Peace talks resume at Brest-Litovsk

On the morning of 30 January 1918 (17 January in the Julian calendar) a plenary session of the peace conference met at Brest-Litovsk, broken off almost two weeks earlier. It was chaired by the Grand Vizier, Talaat Pasha, who had joined the Turkish delegation. He began by asking the heads of the delegations to present the changes in their membership. Richard von Kühlmann announced that the former Bavarian prime minister, Count Podewils-Dürniz, would sit in the German delegation by virtue of the rights reserved to Bavaria in 1871. According to Russian accounts, Berlin accepted him because the Munich press had been criticising Kühlmann’s policy.

The Soviet delegation was again led by Leon Trotsky. Alongside Adolph Joffe and Anastasia Bitsenko it now included the Left Socialist Revolutionary Vladimir Karelin, People’s Commissar for State Properties. The second change was more important: two representatives of the Bolshevik government of Ukraine in Kharkov joined the Russian delegation, Medvedev, chairman of its Central Executive Committee, and Shakhrai, secretary for military affairs. The third designated delegate, Volodymyr Zatonsky, stayed in Petrograd. The experts who came were the Lviv-born Karl Radek and Stanisław Bobiński, both for Polish affairs, as well as Pēteris Stučka for Latvian affairs and Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas for Lithuanian affairs. On the Russian side, therefore, the fate of the Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian lands was to be argued by local communists.

Two Ukraines

Trotsky explained why there were Ukrainians in his delegation. The workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ soviets were fighting the Kiev Rada throughout Ukraine and winning. The whole of the Donets Basin, the mining district of Yekaterinoslav and the Kharkov and Poltava governorates were in their hands. On the day he left Petrograd, news had come from Kiev that the General Secretariat had resigned. A peace concluded with the Rada’s delegation could therefore not be regarded as peace with Ukraine. Only an agreement approved by the government of the Russian Federative Republic, just proclaimed by the Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, was to be valid. There was no one at Brest who could answer him on behalf of Kiev. Mykola Levytsky, the only Ukrainian delegate who had remained there, declared that until the whole delegation returned he would take no position on political questions.

Kühlmann agreed to postpone the discussion until the Rada’s delegates arrived. He remarked tartly, however, that Trotsky had not previously said a word about any other body claiming the right to speak for Ukraine. In his view no one disputed the existence of a free Ukrainian People’s Republic; the dispute concerned only who was to represent it. Trotsky replied that this would be settled by the outcome of the struggle between the two organisations. At the request of Count Ottokar Czernin, who did not want to waste time, it was decided to resume the work of the territorial commission. Finally Trotsky closed the dispute from before the break over an alleged telegram of the Petrograd Telegraph Agency attributing to the Soviet delegation words it had not spoken. The agency, he had established, had sent no such telegram. Who was to blame for the “misunderstanding or forgery” he left to those concerned to clear up.

A new tone

Courtesies did not hide a change of mood. The Bolsheviks were emboldened by the successes of the Reds in Ukraine and Finland and by the strikes in Austria-Hungary and Germany. Kühlmann and Czernin, however, had returned from their capitals determined to finish the negotiations as quickly as possible. The Kiev Rada, which had just proclaimed the independence of Ukraine, was a convenient partner for them, even if it was losing control of its own country. The difficulties were temporary, Hoffmann noted in his diary, because one could always support this government by force of arms and set it up again.

On 1 February, at a plenary session, the Rada’s delegates, Oleksandr Sevriuk and Mykola Lubynsky, clashed with Trotsky and Medvedev, and at the end of the session Czernin declared on behalf of the Central Powers that they recognised the Ukrainian People’s Republic as an independent and sovereign state. On 9 February, when Kiev was already in Bolshevik hands, a peace treaty was signed with it. The next day Trotsky announced that Russia was ending the war but would not sign a peace on German terms.