Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (18 page)

The Germans tried to hurry things along but were under instructions to observe diplomatic proprieties. They soon saw that Ioffe, liaising regularly with Trotsky, was hoping to gain time for revolutionary upheavals to occur in Berlin and Vienna. Indicating that their patience was not inexhaustible, they threatened that unless the Soviet leaders submitted quickly to their terms they would face the might of their forces.

Trotsky decided that his presence in Brest-Litovsk had become essential and he joined the talks on 27 December 1917. Smartly attired as usual, he stepped off the train with a bright scarf tucked into a dark fur coat; his shoes were polished as if for an evening ball. He was a virtuoso performer. He spoke in his fluent German whenever he wanted to get his meaning across quickly to the military monoglots. He picked holes in the draft documents produced by the Germans. Why on earth could the translators not see the difference between words like ‘nation’, ‘people’ and ‘state’?
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Over the table from him sat men who had acted haughtily towards Ioffe. Trotsky presented them with a different personality. He appeared indifferent to their threats; and although he was invariably polite he left more than a suspicion that he was treating them condescendingly. They had assumed that he would be embarrassed by the inclusion of the Ukrainian delegates who turned up on the same day as him. Not a bit of it. He accepted their participation, mentioning only that he expected that the territorial allegiance of the Black Sea region would be decided by a plebiscite of its residents.
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Trotsky gave an actor’s display of calm confidence. It was hard to believe that he spoke for a state that was utterly incapable of repelling any German invasion.

His stay in Brest-Litovsk coincided with Lenin’s decision to leave Petrograd for a few days’ holiday in Finland, which provoked the sardonic comment from Jacques Sadoul: ‘And so here we are without a dictator.’
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As soon as Georgi Chicherin arrived from England he deputized for Trotsky at the People’s Commissariat, so that Soviet foreign affairs were entrusted to steadier hands than Zalkind could supply.

Yevgenia Shelepina became Trotsky’s ‘courier extraordinary’. She had grown bored when Trotsky left, and asked Lenin and Stalin for a job that would bring some excitement. Shelepina was depressed by what she saw in Brest-Litovsk:

The town was a dead town. All the houses were broken in some way or other, some with their roofs blown off, others with their walls blown in. Nothing had been done to mend the houses, but the streets had been tidied up, so that there was an oppressive orderliness even in the disorder of the broken town. There were only two or three little shops open, selling necessary things, tobacco and thread, and such things, and then there was a bookstore, over which, of course, Radek spent more time than over all the rest. When he was buying cigarettes, I told him to buy some for me. He told me the permission given him by the Commandant did not allow him to buy any more.
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The signs of distress near the front line surprised her. Time and again she caught sight of ill-kempt Russian POWs being marched around by their captors. Shelepina felt like pulling a gun on the Germans – having run out of cigarettes, she was agitated by the absence of nicotine in her bloodstream. Radek, by contrast, was never without a well-stocked tobacco pouch and called out to the same POWs: he never missed a chance to spread the message of revolutionary socialism.
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Trotsky brought order to the Soviet delegation and raised its morale. He put an end to the growing practice of taking meals with the negotiators of the Central Powers. He saw that if he wanted to maintain a firm bargaining stance, it would not help if his team became too friendly with the Germans. He told his comrades to take greater care with their appearance. The Germans had to feel that Bolsheviks were more than just a rabble from the street.

He had seen enough of conditions near Brest-Litovsk to know how difficult it would be to restore the Russian armed forces. Lenin
agreed. Although he went nowhere near the eastern front, he drew the same conclusion from a survey among the armed forces.
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The only hope lay in dragging out the talks and using them as an instrument of propaganda abroad. Trotsky’s slogan for the Bolshevik Committee was ‘neither war nor peace’. The German high command refused to accept this affront to military and diplomatic convention. Annoyed by the Soviet tactics, the Central Powers on 6 February signed a separate peace with the Ukrainian Rada. Whether Trotsky liked it or not, Ukraine could no longer be brought under Soviet rule. The Germans then issued an ultimatum: either the communist leaders accepted the terms on offer or they would face an immediate invasion of Russia. This was intended to bring Trotsky to heel, but he had a surprise of his own for them. When the talks resumed on 10 February, instead of responding to the ultimatum, he declared the state of war between Russia and the Central Powers to be ‘terminated’. The eastern front was no more. The Russians were withdrawing from the armed conflict regardless of the threats being made by the Germans.
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Trotsky’s statement was more than Richard von Kühlmann, Germany’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, could bear. A government facing invasion had sent a plenipotentiary to Brest-Litovsk who refused to indicate his response to the threat of military attack. This was still an age when empires and nations declared war on others before waging it. The Blitzkrieg was invented by Hitler: no diplomat in 1918 felt comfortable about initiating armed conflict in Europe without having completed the formalities of mutual communication. The rest of the world was a different matter, and European powers had marched into Africa and Asia in their pell-mell scramble for colonial conquests in the late nineteenth century. It therefore took some minutes for Kühlmann to collect his thoughts and point out that wars could not end without agreements on borders, trade and a host of other practical matters. Trotsky’s rhetoric would not be allowed to remove the current question on the agenda for Sovnarkom. Was it going to be war or peace? But Trotsky was unbending and curtly announced that his delegation had exhausted the powers invested in it. Then he and his comrades picked up their papers and left the room.
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Since Trotsky’s démarche had not been prearranged with the Party Central Committee or Sovnarkom, he had to return to Petrograd fast so as to argue his case. He knew that he could expect grave criticism from Lenin in the Central Committee. Lenin was no less
impatient than Kühlmann about the need to make a clear choice between war and peace. Having disbanded the old Russian Army in December, Sovnarkom set about forming a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army two months later; but the first small, ill-trained units were undeniably in no condition to withstand attack by German military divisions. In Lenin’s view Trotsky was putting the October Revolution in peril. By 14 February the Soviet leadership was noting that the German missions in Petrograd were getting ready to leave the city. This was interpreted as a sign that invasion was imminent. Lenin snarled that a peace treaty had to be signed before all was lost.

The Bolshevik Central Committee met on 17 February and conducted a congested sequence of votes. Lenin made steady but excruciatingly slow progress. Everyone conceded in principle that, under certain conditions, a peace could be signed with Germany. The conditions were not specified; but even Bukharin was recorded as acknowledging that the signing of a separate treaty with the Central Powers should not be entirely dismissed in principle as an acceptable manoeuvre. Nobody any longer held out unconditionally for a policy of revolutionary war. Indeed three out of eleven voters at the Central Committee – Bukharin, Ioffe and Georgi Lomov – abstained from registering their opinion on the matter on the grounds that Lenin had put the question in an incorrect fashion.
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But if they objected to his blunt wording, it is hard to see how else he could have phrased things. The Germans had made clear that the Bolshevik party had to agree to a separate peace treaty or else endure a military offensive. What would Bukharin and his sympathizers do if the Germans were to attack? They answered with their silence, and it became obvious that they at last saw that the idea of revolutionary war throughout Europe was unrealizable.

Trotsky’s hope was that something might be done to elicit practical support from the Western Allies since Russia could no longer defend itself without external assistance. He and the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart met frequently, and Trotsky railed against the United Kingdom’s schemes to assist the enemies of Sovnarkom. His passion seemed sincere to Lockhart, who implored London to ignore the wildness of Bolshevik policies and consider help for the Soviet military effort. Trotsky talked to him ceaselessly about resuming the war against Germany – and Lockhart was persuaded that this would happen sooner or later.
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When Trotsky requested help from the French, Lockhart saw this as ‘sufficient proof’ of his
good intentions on the eastern front. Lockhart also passed on Trotsky’s promise to aid the Allied cause by fomenting revolution in Berlin.
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Earlier in the month, Kamenev had been sent off to France on a diplomatic assignment to win favour among the Western Allies. Kamenev was the first leading Bolshevik to leave Russia since the October Revolution. A French reporter left this account of his appearance:

An elongated oval head, myopic blue eyes which are generally soft under a gold-mounted pince-nez and become wilful and penetrative when the discussion is animated. A little goatee, a blazingly blond and strong moustache falling over a mouth which they half cover, long, bulky, straw-coloured eyebrows, light brown hair. From a distance, a surly air but, from close by, a man who is always amiable and smiling.
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Kamenev left Petrograd accompanied by Zalkind, who was designated Soviet plenipotentiary to Switzerland. Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, confirmed in the House of Commons that they could come to London on their way to Paris.
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But, on setting foot in England, Kamenev immediately met with obstacles as the Foreign Office refused point-blank to talk to him and he was ignored by
The Times
in an attempt to deny him the oxygen of publicity. The
Manchester Guardian
interviewed him, however, and Kamenev displayed his ebullience by stating that if the Germans marched on Russia the workers would fight them in the streets of Petrograd. He claimed that, even if a separate peace was signed, the cause of the Western Allies would not suffer damage since it would take many months to send back POWs to Germany. He also predicted that Ukraine would never deliver grain to Germany unless promised industrial products in return.
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Kamenev was talking nonsense but received support from the anti-war Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald, who protested against the way that customs officers in Aberdeen had treated him. The sum of £5,000 was removed from his possession until such time as he left British shores and there was a rumour that he was relieved of an Orthodox Russian Bible and a box of matches. Supposedly he was bringing the Bible for Litvinov.
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(This was unlikely since Kamenev and Litvinov were atheists by doctrine and Jews by birth, although possibly the Bible was going to be used for the purpose of encrypting
messages to and from Russia.) MacDonald spoke up in the House of Commons for Sovnarkom’s democratic credentials and claimed that the Soviet form of government was the only form of authority with a chance of survival in Russia. Lord Robert Cecil, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, replied that a personal search of Sovnarkom’s envoy was entirely appropriate in the current situation. Mac-Donald kept up his line of questioning. Why were police detectives hanging around Kamenev in London? Why did the authorities allow the allegation to go unchallenged that Litvinov had been mixed up in the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery? In all innocence MacDonald called this a ‘vile slander’. Kamenev wrote a letter to the
Manchester Guardian
denying that the Bolsheviks were apathetic about losing Ukraine. In due course, he asserted, the old multinational state and its peoples would be brought back together.

The French gave a dusty reply to Kamenev’s and Zalkind’s request to cross the English Channel. The two Bolsheviks had no choice but to return to Russia. Yet nothing dampened their mood. Paul Vaucher, correspondent for
L’Illustration
magazine, travelled on the same boat and noted their complete confidence that the German workers were about to overthrow their rulers.
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Lenin was still some way from victory in the Central Committee – and Kamenev’s absence did not help since he was one of the sturdiest advocates of a separate peace along with Stalin, Zinoviev and Sverdlov. The resistance led by Trotsky and Bukharin remained strong. On 18 February, albeit by the slim margin of seven against six, the Central Committee voted against resuming talks with the Germans.
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By the evening, news was coming through that the Germans had carried out their ultimatum and had advanced to occupy Dvinsk. Trotsky wanted to cable Berlin and Vienna and ask about the further intentions of the Central Powers. Sverdlov and Stalin objected that time was too short for the Bolsheviks to wait for an answer and that the Brest-Litovsk talks had to be resumed immediately.
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The Central Committee, after yet another discussion, overturned its entire previous policy and voted by seven to five for signing an immediate peace with Germany. The decision was to be cabled to the enemy without delay. Lenin and Trotsky were instructed to draft the text. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were to be informed of what the Bolshevik leaders were now planning.
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All this time the menace to Petrograd was growing as German forces moved onward unopposed. The cables received on 19 February were grim. Minsk, Polotsk, Lutsk, Dubno
and Rovno fell to the Germans without resistance. Pskov had to be evacuated. The Austrians organized an offensive and took Kamenets-Podolsk; and Romanian armed forces crossed the River Dniester and cut into Ukraine. A Turkish army marched on Trebizond, which had been occupied by the Russians since 1916. Lenin’s dark predictions seemed about to be fulfilled. The Germans, now occupying Mogilëv where the Russians had kept their GHQ in 1917, were poised to seize Petrograd.