Russia rejects a German armistice offer

On 9 June 1917 (27 May by the Julian calendar) the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet disclosed and rejected a German offer of a separate armistice on the Eastern Front. The commander-in-chief of the German forces in the east, Prince Leopold of Bavaria, had sent the Russian troops a radio message in which he offered to show them the way to an “honourable peace” and to an end of the fighting without breaking with their allies. A British chronology of the war records under this date that the Provisional Government rejected a German proposal for an armistice of unlimited duration. The available contemporary sources speak above all of the Soviet’s reply, but also of the refusal of Russian commanders and of the position of the government, which had already ruled out a separate peace in May.

A quiet war in the east

Since the February Revolution the Germans had been counting on Russia dropping out of the war. The Supreme Army Command, as Erich Ludendorff later wrote, at the chancellor’s wish forbade all major operations in the east, so as not to disturb the changes taking place in Russia and not to waste the chance of peace. Fraternisation between soldiers flourished at the front. From Orthodox Easter, which in 1917 fell on 15 April, meetings in no man’s land spread over whole sectors of the front. The Bolsheviks supported fraternisation as the beginning of an international revolution. The leadership of the Soviet, dominated by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, warned on the other hand that it was a trap. “A revolutionary army should fraternise with a revolutionary army,” it wrote in mid-May in an appeal to the soldiers, and in Germany and Austria-Hungary there was as yet no revolution. The Russian soldier goes to the talks in good faith, while the enemy officers photograph his trenches and move guns elsewhere.

Prince Leopold’s message

The radio message from the German headquarters in the east went a step further. Its author asserted that an armistice on the Russian front gave Germany no advantage, and encouraged the Russian armies to conclude a separate armistice and to hold secret talks with German commanders. The Soviet’s reply was published on 9 June. “The German general speaks in this way because he knows that the Russian revolutionary troops would indignantly reject any open proposal of a separate peace,” it read. The German general forgets what Russia cannot forget: the recent defeat on the Stokhid, the fact that Russian soldiers know where the divisions and heavy batteries are being taken from their front, and the fact that in Russia the sound of the bloody battles on the Franco-British front can be heard. Russia knows that the defeat of its allies would also mean its own defeat and the end of its political freedom.

Similar attempts were made in the same days on the Romanian front. According to the London Daily Chronicle’s correspondent, who cabled from Jassy on 7 June, more than a hundred envoys from Austro-Hungarian divisions crossed to the Russian side under a white flag, among them several officers, including an Austrian prince. They carried letters from Austro-Hungarian and German commanders and demanded an armistice that was to prepare peace talks. The Russian regimental committee at first wanted to discuss the armistice itself, but in the end sent the newcomers to the staff of the 9th Army. Its commander declared that as a soldier he could not listen to peace proposals, because that was a matter for the government. He sent two senior officers back with a refusal and announced that the rest would be treated as prisoners.

Petrograd’s answer

The government’s position had been clear since 19 May, when the coalition cabinet rejected in its declaration “any thought of a separate peace”. The government and the Soviet wanted a general peace, without annexations or indemnities, achieved in agreement with the allies, and not an arrangement concluded with Germany behind their backs. The minister of war, Alexander Kerensky, and the new commander-in-chief, Aleksei Brusilov, were at that time preparing an offensive that was to prove that revolutionary Russia was not defenceless.

A few days later the affair of the Swiss socialist Robert Grimm, who was staying in Petrograd, broke out. The Russians intercepted a telegram from the Swiss foreign minister, Arthur Hoffmann, who assured Grimm that Germany would not undertake an offensive in the east as long as it could count on an understanding with Russia, and that it was ready for peace talks. The government found Grimm’s explanations insufficient and in mid-June ordered him to leave Russia. Hoffmann had to resign. On 29 June, calling on the army to attack in the offensive that began on 1 July as the Kerensky offensive, the minister of war recalled in an order that Austria and Germany had offered Russia a separate peace and tried to deceive it with fraternisation, and when this failed, had begun to threaten it.