer to objectors never changed: there was no army to fight at the front, the peasant soldier had gone home. Lenin's call that 'the socialist fatherland is in danger' tried to raise volunteer units in Petrograd; the real result was that the terms at the table grew harsher still.
3 March: the dictated text
The treaty was signed on 3 March 1918. The terms looked less like a negotiation than a document laid before them:
- Poland, the Baltic lands and Ukraine were torn away from Russia.
- A third of the population, most of the coal fields and the richest farmland were lost.
- Kars, Batum and Ardahan were left to the Ottoman Empire.
- Six billion marks were to be paid in indemnity, and the army demobilized.
A split in the government
The treaty enraged the Left SRs. They saw a separate peace as surrender under the German boot and withdrew from the government in March 1918. Trotsky too left the Foreign Commissariat, and Chicherin replaced him. Trotsky soon set about building the Red Army as War Commissar.
The argument inside the party was harsh. Lenin defended a 'shameful peace', saying the alternative was worse. The party congress in early March followed him, and the Congress of Soviets ratified the treaty as well. No Left SRs remained in the government; the Bolsheviks now decided alone.
The text also contradicted the Bolsheviks' own principles. A government that championed the right of nations to self-determination was leaving Ukraine and the Baltic lands to a German sphere of influence. Lenin defended it as a temporary retreat; the real victory of the revolution would come in the West.
The life of the treaty
Brest-Litovsk did not last even a year. In November 1918, when Germany surrendered, the Soviet government annulled the treaty. But the lost lands did not come back. In Ukraine, as the Germans pulled out, peasant revolts, Makhno's anarchist movement and civil war grew.
The price was not land alone. In July 1918 Left SRs killed the German ambassador Mirbach and rose in revolt; the bloodiest months of the civil war began. Russia was not invited to the peace conference in Paris in 1919.
A one-sentence legacy
A revolution that wanted out of the war found itself inside a larger one. Brest-Litovsk is the Bolsheviks' first great concession: land to survive, honour to buy time.
Nicholas Romanov, held at Tobolsk, learned of the treaty from a newspaper and called it 'a betrayal of Russia'. In Petrograd nobody expected victory; everyone wanted to breathe.