Allies reject the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

On the evening of 18 March 1918 the British Foreign Office published a statement by the prime ministers and foreign ministers of the Entente powers, who had conferred in London a few days earlier. The participants in the conference, among them the prime ministers David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, considered it their “sacred duty” to take note of the “political crimes” committed against the Russian people “under the name of a German peace”. They were responding to the treaty which Soviet Russia had signed at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March and which a few days earlier had been ratified by the Congress of Soviets in Moscow. The conference also dealt with military matters, among them a general Allied reserve on the Western Front and a possible Japanese intervention in Siberia.

The declaration recalled that Russia had been defenceless. Its government, “in a mood of singular credulity”, had hoped to obtain by persuasion the “democratic peace” which it had been unable to win by arms. Even before the armistice expired, Germany, although it had undertaken not to move troops, had transferred them en masse to the Western Front, and weak Russia had not even dared to protest. In practice the “German peace” meant the invasion of Russian territory, the destruction or removal of all the country’s means of defence, and the organisation of its lands for the benefit of Germany. It differed from annexation only in that the word itself was carefully avoided. The Russian delegates had had to declare that they refused to read the treaty but had no choice and would sign it. So they signed, “not knowing whether in its true meaning it meant peace or war”.

A separate paragraph of the declaration was devoted to Poland. Its authors wrote that not even when Prussia seized Silesia and when it partitioned Poland had Germany shown itself so cynically as the destroyer of the independence of nations. Poland, “whose heroic spirit has survived the cruellest of national tragedies”, was now threatened with a fourth partition, and the means by which the last trace of its independence was to be crushed rested on “false promises of freedom”. The fate of Romania, which had just had to accept the Central Powers’ terms at Buftea, was seen in the same light. The declaration ended with the statement: “Peace treaties such as these we do not and cannot acknowledge.” The Allies announced that they would fight on to put an end once and for all to the policy of plunder and to establish in its place “the peaceful reign of organised justice”.

For the Poles the statement was a further, stronger echo of earlier gestures. In February Balfour had informed the Polish National Committee that London did not recognise the Central Powers’ treaty with Ukraine, which gave it the Chełm Land. Now three powers had publicly rejected the whole Brest settlement, and the words about a “fourth partition” echoed the language in which protests had been made in the Kingdom of Poland and in Galicia since February. The declaration, however, mentioned neither Poland’s borders nor the unification of the Polish lands. For such a commitment the Poles had to wait until 3 June 1918, when the United Kingdom, France and Italy issued at Versailles a declaration (PL) on a united and independent Poland with access to the sea.

The refusal to recognise the treaty did not change the situation in the east, where the Germans were occupying one Ukrainian city after another. It did, however, matter for the future. The Western powers made it clear that what the Central Powers had extorted at Brest would not be binding at the final peace. They also announced that they would not accept German domination of eastern Europe. Three days after the declaration was published, Germany struck on the Western Front with forces largely brought from the east.