Brest-Litovsk talks suspended again

On 23 January 1918 (10 January in the Julian calendar) the Dutch press reported from Sofia that, after the adjournment of the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, the Bulgarian delegates, the Minister of Justice Popov and Stoyanovich, had returned to the capital to report to the government and receive new instructions. The third member of the delegation, Kosev, had arrived the day before. The peace conference had emptied. It had formally been interrupted on 18 January, when General Max Hoffmann spread out on the table a map with the future German-Russian border, and Leon Trotsky asked for a ten-day break and left for Petrograd. The political commission was due to meet again on 29 January.

At Brest the Soviet delegation was left in the charge of Adolf Joffe. For two more days the expert commissions continued to work. On 20 and 21 January the legal commission provisionally agreed articles on ending the state of war, restoring diplomatic and consular relations, war damage and the renewal of former treaties. In the economic commission the Germans and Austrians proposed going point by point through the old commercial treaty of 1904 and deciding which of its provisions to carry over into the new one. The Russians refused and demanded a discussion of principles. The ministers left for their capitals: Richard von Kühlmann for Berlin and Count Ottokar Czernin for Vienna. Around 20 January the head of the Ukrainian delegation, Vsevolod Holubovych, returned to Kiev, and only Mykola Levytsky remained at Brest.

The war of telegrams

The Bolsheviks used the break for propaganda. On 22 January Russian wireless stations broadcast a protest that Joffe had sent to Kühlmann and Czernin. In it he wrote that the official reports of the last plenary session, published in the newspapers of the Central Powers, had omitted Trotsky’s statement that after two weeks of negotiations Germany and Austria-Hungary were making demands flagrantly contrary to the principles accepted on 25 December. Such “deliberate abridgements” of the minutes, he claimed, were misleading public opinion. The British press summarised this as an accusation that the Central Powers were falsifying the reports.

On 23 January Russian radio broadcast two more messages “to all”. In the first the Bolsheviks called the peace terms “the most monstrous annexation”: it concerned Poland, Lithuania, Courland, Riga, part of Livonia and the Estonian islands, “the Gibraltar of the Baltic”, and its aim was the economic and political strangling of Russia. Austrian statesmen, it said, were calming the striking workers with assurances of a democratic peace, while Czernin’s role at Brest came down to humbly nodding along to Hoffmann and Kühlmann. The second message recalled that according to Kühlmann the troops of the Central Powers could not leave the occupied territories before a general peace was concluded. The whole world had understood this as a promise of evacuation after the war, yet at Brest the Germans had refused any guarantees. “The peoples of Germany and Austria-Hungary are being deceived before the whole world by their own governments,” the message concluded.

The dispute in Petrograd

Trotsky reached Petrograd on 20 or 21 January, just after the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. On 21 January (8 January Old Style) members of the Bolshevik Central Committee met several dozen party activists. Vladimir Lenin read out his theses on the need to conclude peace immediately, even an annexationist one. The army was incapable of stopping a German offensive, and the revolution needed several months’ respite. He called counting on a revolution breaking out in Germany by a set date adventurism. Nikolai Bukharin and his supporters, known as the Left Communists, demanded that the negotiations be broken off and a “revolutionary war” waged against imperialism. Trotsky proposed a middle way: to declare the war over and demobilise the army, but not to sign a peace. In an informal vote of the 63 present, 15 were for Lenin’s theses, 16 for Trotsky and 32 for Bukharin.

At the same time Czernin was fighting for peace in Vienna. On 22 January he reported to a crown council chaired by Emperor Charles I. The Austrian authorities warned that without grain from outside there would be a food catastrophe within two months. The Hungarian prime minister, Sándor Wekerle, opposed concessions to the Ukrainians, but Czernin compared Austria to a man on the third floor of a burning house who jumps without worrying whether he breaks one leg or both. The emperor backed him and agreed to peace with Ukraine on the terms negotiated by Hoffmann, although they meant concessions over the Chełm region, which the Poles disputed. He also agreed in principle to a separate peace with Russia.

Meanwhile on 23 January Czernin received a telegram from Brest from his representative Friedrich von Wiesner. Joffe had informed him that the government of Soviet Ukraine in Kharkov had decided to send two delegates to Brest. They were to join the Russian delegation and not to consider themselves bound by any agreements concluded by the Kiev Rada, which according to the Bolsheviks represented only the propertied classes. The same day the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets assembled in Petrograd, intended to replace the dispersed Constituent Assembly. The next day the Bolshevik Central Committee rejected revolutionary war, supported dragging out the negotiations and, by 9 votes to 7, adopted Trotsky’s formula. The negotiations at Brest resumed on 30 January.