Chicherin and Trotsky

On 13 March 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars accepted the resignation of Leon Trotsky as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and entrusted him with military affairs. The running of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs was taken over, for the time being in an acting capacity, by Trotsky’s deputy until then, Georgy Chicherin. The British chronicle of the war records both appointments under 8 March. Biographies of both politicians and studies based on Soviet documents, however, give 13 March, and some of them give 14 March as the start of Trotsky’s tenure in the new commissariat.

Trotsky’s departure from diplomacy was the consequence of the failure of his policy at Brest-Litovsk. The formula “neither war nor peace”, announced on 10 February, did not stop the Germans, who on 18 February went over to the offensive and forced the Bolsheviks to accept much harsher terms. Trotsky offered his resignation as early as 22 February. He explained that his departure would convince the Germans of a real change of course and that Russia genuinely wanted peace. He did not go back to Brest-Litovsk, and the treaty of 3 March was signed by Grigori Sokolnikov’s delegation, which also included Chicherin. The resignation was formally accepted only after the Bolshevik party congress of 6–8 March, when the government was moving to Moscow.

The new head of Soviet diplomacy was an unusual figure among the Bolsheviks. He was born in 1872 into an old noble family, distantly related to Pushkin, and began his career in the archive of the tsarist Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From 1904 he lived in emigration, where he joined the Mensheviks. During the war he conducted anti-war agitation in London and helped Russian political émigrés. In August 1917 the British arrested him as a threat to national security. He was released at the beginning of January 1918, when Trotsky made permission for British subjects to leave Russia conditional on his release. According to some studies this also concerned the ambassador, George Buchanan. After returning to Petrograd he joined the Bolshevik party and became Trotsky’s deputy. He was formally appointed People’s Commissar on 30 May 1918. He led Soviet diplomacy until 1930. According to the British historian John Wheeler-Bennett, the British agent in Russia Robert Bruce Lockhart preferred Trotsky’s energy to Chicherin’s “subtle vagueness”. In the summer of 1918 Lenin praised him as a worker who was “splendid, extremely conscientious, intelligent and knowledgeable”.

Trotsky took over the commissariat that had until then been headed by Nikolai Podvoisky, and soon also became head of the Supreme Military Council (PL), set up at the beginning of March to direct the defence of the country. The post of commander-in-chief, held by Nikolai Krylenko, was abolished. Trotsky was given a task that seemed impossible: to build the Red Army from scratch in a country whose old army had disintegrated and whose western lands were occupied by the Germans. In the following months he relied on compulsory conscription, the restoration of discipline and the employment of former tsarist officers under the supervision of political commissars, which aroused the opposition of many Bolsheviks. In April he also took over naval affairs, and in September he became head of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. He conducted the civil war, which was soon to break out in earnest, as the creator and leader of the Red Army.