Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk The ...

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Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Litovskgovernment should fall because of this.” 12 Lenin, however, was playing his owngame in the negotiations and seeking to obtain a temporary truce with the Germanimperial government, seeing in this his only means of preserving power in hisown hands and of splitting up the unified capitalist world, i.e., his aim was toform an alliance with Germany against England and France.Liebknecht saw the promise of victory in a German revolution. Lenin saw it inplaying on the contradictions between the Central Powers and the Triple Entente.Liebknecht was interested in seeing Germany lose the war as quickly as possible.Lenin, in signing a separate peace, wanted to see Germany avoid losing the warfor as long as possible. He feared that Soviet rule in Russia would be overthrownby the joint efforts of Germany and the Triple Entente as soon as a peace treatywas signed on the Western Front. 13 But in signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk anddelaying Germany’s defeat, Lenin was doing exactly what Liebknecht hadeffectively accused him of doing: sabotaging the German revolution. 14 It is notsurprising that the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty led to a split within theBolshevik Party and within the Soviet government and to the formation of a leftopposition – an opposition that, for the first and last time, operated openly andofficially within the Bolshevik Party as an autonomous organization and evenhad its own newspaper. Meanwhile, Lenin, who had emerged nominally victoriousand forced the party to agree to the peace treaty, began losing his power over theparty. Decisions carried out by the Bolshevik leadership were made more andmore often against his will. His own brothers-in-arms could not forgive him soeasily for the “rotten compromise” with the Kaiser’s government and the lostchance for a quick revolution in Germany.The theoretical and ideological defects of Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk policy, however,were far less noticeable than the practical ones. Despite imposing extremelydifficult conditions on Russia and the Bolshevik Party, the Treaty of Brest-Litovskhad resulted neither in the coveted armistice, nor in the “respite” promised byLenin. From the point of view of the German leadership, the Brest-Litovskagreement was a “military measure and served merely as a means of aiding theWestern Front, by eliminating the Eastern front and strengthening the Westernfront, while simultaneously using the Eastern districts for economic purposes inorder to continue the war.” 15 This being the case, the deterioration of Germany’sposition in the West had to increase its appetite in the East. After the peace treatywas signed, military activity did not stop for a single day on most of the territoryof the former Russian empire. Germany continued presenting new ultimatumsand occupied entire districts and cities located to the east of the demarcation lineestablished by the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk turned out tobe merely an agreement on paper precisely because the two main partners in thepeace talks – the Soviet and German governments – did not take the agreementseriously, did not consider it final, and most importantly, signed it not in order tosecure a peace, but only in order to continue the war, but under conditions thatwere more favorable to them. The Bolsheviks were thinking of a revolutionary10
Introductionwar, the Germans of a war for a stable peace. As it turned out, even if the Treatyof Brest-Litovsk did provide a respite, then it was only for Germany, and onlyuntil November 1918.There is no point in arguing that Lenin could have foreseen the consequences ofthe Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But it is evident that the majority of the party’s activistssaw the worst of their apprehensions realized. They had supported Trotsky’sformula “neither war nor peace” before the peace treaty was signed. By therevolutionaries’ standards, Trotsky’s position was moderate. He did notcompromise Russian Bolsheviks in the eyes of the “German proletariat” by signinga peace treaty with the Kaiser’s imperialist government, but he also did not rushinto Bukharin’s impetuous adventurism, lacking the necessary strength. Like theLeft Communists, Trotsky believed that signing a peace treaty would not guaranteethe cessation of military operations, that the revolutionaries had no reason to trustthe “imperialists,” that Germany would continue to take offensive action when itcould. And under such circumstances, it was better to sign no documents at all,but to appeal to the proletariat of all countries and even to make use of the TripleEntente’s assistance.During those months there was a widespread view in revolutionary circles thatGermany was in no condition to take offensive action, and that even if it didmanage to launch an offensive, it would not be able to hold on to occupiedterritories without paying for this with an uprising in Berlin. The Bolsheviksbecame even more confident of this after the assassination of the Germanambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, in Moscow on July 6, 1918: after theGerman ultimatum that was received in response to the killing was categoricallyrejected by the Soviet government, the whole incident was consigned to oblivionby the Germans themselves. Subsequently, until the Brest-Litovsk treaty wasannulled first by the German government (October 5, 1918), and then by theSoviet government (November 13, 1918, two days after Germany’s capitulationin the First World War), a legal truce endured between Russia and Germany. InOctober-November, the truce was terminated, although Germany and Russia didnot declare war on each other. The two countries thus established formal relationswith one another that looked a great deal like Trotsky’s formula – “neither warnor peace.”Such a state of affairs, according to Trotsky’s plan, was of course nothing morethan a respite, preparing the Bolshevik Party for its next move: revolutionary war(except by contrast with Lenin’s respite, Trotsky’s respite did not have to be paidfor by the Bolsheviks with an agreement with “imperialists”). This revolutionarywar began on November 13, 1918, when the Bolsheviks launched a decisivewestward offensive. It was more than successful, and by February 1919, Soviettroops had passed through Vilno and reached the border of Eastern Prussia. Bythis time, Soviet republics had already been proclaimed in a number of northernand central German cities.11
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Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk The ...

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