The new German Chancellor found such brazen appeals to subversion intolerable. By now even the Foreign Office had its fill of the Bolsheviks. At an interagency meeting in October, the Foreign Office for the first time agreed to a break with Moscow. A memorandum drafted by its staff toward the end of that month justified the change in policy as follows:
We who are in bad odor for having invented Bolshevism and for having let it loose against Russia should now, at the last moment, at least cease to extend any longer a protective hand over it, in order not to forfeit also all the sympathies of future Russia …218
Germany had ample justification for breaking with Moscow, inasmuch as Ioffe, who even in the spring and summer of 1918 had pursued subversive activities on its soil, now openly stoked the fires of revolution. As he later boasted, at this time his embassy’s agitational-propagandistic work
increasingly assumed the character of decisive revolutionary preparation for an armed uprising. Apart from the conspiratorial groups of Spartacists, in Germany, and specifically in Berlin, there existed since the January [1917] strike—of course, illegally—soviets of workers’ deputies.… With these soviets the embassy maintained constant communication.… The [Berlin] Soviet assumed that an uprising would be opportune only when the entire Berlin proletariat was well armed. We had to fight this. We had to demonstrate that if one awaited such a moment then no uprising would ever occur, that it is sufficient to arm only the vanguard of the proletariat.… Nonetheless, the striving of the German proletariat to arm itself was entirely legitimate and sensible and the embassy assisted it in every way.219
This assistance took the form of money and weapons. When the Soviet Embassy departed, it inadvertently left behind a document showing that between September 21 and October 31, 1918, it had purchased, for 105,000 deutsche marks, 210 handguns and 27,000 bullets.220
The declaration of the supreme soviet legislative body that it intended to assist the triumph of a revolutionary government in Germany, and Ioffe’s efforts to implement this intention, should have sufficed for a break of diplomatic relations. But the German Foreign Office wanted more incontrovertible grounds and to this end it provoked an incident. Aware that Soviet couriers had for months brought to the embassy agitational materials for distribution in Germany, it arranged for a diplomatic box from Russia to drop and break, as if by accident, while being unloaded at a Berlin railroad station. This was done on the evening of November 4. Out of the damaged crate flew a shower of propaganda material exhorting German workers and soldiers to rise and overthrow their government.221 Ioffe was told he would have to leave Germany at once. Although he displayed appropriate indignation, before departing for Moscow he did not forget to leave Dr. Oskar Cohn, a member of the Independent Socialist Party and a virtual resident of the Soviet mission, 500,000 deutsche marks and 150,000 rubles, to supplement the sum of 10 million rubles previously allocated “for the needs of the German revolution.”*
On November 13, two days after the armistice on the Western Front, Moscow unilaterally abrogated both the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the Supplementary Treaty.222 The Allies also had Germany renounce the Brest Treaty as part of the Versailles settlement.223
The Russian Revolution was never a national event confined to Russia: from the moment the February Revolution broke out, but especially after the Bolsheviks seized Petrograd, it became internationalized and this for two reasons.
Russia had been a major theater of war. Its unilateral withdrawal from the war affected the most vital interests of both belligerent blocs: for the Central Powers it raised the hope of victory, for the Allies the specter of defeat. As long as the war continued, therefore, neither party could be indifferent to what happened to Russia: geographic location alone prevented Russia from escaping the maelstrom of global conflict. The Bolsheviks contributed to their country’s involvement in this conflict by playing off the two belligerent blocs against each other. In the spring of 1918, they discussed with the Allies the formation on their territory of an anti-German multinational army, they agreed to the occupation of Murmansk, and invited help in building the Red Army. In the fall, they requested German military intervention to free the northern ports from the Allies and to crush the Russian Volunteer Army. Time and again, the Germans had to intervene, with political support and money, to prevent the Bolshevik regime from collapsing. Helfferich, referring to the Soviet regime’s crisis of July–August 1918, conceded in his memoirs that “the strongest supporter of the Bolshevik regime during this critical time, even if unconsciously and unintentionally, was the German Government.”224 In view of these facts, it cannot be seriously maintained that foreign powers “intervened” in Russia in 1917–18 for the purpose of toppling the Bolsheviks from power. They intervened, first and foremost, in order to tip the balance of power on the Western Front in their favor, either by reactivating the front in Russia, in the case of the Allies, or by keeping it quiescent, in the case of the Central Powers. The Bolsheviks actively participated in this foreign involvement, and invited it now from this party, now from that, depending on what their momentary interests called for. German “intervention,” which they welcomed and solicited, very likely saved them from suffering the fate of the Provisional Government.
Second, the Bolsheviks from the outset declared that national borders in the era of socialist revolution and global class war had become meaningless. They issued appeals to foreign nationals to rise and overthrow their governments; they allocated state funds for this purpose; and where they were in a position to do, which for the time being was mainly Germany, they actively promoted revolution. By challenging the legitimacy of all foreign governments, the Bolsheviks invited all foreign governments to challenge theirs. If in fact no power chose to avail itself of that right in 1917–18, it was because none of them had an interest in so doing. The Germans found the Bolsheviks serving their purposes and propped them whenever they ran into trouble; the Allies were busy fighting for their lives. The question posed by one historian—“How … did the Soviet government, bereft of significant military force in the midst of what was until then mankind’s most destructive war, succeed in surviving the first year of the revolution?”225—answers itself: this most destructive war completely overshadowed Russian events. The Germans supported the Bolshevik regime; the Allies had other concerns.
Hence, it is misleading to see foreign involvement in Russia in 1917–18 in terms of hostile “intervention.” The Bolshevik Government both invited such intervention and aggressively intervened on its own account. Although the great powers, yearning for a return to normalcy, were reluctant to acknowledge it, the Russian Revolution never was a purely internal affair of Russia, important only insofar as it affected the outcome of the war. Russia’s new rulers made certain that it would reverberate around the globe. The November 1918 armistice offered them unprecedented opportunities to organize revolutions in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and wherever else they could do so. Although these efforts failed for the time being, they ensured that the world would know no respite and no return to pre-1914 life.
One further thing needs to be said about foreign involvement on Russian soil during 1918. In all the talk of what the Allies did in Russia, which really was not very much, it is usually forgotten what they did for Russia, which was a great deal. After Russia had reneged on her commitments and left them to fight the Central Powers on their own, the Allies suffered immense human and material losses. As a result of Russia’s dropping out of the war, the Germans withdrew from the inactive Eastern Front enough divisions to increase their effectives in the west by nearly one-fourth (from 150 to 192 divisions).226 These reinforcements allowed them to mount a ferocious offensive. In the great battles on the Western Front in the spring and summer of 1918—St.-Quentin, the Lys, the Aisne, the Matz, the Marne, and Château-Thierry—the British, French, and Americans lost hundreds of thousands of men. This sacrifice finally brought Germany to her knees.* And the defeat of Germany, to which it had made no contribution, not only enabled the Soviet Government to annul the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and recover most of the lands which it had been forced to give up at Brest but also saved Soviet Russia from being converted into a colony, a kind of Eurasian Africa, which fate Germany had intended for her.