Bolsheviks agree to peace

On the night of 18–19 February 1918 the radio station at Tsarskoye Selo transmitted a telegram from the Council of People’s Commissars to the Reich government in Berlin. In it the Soviet government protested that Germany had sent its troops against a republic that had declared the war over and was demobilising its army, although neither side had denounced the armistice with seven days’ notice, as the agreement of 15 December required. “In the circumstances that have arisen”, however, the Council considered itself compelled to declare formally that it was ready to sign a peace on the terms dictated at Brest-Litovsk by the delegations of the Quadruple Alliance. It promised to send a detailed reply to the German conditions without delay. The telegram was signed by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

The capitulation came after less than a day of fighting. At noon on 18 February the armistice expired and the German armies moved forward, meeting almost no resistance. That same day Dvinsk fell, and in the south Lutsk. The formula “neither war nor peace” had proved an illusion. On the evening of 17 February the Bolshevik Central Committee had still rejected, by six votes to five, Lenin’s motion to propose new negotiations to the Germans at once. Against it were Nikolai Bukharin and his supporters, and also Trotsky, who wanted to wait until the German offensive became a fact and stirred the workers in Germany and the Entente countries. To the question whether peace should be signed if the Germans attacked and no revolution broke out in Germany and Austria, six members of the committee, Trotsky among them, answered yes, and only Adolph Joffe was against. On the morning of 18 February Lenin’s motion again failed by one vote.

In the evening, when news came of the fall of Dvinsk, the committee met again. Trotsky still proposed asking the Germans what their present demands were, and Joseph Stalin said that there was no need to sign at once, but negotiations could be started. Lenin replied that one could not joke with war: whoever wanted war should not have demobilised the army, and writing notes to the Germans was a waste of time, because meanwhile they were seizing depots and railway wagons. He warned that if the Germans demanded Livonia and Estonia, they would have to be given up to save the revolution. After several hours of argument Trotsky came over to his side, and the motion to notify the Germans at once of the readiness to accept peace passed with seven votes. Sources differ as to whether six were against, or five with one abstention. In favour voted Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Yakov Sverdlov, Grigori Sokolnikov, Grigory Zinoviev and Ivar Smilga, while Bukharin, Joffe, Georgy Lomov, Nikolay Krestinsky, Felix Dzerzhinsky and Moisei Uritsky voted against or abstained. At about midnight the telegram went out on the air.

This haste did not suit the Germans, who wanted to reach at least Lake Peipus before the negotiations resumed. On the evening of 19 February General Max Hoffmann replied by radio that the telegram had been passed on to Berlin but could not be regarded as an official document. The Soviet government was to send a written declaration by special courier to the German commandant in Dvinsk. The courier left at once, and an anxious silence fell over Petrograd. “He seems to be in a great hurry; we are not,” Hoffmann noted of Trotsky. Meanwhile his troops were occupying one town after another. Russian units were disintegrating or surrendering, and the Germans were advancing by rail, carrying a handful of infantry with machine guns and a single gun from station to station. Hoffmann called it the most comical war he had ever known.

For the next few days the Bolsheviks did not know whether the Germans would accept their capitulation at all. On 21 February the Council of People’s Commissars proclaimed that “the socialist fatherland is in danger”, and Trotsky began sounding out the representatives of the Entente about help in its defence. The reply from Berlin, with new and much harsher peace terms, reached Petrograd only on 23 February.