Supplementary treaty to Brest-Litovsk

On 27 August 1918 in Berlin, Germany and Soviet Russia signed a package of agreements supplementing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: a supplementary (additional) treaty, a financial agreement and a private-law agreement. They were signed for the Reich by the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Paul von Hintze, and by Johannes Kriege, a director in the Foreign Office, and for the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic by its diplomatic representative in Berlin, Adolph Joffe. It was the last major agreement between Germany and the Bolsheviks before the end of the war.

The negotiations had been provided for by the Peace of Brest-Litovsk itself and went on in Berlin throughout the summer. On the Soviet side they were conducted by Joffe and Leonid Krasin, on the German side first by Richard von Kühlmann and, after his dismissal, by Hintze and Kriege. Not even the assassination of Ambassador Mirbach in Moscow interrupted them. At the beginning of August Joffe travelled to Moscow to obtain the approval of the Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars, and on his return to Berlin he signed the agreements. In some matters the new agreements softened the Brest terms, in others they made them harsher, and above all they abandoned the mutual renunciation of indemnities written into the Brest treaty.

What was agreed

The most striking provision was the indemnity. Russia undertook to pay Germany 6 billion marks as compensation for the losses Germans had suffered as a result of Russian measures, above all nationalisation and the cancellation of debts. Of this, 1.5 billion marks was to be paid in gold (over 245 tonnes) and rouble banknotes in five instalments, from 10 September to 31 December 1918, one billion in deliveries of goods, and 2.5 billion in bonds of a loan bearing 6 per cent interest. The last billion was to be settled by separate agreements taking into account the accounts with Ukraine and Finland. Russia also renounced sovereignty over Estonia and Livonia, which under the Brest treaty had formally still remained with it, and agreed that Germany would recognise the independence of Georgia. In return it received free transit through the ports of Reval, Riga and Windau.

Germany undertook not to support separatist movements in Russian territory, to evacuate the lands east of the Berezina as Russia paid the successive instalments, and, at Moscow’s request, to withdraw from Rostov and the Rostov–Voronezh railway. An important part of the treaty concerned the Caucasus. Germany promised not to help any third state in military operations in the Caucasus outside Georgia and the districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum, and to prevent its troops from crossing a line covering the Baku district. This was aimed above all at the Turks, who were just then approaching the city. In return Russia was to supply Germany with a quarter of the oil output from the Baku area. The trouble was that Baku was no longer in Bolshevik hands: after the fall of the Commune it was ruled by the Centrocaspian Dictatorship, supported by British troops.

The secret notes

Russia also undertook to use all its forces to remove the Entente troops from the north of the country, where the Allies had recently landed at Archangel, while Germany guaranteed that in the meantime Finland would not attack Russia, especially Petrograd. Two confidential notes, which Hintze and Joffe exchanged on the same day, went even further. They were published only several years later. In them Germany reserved the right to drive the Entente out of northern Russia with its own forces, with Finnish participation as well, if the Bolsheviks could not manage it themselves. According to the British historian John Wheeler-Bennett, they also promised help in fighting General Alekseyev’s Volunteer Army and the Czechoslovaks. In this way formally neutral Soviet Russia was moving towards military cooperation with Germany against its former allies.

Historians still wonder why the Bolsheviks accepted such harsh terms at a moment when Germany was losing in the west. Wheeler-Bennett believes that Moscow, threatened by intervention and civil war, could not afford to refuse, and that news of the scale of the defeat of 8 August was slow to reach Berlin, so that Joffe, too, may have underestimated Germany’s weakness. The German leaders knew more about it: barely two weeks earlier, at the Spa conference, they had concluded that they could not win the war militarily. The instruments of ratification were exchanged on 6 September. In September Russia managed to send two trains of gold to Germany, about 93 tonnes in all. The Armistice of Compiègne forced Germany to renounce these agreements and hand the Russian gold over to the Allies, and on 13 November the All-Russian Central Executive Committee annulled both the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and the agreements signed in Berlin.