The Bolshevik grip on power in November 1917 was truly precarious. Lenin and Trotsky’s partners in power, the Left Social Revolutionaries, were no friends of the Entente, but like all the other parties of the February revolution they rejected any idea of a separate peace with the Kaiser. Like the majority of the Bolshevik Party’s own activists, they clung to the idea that if acceptable terms could not be agreed, they would proclaim a ‘revolutionary war’, summoning the insurgent energies of both the Russian and German people for united resistance against imperialism.
