Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk

On the afternoon of 8 January 1918 (26 December 1917 Old Style) the heads of the delegations to the peace conference met at Brest-Litovsk. At the table sat the German Secretary of State Richard von Kühlmann, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Count Ottokar Czernin, the Bulgarian Minister of Justice Popov, the Grand Vizier Talat Pasha, who had arrived the previous night, and the representative of the Ukrainian Central Rada, Vsevolod Holubovych. Soviet Russia’s delegation was represented by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Leon Trotsky. After a crisis lasting several days, in which the Central Powers had announced the suspension of the talks, the agenda was agreed and a plenary session was called for the following day. The second round of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, which was to last until 10 February, had just begun.

A new head of delegation

Trotsky had crossed the front line near Dvinsk and arrived at Brest-Litovsk on the morning of 7 January. The German officer accompanying him, Captain Baron Lamezan, later recounted that the Russian trenches in front of Dvinsk were empty, and that at the stations along the way soldiers and workers waited, demanding peace. Trotsky answered them politely, but according to Lamezan he grew more and more dejected. “They have only the choice of which sauce they will be eaten with,” Kühlmann said in French. “Just like us,” Czernin replied, thinking of the hunger in Austria-Hungary.

The make-up of the Soviet delegation had hardly changed. It included Adolph Joffe, Lev Kamenev, Mikhail Pokrovsky, Anastasia Bitsenko, the Left Socialist Revolutionary Vladimir Karelin and the secretary Lev Karakhan, and as advisers, among others, Karl Radek, the Polish communist Stanisław Bobiński and the Lithuanian Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas. The style, however, had changed. In December the Russians had dined with the officers in the mess, and Joffe had talked with Czernin over supper. Trotsky at once asked that the delegation be allowed to eat separately, and from then on the sides saw each other only at the sessions. Lenin had sent him to Brest-Litovsk to drag out the negotiations: the Russian army could no longer fight, and the Bolsheviks were counting on revolution soon breaking out in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Trotsky also wanted to use the public sessions as a platform from which he could address the workers of all Europe.

Ultimatum and reply

The delegations of the Central Powers resolved not to let Trotsky get a word in. The session planned for 8 January was postponed because the Ukrainians were not ready, and the plenary negotiations began on 9 January at eleven o’clock. Kühlmann announced that since none of the Entente states had joined the talks, the Central Powers’ declaration of 25 December on a peace without annexations or indemnities had lapsed. He rejected moving the negotiations to Stockholm as the “firm and unalterable decision” of the four powers and accused the Petrograd Telegraph Agency of spreading an invented account of the session of 28 December. Czernin added that the issue was no longer a general peace but a separate peace between Russia and the Quadruple Alliance, and that responsibility for continuing the war would fall on Russia. General Max Hoffmann protested against Bolshevik propaganda among German soldiers. Trotsky, who had prepared a long speech, asked for an adjournment.

On 10 January he spoke. Czernin considered the address “a great and in its way truly fine speech, calculated for the whole of Europe”. Trotsky rejected the German interpretation of self-determination, according to which the will of the peoples of the occupied lands was expressed by bodies set up under the control of the occupation authorities. He nevertheless accepted the condition and agreed to remain at Brest-Litovsk “so as not to leave unused the slightest possibility of peace”. He did not want to give his opponents a pretext for blaming Russia for the continuation of the war. A territorial commission was set up, on which Kühlmann, Hoffmann, Czernin and the Russians sat.

The Ukrainians at the table

That same day Holubovych read a note from the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, signed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and the Secretary for International Affairs, Oleksandr Shulhyn. In it the Rada declared that the authority of the Council of People’s Commissars did not extend to Ukraine, and that a peace concluded by Petrograd would bind Ukraine only if its government signed it. Kühlmann asked Trotsky whether his delegation intended to go on representing the whole of Russia. Trotsky answered that, in accordance with the right of nations to self-determination up to and including secession, he saw no obstacle to the Ukrainian delegation taking part in the negotiations. Pressed further, he admitted that he regarded it as independent. Russian historians point out that in this way he recognised the independence of the delegation, not of the state, but the Central Powers eagerly made use of this loophole. They put off formal recognition of Ukraine until the peace treaty. From then on Hoffmann and Czernin talked with the Ukrainians on the side more and more often, and Trotsky was losing influence over the matter that was most important for Russia: Ukrainian grain.

A duel over self-determination

Over the following days Kühlmann and Trotsky, as the British historian John Wheeler-Bennett wrote, circled each other like duelling fencers. They argued about what self-determination was and how to apply it in the occupied lands. Trotsky demanded a referendum with no foreign troops on the spot. Kühlmann would not hear of evacuation and maintained that the peoples of those lands had already expressed themselves through councils set up under German administration. “We are realists just as much as revolutionaries, and we prefer to speak plainly of annexations rather than replace their real name with a pseudonym,” Trotsky replied. The discussions strayed into the dependence of the Nizam of Hyderabad on Great Britain and the powers of the Supreme Court of the United States. Trotsky reproached his opponents with the violation of Belgian neutrality and unrestricted submarine warfare. Czernin, who every day received alarming news from Vienna about food shortages, found these “spiritual wrestling matches” harder and harder to bear.

On 12 January Kamenev presented the Russian plan in the commission: the occupation troops were to withdraw, and the population of Poland, Lithuania, Courland, as well as Estonia and Livonia, was to decide its own fate by vote. Kühlmann replied briefly: “General Hoffmann has the floor.” Hoffmann declared that the Soviet government, which rested solely on force, itself denied self-determination to the Ukrainians and Belarusians and dispersed their assemblies with bayonets. He added that the German Supreme Command refused to evacuate Courland, Lithuania, Riga and the islands of the Gulf of Riga. Contrary to legend, he did not bang his fist on the table. Czernin noted that Hoffmann had been working on this “unfortunate speech” for several days and was proud of it, but it caused only indignation at home, although Erich Ludendorff at once congratulated him.

The Polish question

The most contentious issue was the fate of the Kingdom of Poland, Lithuania and Courland. The Soviet delegation did not recognise the Warsaw Regency Council or Jan Kucharzewski’s government as representing Poland. According to a German communiqué of 9 January, Count Adam Tarnowski was appointed the Polish delegate to Brest-Litovsk, but the Poles were not admitted to the negotiating table. On 11 January Trotsky accused the Central Powers of wanting annexations under the cloak of self-determination and proposed inviting to Brest-Litovsk representatives of Poland, Courland and Lithuania who would speak freely. Kühlmann and Czernin agreed at once, but on condition that if these representatives came out on Germany’s side, Russia would accept their view as binding. Trotsky asked for a day to think it over, and the proposal fell through. Czernin regretted it: the presence of the Poles would have suited him. The Germans, as he himself observed, preferred to do without them, because they knew of the anti-Prussian mood in the Kingdom.

Hoffmann’s map

The verbal duel ended on 18 January when, at Trotsky’s request for an explanation of where the German demands ended, Hoffmann spread a General Staff map on the table. A blue line ran from Brest-Litovsk north to the Baltic and cut off from Russia most of the Polish lands, Lithuania, western Latvia with Riga, and the Moonsund islands. Trotsky concluded that his opponents’ position was now perfectly clear. That same night he left with the map for Petrograd to consult Lenin, and promised to return by 29 January. The separate negotiations with the Ukrainians, meanwhile, were moving ever faster. On 9 February the Central Powers signed a peace with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and a day later Trotsky announced at Brest-Litovsk that Russia was ending the war but would not sign a treaty.