Peace negotiations open at Brest-Litovsk

At four in the afternoon of 22 December 1917 (9 December in the Julian calendar), the first plenary session of the peace conference between Soviet Russia and Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey began at Brest-Litovsk. The proceedings were opened by the Commander-in-Chief East, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria, at whose headquarters the armistice had been signed a week earlier. Article IX of that agreement bound the parties to open peace talks immediately. These were the first official peace negotiations of the war between belligerent great powers. They went on, with interruptions, until 3 March 1918.

The delegations

The foreign ministers came to the conference. Germany was represented by the State Secretary Richard von Kühlmann, who had headed German diplomacy since August. He was advised by the chief of staff of the Eastern command, General Max Hoffmann, who had negotiated the armistice and now acted as the plenipotentiary of the Supreme Army Command. Austria-Hungary was represented by its foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, who arrived in Brest on 20 December. The Turkish delegation was headed by the foreign minister Ahmed Nesimi, with the ambassador in Berlin, Ibrahim Hakki Pasha, sitting beside him. The Bulgarians were led by the justice minister Popov. Contrary to what some newspapers of the time wrote, followed by some later works, neither the Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha nor the Bulgarian prime minister Vasil Radoslavov was in Brest in December. Both joined the negotiations only in 1918.

The Soviet delegation was almost the same as during the armistice talks. It was headed by Adolph Joffe, and its members included Lev Kamenev, Anastasia Bitsenko, who in 1905 had assassinated the former war minister General Sakharov, the delegation’s secretary Lev Karakhan and a new member, the historian Mikhail Pokrovsky. The military advisers were Rear Admiral Vasily Altfater and General Alexander Samoylo. At a dinner given by Leopold of Bavaria on 20 December, Czernin sat next to Joffe, who told him mildly that he hoped to bring about a revolution in his country too. “We shall hardly need the help of the good Joffe to start a revolution at home,” the minister noted in his diary. “The people will do it themselves if the Entente goes on refusing to come to terms.”

The first session

After the welcome, Leopold of Bavaria gave the floor to Hakki Pasha as the senior member of the assembly, and he proposed Kühlmann as the first chairman. Kühlmann announced that the aim was not to draw up a detailed treaty but to establish the most important principles on which peaceful and neighbourly relations could quickly be rebuilt. The talks were to take account of “what has become history”, so as not to lose the ground beneath their feet, but also to be guided by the great new idea that had brought the delegates together at Brest. He considered it a happy circumstance that the talks were beginning on the eve of the feast that for centuries had proclaimed peace to men of goodwill. It was decided that the heads of all five delegations would chair the sessions in turn. At the Russians’ demand, the proceedings were to be public and the minutes published.

Joffe recalled the Decree on Peace and proposed six principles on which a general peace was to rest:

• no forcible annexation of territories occupied during the war; occupying troops were to leave them quickly;
• full restoration of independence to the nations that had lost it during the war;
• nations that had not been independent before the war were to decide in a free referendum which state they wished to belong to, or whether they wished to be independent;
• in multinational territories the rights of minorities were to be protected, with cultural and administrative autonomy;
• no war indemnities; contributions already levied were to be returned, and the losses of private persons covered from a fund to which all the belligerent states would contribute;
• colonial questions were to be settled according to the same principles.

The Russians added that they considered it inadmissible for stronger nations to restrict the freedom of weaker ones, for instance by an economic boycott or by imposing commercial treaties. The delegations of the Central Powers took note of the programme and asked for time to reply. The first session was short.

Disputes in the Central Powers’ camp

Behind the scenes a struggle was going on of which the Russians knew nothing. On 18 December (according to some accounts 19 December), a crown council chaired by Emperor Wilhelm II met at Kreuznach, at Supreme Army Command headquarters. Erich Ludendorff demanded a “protective strip” cut off from the Kingdom of Poland along the Prussian border, and Courland and Lithuania in personal union with the German crown. Kühlmann believed that the fate of the occupied territories should be left open. According to an account of the meeting, he asked Paul von Hindenburg what he wanted those territories for, and was told: to manoeuvre the left wing in the next war. Kühlmann left for Brest without clear instructions and decided to pursue his own policy.

Czernin had long been ready to accept the Russian formula, because Austria-Hungary needed peace and grain. Already on the train to Brest he told his staff that Russia would propose a general peace and that it would have to be accepted. If the Entente refused, the way would open to a separate peace. Kühlmann reasoned in a similar way. He was convinced that the Allies would reject the talks, and that the Bolsheviks would then be left with nothing but a separate peace. On 23 and 24 December the two ministers worked on their allies. The Turks wanted the Russians to withdraw from the Caucasus immediately after peace was concluded, which the Germans could not accept, because they would then have to leave Poland, Courland and Lithuania. The Bulgarians demanded that the territories they occupied in Serbia and Romania be exempted from the “no annexations” principle, and gave way only on orders from Sofia. Hoffmann protested that accepting the Russian formula was, at bottom, a lie.

Poland at Brest

There were no Poles at the table, although the fate of the Kingdom of Poland was one of the main questions of the conference. Under the Act of 5 November, Germany and Austria-Hungary had announced in 1916 the creation of a Polish state, and since the autumn of 1917 the Regency Council and the government of Jan Kucharzewski, which had met for the first time only on 11 December, had been operating in Warsaw. The Russian principles, taken literally, meant the withdrawal of the Central Powers’ troops from Polish, Lithuanian and Courland territory. The Germans understood them differently. They held that the peoples of those lands had already expressed their will, which in Lithuania’s case was supposedly confirmed by the declaration of the Taryba of 11 December. Vienna still hoped to unite the Kingdom with Galicia under the Habsburg sceptre, and the German Supreme Army Command hoped for a border strip for Prussia. The question of the Kingdom’s representatives taking part in the negotiations was to return in January and February 1918. Czernin wanted them at Brest, but the Soviet delegation refused to recognise the Regency Council and its government as the representatives of Poland.

What came next

On 25 December Czernin, who was then chairing the proceedings, read out the Central Powers’ reply. They accepted the Russian principles as a basis for discussing an immediate general peace without forcible annexations and without indemnities, but on two conditions. All the belligerent states had to commit themselves to these principles within a suitable period, and the self-determination of nations lacking independence was to be an internal matter for each state, not a subject for international settlement. Joffe welcomed the reply, and it was decided to give the Entente ten days to join the negotiations. The Russians’ joy was short-lived. A few days later Hoffmann told Joffe over lunch that the “no annexations” principle did not apply to Poland, Lithuania and Courland, which in the Germans’ view had separated themselves from Russia. On 28 December the conference was adjourned, and when talks resumed in January the Soviet delegation was already led by Trotsky.