Bolsheviks propose an armistice

On the night of 20/21 November 1917 (7/8 November in the Julian calendar) the Council of People’s Commissars sent a radiotelegram to the Stavka at Mogilev. In it the acting commander-in-chief, General Nikolai Dukhonin, was ordered to approach the commands of the enemy armies with a proposal to cease all hostilities in order to open peace negotiations. That same day the Allied embassies in Petrograd received a note from the commissar for foreign affairs, Leon Trotsky, formally proposing an immediate armistice on all fronts. The British chronology of the war records under this date that the Bolshevik government opened armistice negotiations with the Central Powers. In reality nobody was yet talking to the enemy on 21 November, but over the following day the new regime clashed with its own high command over the matter.

The order to the Stavka

The Bolsheviks had taken power under the slogan of immediate peace, and the decree on peace, adopted by the Congress of Soviets on 8 November, proposed an armistice to all the belligerents, preferably, according to its text, of at least three months. For the first two weeks, however, the government was fighting for survival: it was beating off Kerensky at Pulkovo and taking Moscow. Only when, as the radiotelegram put it, the Council’s power had “established itself in all the principal points of the country” could it move from declarations to deeds.

The telegram to the Stavka was signed by Vladimir Lenin as chairman of the Council, by Trotsky and by Nikolai Krylenko, one of the members of the committee for military and naval affairs. The Council announced that as soon as its power was consolidated it would make a formal proposal of an armistice to all the nations at war, allies and enemies alike. It ordered the commander-in-chief to approach the command of the enemy armies at once. He was to report on the course of the talks continuously by direct telegraph line and to sign a preliminary agreement only after the Council had approved it.

Trotsky’s note

Trotsky’s note, dated 7 November Old Style (20 November), was signed for by the dragoman of the American embassy at eleven in the evening on 21 November. In it Trotsky announced that the Congress of Soviets had set up a new government headed by Lenin, and asked that the text of the proposal of a peace “without annexations or contributions” adopted by the congress be regarded as a formal proposal for an immediate armistice on all fronts and the immediate opening of negotiations. He stressed that the government was addressing it simultaneously to all the belligerent peoples and their governments. The note was delivered to the British, American, French and Italian embassies and to the Belgian and Serbian legations. Soon a similar letter went to the representatives of the neutral states, asking them to pass the proposal on to the enemy governments.

The Allies had no intention of replying. On 22 November the representatives of the Entente powers in Petrograd unanimously agreed not to take up the note, and that each of them would ask his government not to instruct him to answer it, since the “so-called government” had been set up by force and was not recognised by the Russian people. Russia was, moreover, bound by the undertaking of September 1914 not to conclude a separate peace or armistice.

Dukhonin’s refusal

Dukhonin, who had been in charge of the Stavka since Kerensky’s flight, received the telegram on the morning of 21 November and delayed his answer. On the night of 21/22 November Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Krylenko called him to the apparatus and demanded that he open negotiations at once. The general refused. He replied that such talks could be conducted only by a central government supported by the army and the country, not by a military commander. He was told that he was dismissed but was to carry on his duties until his successor arrived. The government appointed Krylenko, a reserve ensign and Bolshevik activist, as the new commander-in-chief.

On 22 November Lenin broadcast an appeal to the soldiers by radio in which he described Dukhonin’s refusal. “The cause of peace is in your hands,” he wrote. He called on the regiments in the line to elect delegates at once to open formal negotiations for an armistice with the enemy, and to place counter-revolutionary generals under guard. The next day the heads of the British, French, Italian, Japanese, Romanian and Serbian military missions at the Stavka handed Dukhonin a joint protest against the breach of the agreement of 1914 and warned of “the gravest consequences”. The American representative, Lieutenant-Colonel Monroe Kerth, did not sign it, because the United States was not a party to that agreement. Dukhonin circulated the text to the front commanders, and Trotsky accused the Allies of interfering in Russia’s internal affairs and inciting civil war.

The Germans, who for two weeks had been picking up Bolshevik communiqués on the air, for a long time did not know what to make of them. “We cannot get a clear picture of what is happening,” the chief of staff of the German Eastern command, General Max Hoffmann, wrote in his diary on 21 November. A few days later Krylenko himself sent envoys across the front line. Dukhonin was no longer able to play any part: on 3 December, after Krylenko’s troops had occupied the Stavka, he was lynched by soldiers and sailors at Mogilev railway station.