The Bolshevik Government reacted very differently when foreign powers interfered in internal Russian affairs. As early as November 1917, Trotsky, the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, protested Allied “interference” in Russian matters after Allied ambassadors, uncertain who the legitimate government of Russia was, had sent a diplomatic note to the Commander in Chief, General N. N. Dukhonin.6 The Sovnarkom never let an occasion pass without voicing objections to foreign powers violating the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of its country, even as it repeatedly violated this very same principle with its own conduct.
As stated, Lenin was prepared to accept any terms demanded by the Central Powers, but because of widespread suspicions that he was a German agent, he had to proceed with caution. Instead of entering immediately into negotiations with Germany and Austria, therefore, as he would have preferred, he issued appeals to all the belligerent powers to meet and make peace. Actually, general peace in Europe was the last thing he wanted: as we have seen, one reason for his urgency in seizing power in October was fear of just such an eventuality, which would foreclose the chances of unleashing a civil war in Europe. Apparently, he did not feel afraid to call for peace since previous appeals had fallen on deaf ears, including the proposals of President Wilson of December 1916, the peace resolution of the German Reichstag in July 1917, and the papal proposals of August 1917. Once the Allies rejected his offer, as he had every reason to expect they would, he would be free to make his own arrangements.
The curiously named “Decree on Peace,” which Lenin had drafted and the Second Congress of Soviets adopted, proposed to the belligerent powers a three-month armistice. This proposal it coupled with an appeal to the workers of England, France, and Germany with their
many-sided decisive and selflessly energetic activity [to] help us successfully complete the task of peace and, at the same time, the task of liberating the toiling and exploited masses of the population from all slavery and all exploitation.7
George Kennan has labeled this “decree” an act of “demonstrative diplomacy,” intended “not to promote freely accepted and mutually profitable agreements between governments but rather to embarrass other governments and stir up opposition among their own people.”* The Bolsheviks issued other proclamations in the same spirit, urging the citizens of the belligerent powers to rise in rebellion.8 As head of state, Lenin could now advance the program of the Zimmerwald left.
The Bolsheviks transmitted their Peace Decree to the Allied envoys on November 9/22. The Allied governments rejected it out of hand, following which Trotsky informed the Central Powers of Russia’s readiness to open negotiations for an armistice.
The policy of cultivating the Bolsheviks now paid generous dividends for the Germans. Russia’s quest for a separate peace reminded some of them of the “miracle” of 1763, when the death of the pro-French Elizabeth and the accession of the pro-Prussian Peter III led to Russia’s withdrawal from the Seven Years’ War, which saved Frederick the Great from defeat and Prussia from destruction. Russia’s defection from the alliance promised two benefits: the release of hundreds of thousands of troops for transfer to the west and a breach in the British naval blockade. The prospect made a German victory seem once again within grasp. On learning of the Bolshevik power seizure in Petrograd, Ludendorff drew up plans for a decisive offensive on the Western Front in the spring of 1918, with the help of divisions transferred from the Eastern Front. The Kaiser endorsed the plan.9 At this stage, Ludendorff heartily approved of the policy of the Foreign Office, pursued by the architect of the pro-Bolshevik orientation, Richard von Kühlmann, to obtain a quick armistice with Russia followed by a dictated peace.
In the battle of wits between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers, the latter appeared to enjoy all the advantages: stable governments with millions of disciplined troops, as compared with a regime of amateurs and usurpers whom few recognized, with a ragtag army in the process of dissolution. In reality, however, the balance of power was much less one-sided. By the end of 1917, the economic situation of the Central Powers had become so desperate that they were unlikely to stay in the war much longer. Austria-Hungary was in a particularly precarious condition: its Foreign Minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, told the Germans during the Brest negotiations that his country probably could not hold out until the next harvest.10 The Germans were only marginally better off: some German politicians believed that the country would run out of grain by mid-April 1918.11
Germany and Austria also had problems with civilian morale, for the Bolshevik peace appeals aroused great hopes among their peoples. The German Chancellor advised the Kaiser that if talks with the Russians broke down, Austria-Hungary would probably drop out of the war and Germany would experience domestic unrest. The leader of the German Majority Socialists (who supported the war), Philipp Scheidemann, predicted that the failure of peace negotiations with the Russians would “spell the demise of the German Empire.”12 For all these reasons—military, economic, and psychological—the Central Powers needed peace with Russia almost as much as Bolshevik Russia needed peace with them. These facts, of which the Russians could not have been fully aware, indicate that those Bolsheviks who opposed Lenin’s capitulationist policy in favor of stringing the Germans and Austrians along were not as unrealistic as they are usually depicted. The enemy also negotiated with a gun to his head.
The Bolsheviks enjoyed a further advantage in that they had intimate knowledge of their opponent. Having spent years in the West, they were familiar with Germany’s domestic problems, her political and business personalities, her party alignments. Nearly all of them spoke one or more Western languages. Because Germany was the main center of socialist theory and practice, they knew Germany at least as well as if not better than their own country, and if the occasion presented itself, the Sovnarkom would have gladly assumed power there. This knowledge enabled them to exploit discords inside the opponent’s camp by pitting businessmen against the generals or left socialists against right socialists, and inciting German workers to revolution in readily understandable language. By contrast, the Germans knew next to nothing of those with whom they were about to enter into negotiations. The Bolsheviks, who had just emerged into the limelight, were to them a gaggle of unkempt, garrulous, and impractical intellectuals. The Germans consistently misinterpreted Bolshevik moves and underestimated their cunning. One day they saw them as revolutionary hotheads, whom they could manipulate at will, and the next as realists who did not believe their own slogans and were ready for businesslike deals. In their relations during 1917–18, the Bolsheviks repeatedly outwitted the Germans by assuming a protective coloring that disoriented the Germans and whetted their appetites.
To understand Germany’s Soviet policy a few words need to be said about her so-called Russlandpolitik. For while her immediate interest in making peace with Russia derived from military considerations, Germany also had long-range geopolitical designs on that country. German political strategists had traditionally shown a keen interest in Russia: it was not by accident that before World War I no country had a tradition of Russian scholarship remotely approaching the German. Conservatives regarded it as axiomatic that their country’s national security required a weak Russia. For one, only if the Russians were unable to threaten Germany with a second front could her forces confidently take on the French and the “Anglo-Saxons” in the struggle for global hegemony. Second, to be a serious contender in Weltpolitik, Germany required access to Russia’s natural resources, including foodstuffs, which she could obtain on satisfactory terms only if Russia became her client. Having established a national state very late, Germany had missed out in the imperial scramble. Her only realistic chance of matching the economic prowess of her rivals lay in expanding eastward, into the vastness of Eurasia. German bankers and industrialists looked on Russia as a potential colony, a kind of surrogate Africa. They drafted for their government memoranda in which they stressed how important it was for victorious Germany to import, free of tariffs, Russian high-grade iron ore and manganese, as well as to exploit Russian agriculture and mines.13