Brest-Litovsk peace talks suspended

On 5 January 1918 (23 December 1917 Old Style) an official communiqué was issued in Berlin stating that the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk had been temporarily interrupted. According to the German wireless, the Central Powers had decided this because the Russians had demanded that the talks be moved to Stockholm and, contrary to the agreement, had not returned to Brest from Petrograd. The same day the heads of the delegations of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey sent the head of the Soviet delegation, Adolf Joffe, a telegram stating that the ten-day deadline for the Entente to join the negotiations had expired without a reply. This meant that the Central Powers no longer considered themselves bound by their Christmas declaration on a peace without annexations or indemnities. The British chronology of the war records the suspension of the negotiations under this date.

The Stockholm telegram

The crisis had begun a few days earlier. When the first round of talks was interrupted on 28 December, General Max Hoffmann had already told the Russians that the principle of “no annexations” did not apply to Poland, Lithuania and Courland. On 2 January (20 December Old Style) Joffe telegraphed from Petrograd to Hoffmann for the delegations of the Central Powers that the Soviet government considered it necessary to conduct further negotiations on neutral ground and proposed moving them to Stockholm. He added that the government and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee had found the German-Austrian territorial proposals contrary to the principle of national self-determination. The Soviet delegation would await the reply in Petrograd.

The telegram reached the ministers of the Central Powers on their way to Brest. Richard von Kühlmann and Count Ottokar Czernin travelled on. Czernin considered the proposal a bluff, but knew what it threatened. In Stockholm it would be impossible to keep socialists from every country away from the talks, and the reins would slip from the hands of the Central Powers. The mood was bad for another reason too. On 2 January in Berlin, at a meeting of the crown council, there was a violent scene between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Erich Ludendorff, who could not bear that the Kaiser had listened to Hoffmann rather than to the Supreme Army Command on the question of the future Polish border. On the morning of 4 January Kühlmann and Czernin agreed over breakfast at Brest that if the Russians did not come, the armistice would have to be denounced. They also decided to open talks quickly with the Ukrainian delegation, which was already waiting there.

Lenin’s decision

In Petrograd it was known that there was nothing to fight with. On 31 December (18 December Old Style) the Council of People’s Commissars, having heard reports on the disintegration of the army, decided to continue the negotiations but to drag them out as far as possible and resist German pressure. Vladimir Lenin proposed that the commissar for foreign affairs himself should take over the delegation. “To drag out the negotiations, you need someone to do the dragging,” he is supposed to have said to Leon Trotsky, as Trotsky recalled years later. The debate on whether to sign a peace with “imperialist” Germany at all was only just beginning in the Bolshevik party.

The threat of a breakdown worked quickly. On the evening of 4 January a telegram arrived at Brest saying that the Soviet delegation, this time with Trotsky, was on its way. Czernin noted that only the Germans’ outburst of joy showed how much they had feared the Russians would not come. In a reply published by Pravda on 6 January the Russians still maintained that moving the talks to a neutral country was in keeping with the progress of the negotiations, but since the delegations of the Central Powers were already at Brest, they too would come there. Trotsky crossed the front line near Dvinsk and was at Brest on the morning of 7 January. The break thus lasted only a few days. On 9 January Kühlmann declared that moving the negotiations elsewhere was out of the question, and Trotsky accepted this a day later. At the same time, on 5 January, David Lloyd George announced Britain’s war aims in London, warning that if the present rulers of Russia acted independently of their allies, Britain had no means of averting the catastrophe that was falling on their country.