Russian envoys cross the German lines

On 27 November 1917 (14 November in the Julian calendar) the German command on the Eastern Front gave three Russian envoys a written answer: it was ready to begin armistice negotiations with representatives of the Bolshevik commander-in-chief. The envoys had been sent across the front line near Dvinsk by Nikolai Krylenko, whom Lenin’s government had appointed commander-in-chief after General Nikolai Dukhonin refused to carry out the order to propose an armistice. The British chronology of the war records under this date the first meeting of Russian and German delegates behind the German lines. Russian works state that the envoys crossed the front as early as the afternoon of 26 November and received the answer the next day. Contemporary dispatches from Petrograd, quoted in the British press, and some historians place the crossing of the lines itself only on 27 November.

Krylenko left Petrograd by special train for the Northern Front and stopped at the headquarters of the Fifth Army in Dvinsk. In Order No. 2 of 26 November he declared Dukhonin an “enemy of the people” and removed from their posts the commander and commissar of the Northern Front, the commander of the Fifth Army and the commander of XXVII Corps. As envoys he chose Lieutenant Vladimir Shneur of the 9th Kiev Hussar Regiment and two members of the Fifth Army committee, the army doctor Mikhail Sagalovich and the volunteer Georgy Meren. In the authorisation that Krylenko signed as commissar for military and naval affairs and commander-in-chief, he instructed them to ask the supreme command of the German army whether it agreed to send plenipotentiaries for immediate negotiations on a ceasefire on all fronts of the belligerent states, to be followed by peace talks. If it agreed, they were to settle the time and place of the meeting.

The envoys were led blindfolded to the headquarters of General von Hofmeister’s division. They waited there all day while the matter went up through the successive levels of command. The chief of staff of the German command in the East, General Max Hoffmann, who on the morning of 26 November was still noting in his diary that he did not know whether the Russians would decide on an armistice, reported by telephone to Erich Ludendorff. “Is it possible to negotiate with these people?” Ludendorff is said to have asked. “Yes, it is possible,” Hoffmann replied. “Your Excellency needs troops, and this is the easiest way to get them.” The supreme command authorised him to hold armistice talks.

The answer, signed by Hofmeister, was set out in six points. The commander-in-chief in the East, Prince Leopold of Bavaria, was ready to negotiate with the Russian commander-in-chief and had the authority of the German supreme command to conclude an armistice. The Russian side was to appoint a commission with written full powers and send it to the headquarters of the German command in the East; the Germans were to appoint their own. They were to be warned of the day and hour of arrival so that they could provide a special train at the crossing point, and the Germans undertook to give the commissions a direct telegraph link with the Russian command. The meeting of the plenipotentiaries was set for 2 December. Krylenko announced in an order to the army and navy that the envoys had returned with the official consent of the German commander-in-chief, and ordered fire and all hostilities to cease unless the enemy attacked.

The Bolsheviks at once proclaimed a success. On 28 November the Council of People’s Commissars appealed to the governments and peoples of all the belligerent states to take part in the negotiations, and on 29 November Trotsky asked the representatives of the Allied states whether they intended to take part in the talks, which were to begin on 2 December at five in the afternoon. He received no answer. Shneur himself was arrested soon afterwards, when his past collaboration with the tsarist Okhrana came to light. The Soviet delegation led by Adolph Joffe crossed the lines on 2 December, and the next day the armistice negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk, at the headquarters of Leopold of Bavaria.