Armistice negotiations open at Brest-Litovsk

On 3 December 1917 (20 November in the Julian calendar), at Brest-Litovsk, in the headquarters of the German supreme command in the east, the first negotiations between the Bolshevik government and the Central Powers began. The Soviet delegation, which had crossed the front line the day before, came with a programme of general peace. On the other side of the table sat only military men, authorised to talk solely about an armistice. The British chronology of the war records under this date the first session of the armistice delegates of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey.

The front falls silent

Before the plenipotentiaries sat down to talk, fighting had already stopped on many sectors of the front. When the Russian parlementaires returned from behind the German lines with consent to negotiations, the commander-in-chief, Nikolai Krylenko, ordered a ceasefire wherever the enemy did not attack and encouraged regiments to conclude local agreements. The British chronology gives under 2 December that a suspension of hostilities between the Russian and German armies had begun, and notes that in practice each sector fixed the date on its own, ahead of the official negotiations. A German wireless communiqué of 4 December reported, for example, that on 1 December a halt to operations had been agreed with the Russians on the front from the southern bank of the Pripyat southwards, and that at ten in the evening on 2 December all fighting was to stop there. The parties agreed on movement between the lines, troop movements, work on fortifications and flights, and any resumption of fighting was to be announced at least 48 hours in advance.

The delegations

At the head of the Soviet delegation stood Adolph Joffe. Also plenipotentiaries, as members of the Central Executive Committee of the soviets, were Lev Kamenev, Grigori Sokolnikov and the Left Socialist Revolutionary Anastasia Bitsenko, who in 1905 had shot General Viktor Sakharov and had been freed from penal servitude only by the February Revolution. The revolution was to be embodied by four “representatives of the people”: the sailor Fyodor Olich, the soldier Nikolai Belyakov, the worker Pavel Obukhov and the peasant Roman Stashkov. They had no role in the negotiations. According to an anecdote quoted by John Wheeler-Bennett, the peasant was remembered only on the way to the station, and Stashkov, an old Socialist Revolutionary heading for another train with a sack, was picked up from the street. The advisers without a vote were nine officers under Rear Admiral Vasily Altfater, and the secretary of the delegation was Lev Karakhan.

The other side was represented by military men. The chair was General Max Hoffmann, chief of staff to the commander-in-chief in the east, Prince Leopold of Bavaria, who welcomed the delegates with a short speech and handed the conduct of the proceedings to Hoffmann. Austria-Hungary sent Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Pokorny, who knew Russian, Turkey General Zeki Pasha, and Bulgaria Colonel Petar Ganchev. According to some historians the delegation was also unofficially accompanied by diplomats, among them the Austrian Kajetan von Mérey. At the Russians’ request it was agreed that the proceedings would be public: both sides kept minutes, in Russian and in German, and a special commission compared them after each session. The Bolsheviks reserved the right to publish them in full.

The first sessions

Joffe opened the negotiations with a declaration that the basis of the armistice was to be the Decree on Peace, that is, a general peace without annexations or indemnities, with the right of nations to self-determination. He proposed inviting all the belligerent states to the talks at once. Hoffmann asked whether the delegation could speak on behalf of Russia’s allies. Joffe admitted that the government had received no reply from them. The general declared that he had no authority to talk about peace either with Russia or with its absent allies, and that as a soldier he did not speak on political matters. The representatives of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey said the same. Kamenev argued at length that the telegrams of Czernin and Kühlmann showed no real consent to a peace without annexations. In the end the Russians asked for their proposal to be passed on to the governments of the Central Powers, and agreed themselves to move on to the terms of the armistice.

On 4 December Admiral Altfater read out the Russian draft. The armistice was to last six months and cover all land and sea fronts. While it lasted, no units could be transferred between fronts, from the front to the rear or from the rear to the front. The Germans were also to evacuate the islands of Saaremaa, Hiiumaa, Muhu and the other Moon Sound islands, taken in October in Operation Albion, and the fleets of both sides were to withdraw from the Gulf of Riga. Hoffmann made no secret of his astonishment that, in their military situation, the Russians were setting conditions at all, let alone such far-reaching ones. He declared the evacuation of the islands “absolutely out of the question”, and according to Russian reports said that such demands could be made only of a defeated enemy. Instead of half a year he proposed 14 days with automatic extension, and then agreed to 28. He rejected the ban on transferring troops, since the Central Powers had two fronts and had to relieve tired units, but offered a mutual undertaking that no one would move troops in order to prepare an attack. The concession cost him nothing. As he later wrote in his memoirs, the orders to transfer most of the eastern army to the west had been issued before the negotiations. The German draft also provided for an armistice on the Black Sea and in the eastern Baltic, the return to Russia of the Russian troops from the Salonika front, and the withdrawal of Turkish and Russian troops from central Persia.

The talks continued on 5 December. Then Joffe realised that the Central Powers would agree only to a separate armistice with Russia, and this he could not sign without consulting Lenin and Trotsky. Instead of a full armistice the parties agreed only a short suspension of hostilities and a week’s break in the negotiations. Part of the delegation returned to Petrograd for instructions, while Karakhan stayed at Brest.