We have great revolutionary experience, and from that experience we have learned that it is necessary to follow the tactics of relentless advance whenever objective conditions allow it.… But we have to adopt the tactic of procrastination, the slow gathering of forces when the objective conditions do not offer the possibility of making an appeal to the general relentless advance.105
Yet another fundamental principle of Bolshevik foreign policy was to be revealed after the enactment of the Brest Treaty: the principle that Communist interests abroad had to be promoted by the application of divide et impera, or, in Lenin’s words, by the
most circumspect, careful, cautious, skillful exploitation of every, even the smallest “crack” among one’s enemies, of every conflict of interest among the bourgeoisie of the various countries, among the various groups or various species of the bourgeoisie within individual countries …106
*The earliest Soviet polpredy were stationed in neutral countries: V. V. Vorovskii in Stockholm, and Ia. A. Berzin in Berne. After the Brest Treaty had been ratified, A. A. Ioffe took over the Berlin mission. The Bolsheviks tried to appoint first Litvinov and then Kamenev to the Court of St. James’s, but both were rejected. France also would not accept a Soviet representative until after the Civil War.
*George Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (Princeton, N.J., 1956), 75–76. In early November, the Bolsheviks began to publish the secret treaties between Russia and the Allies from the files of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With their appeals, the Bolsheviks emulated the French revolutionaries who in November 1792 pledged “brotherhood and assistance” to any nation desirous of “regaining” its freedom.
*J. Buchan, A History of the Great War, IV (Boston, 1922), 135. The Armistice Agreement forbade “major” transferals of troops from or to the Russian front while it was in force.
†According to the French general Henri A. Niessel, the Allies intercepted German cables from Petrograd to Brest and from them learned how desperately the Germans desired peace: General [Henri A.] Niessel, Le Triomphe des Bolchéviks et la Paix de Brest-Litovsk: Souvenirs, 1917–1918 (Paris, 1940), 187–88.
*The Soviet Government’s default on all state obligations, domestic as well as foreign, was announced on January 28, 1918. The sum of foreign debts annulled by this measure has been estimated at 13 billion rubles or $6.5 billion: G. G. Shvittau, Revoliutsiia i Narodnoe Khoziaistvo v Rossii (1917–1921) (Leipzig, 1922), 337.
*Text: J. Degras, ed., Documents on Russian Foreign Policy, I (London, 1951), 22. The money was placed at the disposal of Vorovskii.
*Lenin, PSS, XXXV, 478; LS, XI, 41; Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 (Vienna-Munich, 1966), 22. Stalin, who supported Lenin, said that a revolution in the West was not in sight. The protocols of this conference are said to have disappeared. Isaac Steinberg says that the Left SRs liked the “neither war nor peace” formula and had a hand in its formulation: Als ich Volkskommissar war (Munich, 1929), 190–92.
*Sovetsko-Germanskie Otnosheniia ot peregovorov v Brest-Litovske do podpisaniia Rapall’skogo dogovora, I (Moscow, 1968), 328. Although inspired by Kaiserlingk’s dispatches from Petrograd, this anti-Semitic remark echoed the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was soon to become favorite reading fare of the simpleminded in quest of an “explanation” for the World War and Communism.
*Each of the three Allied ambassadors left memoirs: George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, 2 vols. (London, 1923); David Francis, Russia from the American Embassy (New York, 1921); and Joseph Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1933).
†The sentence was not carried out after Sadoul had returned home and joined the French Communist Party. His revolutionary experiences are recorded in an interesting book, first published in Moscow, in the form of letters to Albert Thoma: Notes sur la Révolution Bolchevique (Paris, 1920), supplemented by Quarante Lettres de Jacques Sadoul (Paris, 1922).
*Letter dated April 25, 1918, in the Raymond Robins Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. In responding, Lenin expressed confidence that “proletarian democracy … will crush … the imperialist-capitalist system in the New and Old Worlds”: Ministerstvo Inostrannykh Del SSSR, Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, I (Moscow, 1957), 276.
†George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, N.J., 1958), 237–38. In light of the above evidence it is difficult to agree with Kennan that Robins’s “feelings with respect to the Soviet government did not rest on any partiality to socialism as a doctrine” or that he entertained no “predilection for communist ideology”: Ibid, 240–41. Robins later eulogized Stalin and was received by him in 1933. See Anne Vincent Meiburger, Efforts of Raymond Robins Toward the Recognition of Soviet Russia and the Outlawry of War, 1917–1933 (Washington, D.C., 1958), 193–99.
‡See his Memoirs of a British Agent (London, 1935) and The Two Revolutions: An Eyewitness Account (London, 1967).
§A. Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations Franco-Soviétiques, 1917–1924 (Paris, 1981), 53. Niessel does not mention these facts in his memoirs, Le Triomphe des Bolcheviks.
*In fulfillment of the peace terms, in mid-April Moscow proposed to the Ukrainian Government the opening of negotiations leading to mutual recognition. For various reasons having to do with internal Ukrainian politics, these negotiations got underway only on May 23. On June 14, 1918, the governments of Soviet Russia and the Ukrainian Republic signed a provisional peace treaty, which was to be followed by final peace negotiations, but these never took place: The New York Times, June 16, 1918, 3.
14
The Revolution Internationalized
To obtain an armistice now means to conquer the whole world.
—Lenin, September 19171
Although in time the Russian Revolution would exert an even greater influence on world history than the French, initially it attracted much less attention. This can be explained by two factors: the greater prominence of France and the different timing of the two events.
In the late eighteenth century, France was politically and culturally the leading power in Europe: the Bourbons were the premier dynasty on the Continent, the embodiment of royal absolutism, and French was the language of cultured society. At first, the great powers were delighted with the way the Revolution destabilized France, but they soon came to realize that it posed a threat also to their own stability. The arrest of the King, the September 1792 massacres, and the appeals of the Girondins to foreign nations to overthrow their tyrants left no doubt that the Revolution was more than a mere change of government. There followed a cycle of wars which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, ending in a Bourbon restoration. The concern of European monarchs for the fate of the imprisoned French king is understandable given that their authority rested on the principle of legitimacy and that once this principle was abandoned in favor of popular sovereignty none of them could feel safe. True, the American colonies had proclaimed democracy earlier, but the United States was an overseas territory, not the leading continental power.