The impatiently awaited American response to the inquiry of March 5 arrived on the opening day of the Fourth Congress of Soviets (March 14). Robins handed it to Lenin, who had it immediately published in Pravda. It was a noncommittal note, addressed not to the Soviet Government but to the Congress of Soviets, presumably on the assumption that this body was the equivalent of the U.S. legislature. It refused for the present to grant Soviet Russia aid, but accorded the regime something close to informal recognition. The American President wrote:
May I now take advantage of the meeting of the Congress of the Soviets to express the sincere sympathy which the people of the United States feel for the Russian people at this moment when the German power has been thrust in to interrupt and turn back the whole struggle for freedom and substitute the wishes of Germany for the purpose of the people of Russia?
Although the government of the United States is, unhappily, not now in a position to render the direct and effective aid it would wish to render, I beg to assure the people of Russia through the congress that it will avail itself of every opportunity to secure for Russia once more complete sovereignty and independence in her own affairs, and full restoration to her great role in the life of Europe and the modern world.
The whole heart of the people of the United States is with the people of Russia in the attempt to free themselves forever from autocratic government and become the masters of their own life.
Woodrow Wilson
Washington, March 11, 191897
The British Government reacted in a like spirit.98
This was not what the Bolsheviks had expected: they had overestimated their ability to play one “imperialist” camp against the other. Hoping that perhaps Wilson’s cable was only the first installment, with more to come, Lenin kept on badgering Robins for a follow-up message. When it became obvious that no more would be forthcoming, Lenin drafted an insulting reply to the American “people” (rather than their President) in which he promised that the revolution in their country would not be long in coming:
The congress expresses its gratitude to the American people, above all to the laboring and exploited classes of the United States, for the sympathy expressed to the Russian people by President Wilson through the Congress of Soviets in the days of severe trials.
The Russian Socialistic Federative Republic of Soviets takes advantage of President Wilson’s communication to express to all peoples perishing and suffering from the horrors of imperialistic war its warm sympathy and firm belief that the happy time is not far distant when the laboring masses of all countries will throw off the yoke of capitalism and will establish a socialistic state of society, which alone is capable of securing just and lasting peace, as well as the culture and well-being of all laboring people.99
Amid peals of laughter, the Congress of Soviets unanimously approved the resolution (with two minor changes), which Zinoviev described as a “resounding slap” in the face of American capitalism.100
The congress duly ratified the Brest Treaty. The motion to this effect received 724 votes, 10 percent less than there were Bolsheviks present, but more than a two-thirds majority; 276 delegates, or one-quarter, nearly all of them Left SRs, with the addition perhaps of some Left Communists, voted against; 118 delegates abstained. After the results had been announced, the Left SRs declared that they were withdrawing from the Sovnarkom. This ended the fiction of a “coalition government,” although for the time being the Left SRs continued to work in lower-level Soviet institutions, including the Cheka.
In a secret vote, the congress approved the resolution of the Bolshevik Central Committee authorizing the government to renounce the Brest Treaty and declare war at its discretion.
Lenin has been widely credited by the Bolsheviks with prophetic vision in accepting a humiliating treaty that gave him the time he needed and then collapsed of its own weight. When the Bolsheviks renounced the Brest Treaty on November 13, 1918, following Germany’s capitulation to the Western Allies, his stock in the Bolshevik movement rose to unprecedented heights. Nothing he had done contributed more to his reputation for infallibility: he never again had to threaten resignation to have his way.
And yet there is nothing to indicate that in pressuring his colleagues to accede to German demands Lenin had expected an imminent collapse of the Central Powers. In none of his speeches and writings between December 1917 and March 1918, private and public, when he used every conceivable argument to bring the opposition around, did he claim that time was running out for Germany and that Soviet Russia would soon regain all that she had to give up. Quite the contrary. In the spring and summer of 1918 Lenin seemed to have shared the optimism of the German High Command that they were about to deal the Allies a crushing defeat. Leonid Krasin certainly was not speaking only for himself when on his return from Germany early in September 1918 he assured the readers of Izvestiia that, thanks to her superb organization and discipline, Germany would have no difficulty staying in the war yet another, fifth, year.101 The Bolshevik faith in Germany’s victory is evidenced by the elaborate accords that Moscow concluded with Berlin in August 1918, accords viewed by both countries as a prelude to a formal alliance.102 How inconceivable Germany’s defeat appeared to Moscow is attested to by the fact that as late as September 30, 1918, when Imperial Germany lay in her death throes, Lenin authorized the transfer to Berlin of assets valued at 312.5 million deutsche marks, as provided for by the August 27 supplementary accord to the Brest Treaty, although he could have delayed this payment with impunity and then canceled it. One week before Germany sued for an armistice, the Soviet Government reconfirmed that German citizens could withdraw deposits from Soviet banks and take them out of the country.103 The inescapable conclusion from this evidence is that Lenin bowed to the German Diktat, not because he believed that Germany would be unable to enforce it for very long, but, on the contrary, because he expected Germany to win and wanted to be on the winning side.
The circumstances surrounding the Brest-Litovsk Treaty furnish the classic model of what was to become Soviet foreign policy. Its principles may be summarized as follows:
1. The highest priority at all times is to be assigned to the retention of political power—that is, sovereign authority and the control of the state apparatus over some part of one’s national territory. This is the irreducible minimum. No price is too high to secure it; for its sake anything and everything can be sacrificed: human lives, land and resources, national honor.
2. Ever since Russia had undergone the October Revolution and turned into the center (“oasis”) of world socialism, its security and interests take precedence over the security and interests of every other country, cause, or party, including those of the “international proletariat.” Soviet Russia is the embodiment of the international socialist movement and the base from which the socialist cause is promoted.
3. To purchase temporary advantages, it is permissible to make peace with “imperialist” countries, but such peace must be treated as an armed truce, to be broken when the situation changes in one’s favor. As long as there is capitalism, Lenin said in May 1918, international agreements are “scraps of paper.”104 Even in periods of nominal peace, hostilities should be pursued by unconventional means with a view to undermining the governments with which one has signed accords.
4. Politics being warfare, foreign policy, as much as domestic policy, must always be conducted unemotionally, with the closest attention being paid to the “correlation of forces”: