Peace talks resume

On the evening of 28 February 1918 a new delegation of Soviet Russia arrived at Brest-Litovsk. As it telegraphed to Petrograd itself, it reached its destination at 8 p.m., although German radio reported that it had arrived in the afternoon. This time it had not come to negotiate, but to sign a peace whose terms the Germans had dictated in an ultimatum. This finale was preceded by five dramatic days in Petrograd. A British chronology of the war records separately the German ultimatum of 23 February, its acceptance by the Bolsheviks on 24 February and the resumption of talks on 28 February. We describe them here together.

The ultimatum

From the moment when, on the night of 18–19 February, the Council of People’s Commissars agreed to sign peace on the Brest terms, the Germans had remained silent and their troops had kept advancing. The reply, dated in Berlin on 21 February and signed by the Secretary of State Richard von Kühlmann, was handed to a Soviet emissary in a sealed envelope on 22 February, and the government in Petrograd received it on 23 February at 10.30 a.m. The terms were much harsher than those Leon Trotsky had rejected at Brest. All the lands of the former empire west of the line presented to the Russians at that time were to pass out of Russian sovereignty, and near Dvinsk the border was moved to the eastern edge of Courland. Russian troops and the Red Guard were to evacuate at once Livonia and Estonia, which were to be occupied by a German “police force”, as well as Ukraine and Finland. Russia had to make peace immediately with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, hand the eastern Anatolian provinces over to Turkey and recognise the abolition of the capitulations. Also demanded were the complete demobilisation of the army, including the units being formed by the new government, the disarming of warships or their detention in port, the restoration of the German–Russian commercial treaty of 1904 and an end to all propaganda against the Central Powers. The Soviet government was to accept these terms within 48 hours, and its plenipotentiaries were to sign the treaty at Brest within three days.

Lenin wins

On 23 February the Bolshevik Central Committee met. Vladimir Lenin demanded acceptance of the terms and threatened otherwise to leave the government and the committee. “If you do not sign them, you will be signing the death sentence of Soviet power in three weeks,” he said. Leon Trotsky was opposed to the peace, but declared that with the party split a revolutionary war could not be waged, and that he would not take on himself the responsibility of voting for it. Seven members of the committee voted for accepting the German terms, among them Lenin, Yakov Sverdlov, Joseph Stalin and Yelena Stasova. Four were against: Nikolai Bukharin, Moisei Uritsky, Georgy Lomov and Andrei Bubnov. Trotsky, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Adolph Joffe and Nikolay Krestinsky abstained, and in so doing secured Lenin his majority. The Left Communists announced that they would campaign against the peace, and several of them resigned their posts in the government.

The party’s decision still had to pass the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, sitting in the Tauride Palace. Late in the evening the Left Socialist Revolutionaries decided to vote against the peace. In the hall Lenin was greeted with shouts of “traitor!”. He argued that the revolution had no army, and that a withdrawal to the Urals would give only a few weeks’ delay, after which still worse terms would have to be signed. On 24 February at about 4.30 a.m. the committee accepted the German terms. In a roll-call vote 116 members were in favour, 85 against and 26 abstained. Bukharin and David Riazanov voted against in defiance of party discipline, while some of the Left SR leaders, with Maria Spiridonova, came out in favour of the peace. At 7.32 a.m. the radio station at Tsarskoye Selo transmitted to Berlin, Vienna, Sofia and Constantinople the message that the Council of People’s Commissars accepted the peace terms and was sending a delegation to Brest.

The war goes on

That same day the commander-in-chief Nikolai Krylenko asked the German command whether, now that the terms had been accepted, the armistice automatically reverted to its state before 18 February. General Max Hoffmann replied that the old armistice was dead and could not be revived. The war was to go on until the peace was signed, “for the protection of Finland, Estonia, Livonia and Ukraine”. Over the following days the Germans took, among other places, Reval and Pskov, and in Petrograd a march on the capital was feared. The Soviet government called for “merciless resistance” and announced that if necessary it would move to Moscow.

The delegation left Petrograd on the evening of 24 February. Zinoviev refused to lead it, and Joffe agreed to go only as an adviser, so on the instructions of the Central Committee Grigori Sokolnikov was put at its head. He was accompanied by Grigory Petrovsky, Georgy Chicherin, the secretary Lev Karakhan and military experts, among them Rear Admiral Vasily Altfater. Near Pskov the way was blocked by a railway bridge blown up by the Russians themselves, and the delegates lost a good deal of time before they could travel on. Kühlmann and Count Ottokar Czernin did not wait for them and left for Bucharest, where talks with Romania had begun. At Brest the Central Powers were represented by the German minister Frederic von Rosenberg with General Hoffmann, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador Kajetan Mérey, the Bulgarian minister Andrey Toshev and the former grand vizier İbrahim Hakkı Pasha.

On arrival Sokolnikov demanded an immediate halt to hostilities, since Russia had accepted the ultimatum and its delegates were on the spot. The German side refused: the fighting was to stop only after the treaty was signed, and the three days allowed for the talks were counted from 1 March. A British chronology states that on 28 February hostilities “nominally ceased”, but in reality the offensive continued. A nasty surprise was also a new Turkish demand that the fate of the districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batumi be decided by self-determination of the population. In the evening the agenda for the next day was also discussed. At the session of 1 March Sokolnikov declared that the delegation had come to sign the treaty, not to discuss it. The peace treaty was signed at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918.