*O. N. Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Leningrad, 1976), 338. Much of the Left SR support came from Petrograd workers and radicalized sailors in the Baltic and Black Sea navies.
*E. Ignatov, in PR, No. 5/76 (1928), 37. The author claims that these worker signatures were forged but furnishes no proof.
*Kerensky was, in fact, in Petrograd at this time, but there is no evidence that he tried to organize anti-Bolshevik forces.
*NZh, No. 6/220 (January 9/22, 1918), 1. Afraid of a backlash, the Bolsheviks ordered an inquiry into the shooting. It revealed that troops from the Lithuanian Regiment had fired on the demonstrators in the belief that in so doing they were defending the Assembly from “saboteurs” (NZh, No. 15/229, February 3, 1918, 11). The Commission of Inquiry discontinued its work at the end of January without issuing a report.
†Znamenskii, Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 339. The exact number of the deputies present is not known: it could have been as low as 410: Ibid.
*Zhelezniakov was a leader of the anarchists who had occupied Peter Durnovo’s villa the previous year and whose arrest caused the Kronshtadt sailors in June 1917 to revolt: Revoliutsiia, III, 108.
*I. S. Malchevskii, ed., Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), no. Zhelezniakov was killed the following year, fighting in the Red Army.
*In May 1918, Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the most reactionary pre-revolutionary politicians, published an open letter in which he said that after having spent half a year in Soviet prison he remained a monarchist and would offer no apologies for the Soviet Government which was transforming Russia into a German colony. However, he went on, “Soviet authority is firm authority—alas, not from that direction which I would prefer to have firm authority in Russia, whose pitiful and cowardly intelligentsia is one of the main culprits of our humiliation and of the inability of Russian society to produce a healthy, firm authority of governmental scope’: letter dated May 1, 1918, in VO, No. 36 (May 3, 1918), 4.
*This attitude was pointed out by Martov in the spring of 1918 when Stalin accused him of slander and brought suit before a Revolutionary Tribunal. Noting that these tribunals had been set up to try exclusively “crimes against the people,” Martov asked: “Can an insult to Stalin be considered a crime against the people?” And he answered: “Only if one considers Stalin to be the people”: “Narod eto ia,” Vperëd, April 1/14, 1918, 1.
*The idea of a Workers’ Congress had been first advanced by Akselrod in 1906, at which time it was rejected by both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks: Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London, 1963), 75–76.
*In fairness it must be noted that a small group of old Mensheviks, among whom were the founders of Russian Social-Democracy—Plekhanov, Akselrod, Potresov, and Vera Zasulich—thought differently. Thus, Akselrod wrote in August 1918 that the Bolshevik regime had degenerated into a “gruesome” counterrevolution. Even so, he and his old Genevan comrades also opposed active resistance to Lenin, on the grounds that it would assist reactionary elements to return to power. A. Ascher, Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 344–46. On Plekhanov’s attitude: Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov (Stanford, Calif., 1963), 352–61. Potresov criticized his Menshevik colleagues then and later (V plenu u illiuzii, Paris, 1927), but he, too, would not participate in active opposition.
*NZh, No. 115/330 (June 16, 1918), 3. According to NV, No. 96/120 (June 19, 1918), 3, the Bolshevik faction of the CEC refused to eject the Mensheviks and SRs from the soviets but consented to their expulsion from the CEC.
*V. Stroev in NZh, No. 119/334 (June 21, 1918), 1. According to one newspaper (Novyi luch, cited in NZh, No. 121/336, June 23, 1918, 1–2), of the 130 delegates initially “elected” to the Petrograd Soviet, 77 were handpicked by the Bolshevik Party: 26 from Red Army units, 8 from supply detachments, and 43 from among Bolshevik functionaries.
†NZh, No. 127/342 (July 2, 1918), 1. Somewhat different figures are given in Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 547, where the total number of deputies is placed at 582, of whom 405 were Bolsheviks, 75 Left SRs, 59 Mensheviks and SRs, and 43 partyless.
13
Brest-Litovsk
The party’s agitators must protest, time and again, against the foul slander, launched by capitalists, that our party allegedly favors a separate peace with Germany.
—Lenin, April 21, 19171
The Bolsheviks’ main concern after October was to solidify their power and to expand it nationwide. This difficult task they had to accomplish within the framework of an active foreign policy, at the center of which stood relations with Germany. In Lenin’s judgment, unless Russia promptly signed an armistice with Germany, his chances of keeping power were close to nil; conversely, such an armistice and the peace that would follow opened for the Bolsheviks the doors to world conquest. In December 1917, when most of his followers rejected the German terms, he argued that the party had no choice but to do the Germans’ bidding. The issue was starkly simple: unless the Bolsheviks made peace, “the peasant army, unbearably exhausted by the war, … will overthrow the socialist workers’ government.”2 The Bolsheviks required a peredyshka, or breathing spell, to consolidate power, to organize the administration, and to build their own armed force.
Proceeding from this assumption, Lenin was prepared to make peace with the Central Powers on any terms as long as they left him a power base. The resistance which he encountered in party ranks grew out of the belief (which he shared) that the Bolshevik Government could survive only if a revolution broke out in Western Europe and the conviction (which he did not fully share) that this was bound to happen at any moment. To make peace with the “imperialist” Central Powers, especially on the humiliating terms which they offered, was to his opponents a betrayal of international socialism; in the long run, it spelled death for revolutionary Russia. In their view, Soviet Russia should not place her own short-term national interests above the interests of the international proletariat. Lenin disagreed:
Our tactics ought to rest… [on the principle] how to ensure more reliably and hopefully for the socialist revolution the possibility of consolidating itself or even surviving in one country until such time as other countries joined in.3
On this issue the Bolshevik Party split in the winter of 1917–18 straight down the middle.
The history of Bolshevik Russia’s relations with the Central Powers, notably Germany, during the twelve months that followed the October coup is of supreme interest because it is on this occasion that the Communists first formulated in theory and worked out in practice the strategy and tactics of their foreign policy.
Western diplomacy traces its origins to the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century. From there diplomatic practices spread to the rest of Europe and in the seventeenth century received codification in international law. Diplomacy was designed to regulate and peacefully resolve disputes among sovereign states; if it failed and arms were resorted to, its task was to keep the level of violence as low as possible and to bring hostilities to an early end. The success of international law rests on the acceptance by all parties of certain principles: