Michael Tillotson
The Times
Military officers from Russia and the Austro-Hugarian Empire meet to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918Military officers from Russia and the Austro-Hugarian Empire meet to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918
The alarm generated in the British cabinet by the collapse of the Russian armies in eastern Turkey in September 1917 was due largely to a new threat to India. There were 40,000 or so German and Austrian prisoners of war in central Asia who, if freed by their guards and armed, could march through the “Caucasian gap” left by the departing Russians.Their alarm increased in October when Lenin, newly arrived from exile in Switzerland courtesy of the Kaiser, announced the overthrow of the provisional government and instalment of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which seemed likely to seek a separate peace with the Central Powers. Little comfort was drawn from a report by the British military attaché, Major-General Alfred Knox, that a senior Bolshevik official had assured him that “Russia is a big country and can fight a war and manage a revolution at the same time”.
Lenin briefly thought it might be expedient to continue the war on the side of the Western Powers, but changed his mind on discovery that the only troops outside Petrograd willing to take orders was one Latvian regiment of volunteers. Hastily he sent Adolph Joffe, a trusted revolutionary from the Crimea, to negotiate an armistice with Prince Leopold of Bavaria, commanding the German armies on the Eastern Front, before negotiation of a comprehensive peace deal.
The Allies’ worst fears had been realised and Ludendorff, the de facto German commander-in-chief, set in train plans to move most of the 83 divisions on the Eastern Front westwards in readiness for his planned offensive against the British and French the next March. A three-month armistice was agreed and Prince Leopold’s chief of staff, Major-General Max Hoffman, ordered to make the necessary arrangements in the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk on the border with Byelorussia. It had been virtually destroyed by the retreating Russian army in 1914, but a complex of wooden huts in the courtyard of the fort was put in readiness and December 22 agreed for the start of negotiations.
An American political commentator later likened the discussions leading up to what became the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to a poker game in which the Germans held cards for a full house of aces on kings and the Russians a pair of sevens. (Why he chose sevens is obscure because, while the western form of the figure is considered unlucky by the Chinese — one’s luck is supposed to run out of the tail — under Russian Orthodox mythology it represents “perfection and completeness”; neither attributes even the Bolsheviks thought likely to be achieved.)
Diplomatic niceties were observed, with Prince Leopold and his retinue meeting Joffe and his team at the railway station and sharing meals in the makeshift huts. Joffe telegraphed the encouraging first impressions to Lenin, but he had not yet heard the terms by which Germany, leading discussion for the Central Powers, had in mind for a conclusion of hostilities.
The two delegations were driven by diametrically opposed imperatives. The Central Powers sought a swift conclusion to give them access to Caucasian oil and Ukrainian wheat — the German air force and U-boat fleet were already on restricted operations, the populations of Vienna and Sofia were starving and Ludendorff was fretting for release of the Eastern Front divisions to reinforce the Western Front.
Conversely, the Russian delegation planned to spin out the talking for as long as possible, in hope that the events in Petrograd would lead to the peoples of France and Germany, weary of war and the heavy losses, rising in revolt and a consequent end to hostilities without Russia having to concede territory or reparations. Joffe had a weak hand to play even for that objective, and the other side of the table was seething with impatience.
When the leader of the Central Powers negotiators, Richard von Kühlmann, a former German foreign minister, outlined his requirements, Joffe was stunned. He demanded that the Russian territories in Poland, plus the Baltic provinces of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, amounting to 18 provinces of Russia, should be granted self-determination, and return of the Turkish town of Kars recently captured by the Russians. Joffe’s only comfort was Count Ottokar Czernin’s offer to make a separate peace on behalf of Austro-Hungary, desperate for grain. He was swiftly silenced by Von Kühlman’s warning that if he made a separate peace, all German divisions would immediately be withdrawn from the Austrian front.
Joffe requested a 12-day recess in the negotiations to allow him to consult Lenin and the Politburo. This was agreed, with the result that Lenin, still hanging on to hopes of risings of the masses in Berlin and Paris, replaced Joffe as chief negotiator with the Ukrainian Jew Leon (Lev) Trotsky, whose ability to argue the toss on any subject had led to his appointment as people’s commissioner for foreign affairs. Negotiations resumed with Trotsky in charge of the Bolshevik team, but joined by a delegation from Ukraine, which unhelpfully declared its independence from Russia and willingness to trade hundreds of tonnes of grain with anyone ready to sign a peace treaty.
Trotsky was quick to perceive that there were disagreements within the Central Powers negotiators; even Von Kühlmann was receiving conflicting demands from Hindenburg, who wanted to be sure of the Baltic States as a ”secure left flank in the next war”, and Ludendorff urging for a swift release of his German divisions on the Eastern Front. Trotsky skilfully exploited the differences between the German, Austrian, Bulgarian and Turkish delegations and argued each point on an obscure matter of principle.
After stringing out the talks for nine weeks, the Germans and Austrians lost patience and ordered their troops to resume their advance into Russia. By February 24 they had advanced 150 miles without meeting resistance. With no hint of uprisings in France or Germany, Lenin realised that the game was up and ordered Trotsky to accept the Central Powers’ terms without further quibble.
The treaty was signed on March 3, 1918, although a separate treaty of the same title had been agreed with Ukraine on February 9 and hundreds of tonnes of grain taken by rail to the starving in Austro-Hungary and Bulgaria. Strategically, the exit of Russia from the war threw an enormous extra burden on the Western Allies, as was to be most dramatically demonstrated by Ludendorff’s massive offensive of March 1918 that almost drove the British Expeditionary Force back to the sea.
The treaty was nullified by the Treaty of Versailles, which brought the war to an end, but Poland and the Baltic states retained their independence. Trotsky resigned his position as Bolshevik foreign minister, thus beginning a feud with Lenin and Stalin, which was only concluded by his assassination in Mexico on Stalin’s order in 1940.