Congress of Soviets ratifies the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

On the afternoon of 14 March 1918, in Moscow, in the Hall of Columns of the former Assembly of the Nobility, the Fourth Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened. It had been summoned for one purpose: to approve the peace treaty which the Soviet delegation had signed on 3 March at Brest-Litovsk. The sessions lasted until 16 March, and the vote on ratification itself took place late in the evening of 15 March, according to some sources already after midnight. A British chronicle of the war records under 14 March the opening of the congress, summoned “to ratify the peace treaty with the Central Powers”.

The congress was to have met already on 12 March, but because of the disorder on the railways many delegates had not managed to arrive. In the end about 1,100–1,200 came. According to the list announced on the first day there were over 800 Bolsheviks and almost 240 Left Socialist Revolutionaries, until then the Bolsheviks’ coalition partner in the government. The rest were Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists and non-party delegates. The government had moved from Petrograd to Moscow only a few days earlier, and on 16 March the congress approved the temporary transfer of the capital. On the very first day it also adopted a reply to a telegram from President Woodrow Wilson, who had assured the Russian people of the sympathy of the United States. The congress thanked the American people, above all “the toiling and exploited classes”, and expressed the hope that the time was not far off when the working masses of all countries would throw off the yoke of capitalism.

The main report was delivered by Vladimir Lenin. He did not hide how harsh the peace was. He compared it to the Peace of Tilsit, which Napoleon had imposed on Prussia in 1807, and argued that one had to measure “to the very bottom” the abyss of defeat, dismemberment and humiliation into which Russia had fallen. She had no army, and a revolutionary war would only bring an even worse peace. The peace was to give a “breathing space”, probably a short one, in which new forces would have to be created while waiting for revolution in Europe. Ratification was opposed by the leaders of the Left SRs, with Boris Kamkov, the Menshevik Julius Martov and the Left Communists of Nikolai Bukharin, for whom the treaty was a blow to the international revolution. The American Raymond Robins of the Red Cross mission, who had hoped to the end that a promise of Allied help would allow the peace to be rejected, recalled that before his closing speech Lenin asked him whether Washington had replied. On hearing that it had not, he declared: “Now I shall speak for the peace. It will be ratified.”

The congress adopted the resolution approving the treaty, written by Lenin, by a decisive majority. The figures given in the sources differ. According to the most frequently cited data 784 delegates voted for, 261 against and 115 abstained, the abstainers being the Left Communists. Other tallies give 724 votes for, 276 against and 118 abstentions, or 704 for, 284 against and 115 abstentions. The Left SRs decided that they could no longer share in government. Their people’s commissars, among them the Commissar of Justice Isaac Steinberg, the Commissar of Agriculture Andrei Kolegayev and Prosh Proshian, left the Council of People’s Commissars. The party did not, however, break with Soviet power, and its people remained in many offices, among others in the Cheka. From then on Lenin’s government consisted of Bolsheviks alone.

Ratification closed, on the Soviet side, the question of peace over which the Bolshevik party had almost split. A few days later the treaty was approved by the German Reichstag, and on 26 March it was signed by Emperor Wilhelm II. The dispute did not die down. The Left SRs continued to demand that the peace be broken, and in July 1918 they shot the German ambassador in Moscow, hoping for a resumption of the war with Germany.