But of course the war had not ended at all. The Decree on Peace was an expression of hope, not a statement of fact. It was one thing to call for peace, another to bring it about. The other belligerent powers had no intention of signing a general peace: both sides were more intent than ever on slogging it out to the bloody end. The Allies had been spurred on by the intervention of the United States, and the Central Powers by the prospect of transferring troops to the west as the Eastern Front was run down. There was no real reason why either should listen to Russia’s appeals for peace, especially not now that her military position had been so weakened. She had lost her status among the Great Powers; and her calls for a general peace without annexations or indemnities sounded like the arguments of a loser.
As the Bolsheviks saw it, the peace campaign was inextricably linked with the spread of the revolution to the West. It was this that, in their view, would bring the war to an end — or rather transform it, as Lenin had predicted, into a series of civil wars in which the workers of the world would unite to overthrow their imperialist rulers. The belief in the imminence of a world revolution was central to Bolshevik thinking in the autumn of 1917. As Marxists, it was inconceivable to them that the socialist revolution could survive for long in a backward peasant country like Russia without the support of the proletariat in the advanced industrial countries of the West. Left to themselves, without an industrial base to defend their revolution, and surrounded by a hostile peasantry, the Bolsheviks believed that they were doomed to fail. The October seizure of power had been carried out on the premise, naive though it may sound today, that a worldwide socialist revolution was just around the corner. Every report of a strike or a mutiny in the West was hailed by the Bolsheviks as a certain sign that ‘it was starting’.
As long as this expectation remained alive, the Bolsheviks did not need a foreign policy in the conventional sense. All they needed to do was to fan the flames of the world revolution. ‘What sort of diplomatic work will we be doing anyway?’ Trotsky had said to a friend on hearing of his appointment as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. ‘I shall issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples and then shut up shop.’ The basic aim of the Soviet peace campaign was to serve as a means of revolutionary propaganda; and in this sense it was not a peace campaign at all. The Decree on Peace was a popular summons to revolution. It called on the peoples of the belligerent countries to revolt against the war and to force their rulers into peace talks. ‘This proposal of peace will meet with resistance on the part of the imperialist governments — we don’t fool ourselves on that score,’ Lenin had warned the Soviet Congress. ‘But we hope that revolution will soon break out in all the belligerent countries; and that is why we address ourselves to the workers of France, England and Germany.’ As George Kennan once observed, this was the first example of what was later to become known in Soviet foreign policy as ‘demonstrative diplomacy’ — diplomacy designed not to promote agreements between mutually recognized national governments within the framework of international law, but ‘rather to embarrass other governments and stir up opposition among their own people’.fn1485
But what if the world revolution failed to come about? The Bolsheviks would then find themselves without an army, having encouraged its revolutionary destruction, and would be defenceless against the threat of German invasion. The revolution would be defeated and Russia subjected to the Kaiser’s imperial rule. As time passed and this scenario became more likely, the Bolsheviks found themselves split down the middle. To those on the left of the party, such as Bukharin, a separate peace with imperialist Germany would represent a betrayal of the international cause, killing off all hopes of a revolution in the West. They favoured the idea of fighting a revolutionary war against the German invaders: this, it was argued, would galvanize the Russian workers and peasants into the defence of the revolution, thereby creating a Red Army in the very process of fighting, and their example would in turn inspire the revolutionary masses abroad.
Lenin, by contrast, was increasingly doubtful both of the chances of fighting such a war and of the likelihood that it might spark a revolution in the West. Though he himself had put forward the idea of a revolutionary war in his April Theses, he now began to doubt that the workers and peasants, who had so far been reluctant to defend Russia, would prove any more willing to defend the Socialist Fatherland. Without an army, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to conclude a separate peace, for if they tried to fight on, the remnants of ‘the peasant army, unbearably exhausted by the war, will overthrow the socialist workers’ government’. A separate peace with Germany would give the Bolsheviks the ‘breathing spell’ they needed to consolidate their power base, restore the economy and build up their own revolutionary army. This of course meant giving priority to the policy of strengthening the revolution at home over that of stirring revolution abroad. ‘Our tactics’, wrote Lenin, ‘ought to rest on the principle of how to ensure that the socialist revolution is best able to consolidate itself and survive in one country until such time as other countries join in.’ Moreover, in so far as a separate peace in the East would enable the Central Powers to strengthen their campaign in the West and thus prolong the war, such a policy could in itself be seen as a means of increasing the chances of a European revolution. For it was surely the continuation of the war, rather than the prospect of a peace, which would intensify the revolutionary crisis, and, although Lenin himself never said so, it was in his party’s interests to prolong the slaughter on the battlefields of France and Belgium, even at the risk of helping to bring about a German victory over the Western democracies.
Lenin’s view, it must be said, was a much more accurate appraisal of the situation than the naive internationalism of the Bolshevik Left. The Russian army was falling apart, as the peasant soldiers, encouraged by the Bolsheviks, demobilized themselves and went home to their villages to share in the partition of the gentry’s land. Even Kerensky’s Minister of War, General Verkhovsky, had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to continue the war and Russia had no choice but to sue for peace. There was no reason to suppose that the national consciousness of the peasants had grown any stronger now that Mother Russia had been painted Red. These, after all, were the same people who had failed to see why they should be called up in 1914 because their own particular village had no quarrel with the Germans and, in any case, was not likely to be invaded by them. If anything, such parochial views had been reinforced by the uncertainties of 1917. The peasant and indeed the whole of the social revolution had been largely driven by this petty localism. The Red Guards, who were to become the basis of the new Red Army, were really no more than badly organized partisan units for the defence of the revolution in the separate villages and the separate factories; they were extremely reluctant to leave their own locality and were quite incapable of anything more than petty guerrilla tactics. It was a romantic leftwing fantasy — shared by the Left SRs and Left Communists — to suppose that these guards might sustain, let alone win, a revolutionary war against the German war-machine.