Once the initial shock passed, it was clear to the German High Command that Trotsky’s bluff had to be called. Since no peace treaty had been signed, Germany was still at war with Russia, the armistice had come to an end and the way was now open for the German invasion of Russia. Despite his own growing fears of a revolution in Berlin, Kühlmann was forced by pressure from Ludendorff to announce on 16 February that Germany would resume hostilities against Russia on 18 February. Back in the Smolny, on the 17th, the Central Committee met in panic. Lenin’s demand that the German treaty should be accepted at once was defeated by six votes to five. Trotsky’s policy of waiting for the Germans to launch their attack before signing the peace was adopted instead in the desperate hope that the sight of their troops attacking the defenceless people of Russia might at last inspire the German working classes to rebel.90
Sure enough, on the 18th the German troops advanced. Dvinsk and Lutsk were immediately captured without resistance. The last remaining Russian troops fell apart altogether — they were quite indifferent to the call of a revolutionary war — and by the end of the fifth day Hoffman’s men had advanced 150 miles. It was as much as the whole German army had advanced in the three previous years of fighting. ‘It is the most comical war I have ever known,’ Hoffman wrote in his diary. ‘It is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. We put a handful of infantry men with machine-guns and one gun on to a train and push them off to the next station; they take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops, and go on. This proceeding has, at any rate, the charm of novelty.’91
As news came in of the German advance, the Central Committee convened in two emergency sessions on 18 February. Lenin was furious. By refusing to sign the German treaty, his opponents in the Central Committee had merely enabled the enemy to advance. Lenin clearly feared that the Germans were about to capture Petrograd and oust the Bolsheviks from power — and this necessitated sending a telegram accepting the peace at once. When Trotsky and Bukharin proposed to delay this, Lenin was beside himself with rage. But he still lacked enough votes to enforce his policy, which was defeated by seven votes to six at the morning session of the Central Committee. The Bolshevik leadership seemed on the brink of a fatal division as it stared defeat in the face. But during the afternoon, as rumours came in of a German advance into the Ukraine, Trotsky moved round towards Lenin’s view. At the evening session of the Central Committee he proposed to ask the Germans to restate their terms. As Lenin rightly saw it, this was a foolish game to play. It was too late now for diplomatic notes, which the Germans would in any case soon dismiss as a ploy for time; only the firm acceptance of their terms for peace would be enough to halt their advance. After three further hours of heated debate the crucial vote was taken on Lenin’s proposal to send the Germans an immediate offer of peace. It was passed by the slenderest of margins, by seven votes to five, with Trotsky switching to Lenin’s side at the final moment.92 Though we will probably never find out what went on behind the scenes, it seems that Trotsky’s crucial change of mind was largely influenced by the need to avert what could otherwise have turned out to be a fatal division within the party. If Trotsky had joined Bukharin in opposing the peace, Lenin would probably have resigned from the Central Committee, as he had threatened to do, and rallied support from the Bolshevik rank and file. The party would thus have been split and Trotsky, as the leader of its faction against peace, much the weaker for it. Without Lenin, Trotsky’s place at the top of the party was extremely vulnerable — as events would later prove.
At midnight, after the crucial vote in the Central Committee, Lenin personally sent a cable to Berlin accepting the German terms for peace proposed at Brest-Litovsk. For several days, however, the enemy’s troops continued to advance deep into Russia and the Ukraine without an acknowledgement of Lenin’s telegram being made. It seemed quite clear that the Germans had decided to capture Petrograd and overthrow the Bolshevik regime. Lenin now decided to fight — completely reversing his earlier position — and called for volunteers. Military help was sought from the Allies, who were much more concerned to keep Russia in the war than they were with the nature of its government and readily came up with an offer of military aid.fn15 On Lenin’s orders, the Bolsheviks prepared for the evacuation of the capital to Moscow, which threw Petrograd into panic. The railway stations were jammed with people trying to escape, while thousands left every day on foot. Law and order broke down altogether, as armed gangs looted abandoned shops and houses and angry workers, faced with the evacuation of their factories, tried to recoup weeks of unpaid wages by pilfering from the factory stores. It was at this point, with the capital sliding into anarchy, that Lenin issued his Decree on ‘The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!’ which did so much to fuel the Red Terror.
On 22 February the Central Committee reconvened to discuss the question of accepting military aid from the Allies. With the support of Trotsky and Lenin (in absentia), the motion in favour of doing so was passed — though only just, for Bukharin and the other advocates of a revolutionary war were violently opposed to taking aid from the imperial powers. When the vote was taken, Bukharin threatened to resign from the Central Committee in protest. ‘We are turning the party into a dung-heap,’ he complained to Trotsky and then burst into tears.93
As it turned out, the question of Allied aid was irrelevant. On 23 February the Germans at last delivered their final terms for peace. Berlin now demanded all the territory which its troops had seized in the course of the war, including those they had occupied in the last five days. This meant, in effect, the German annexation of the Ukraine and most of the Baltic. The Central Committee reconvened at once. Lenin threatened to resign if the peace terms were not accepted. Draconian though the new terms were, they at least left the Bolsheviks in power. ‘It is a question’, Lenin warned, ‘of signing the peace terms now or signing the death sentence of the Soviet Government three weeks later.’ Trotsky was not convinced of this, but knew that a divided party, which would result from Lenin’s resignation, could not fight a revolutionary war, and on this basis he abstained from the crucial vote on Lenin’s proposal, which thus passed by seven votes to four with four members abstaining. Only the Bukharin faction, which was prepared, in the words of Lomov, to ‘take power without Ilich [Lenin] and go to the Front to fight’, remained in opposition right to the end and resigned from the Central Committee in order to free themselves for a campaign against the peace both among the party rank and file and in the country at large. Later that night Lenin presented the peace proposals to the Soviet Executive, where they were duly passed by 116 votes to 85. Throughout his speech Lenin was heckled with cries of ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Judas!’ from the Left SRs and many on the left wing of his own party. In the early hours of the following morning he sent to Berlin an unconditional acceptance of the German terms.94