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by
Adam Tooze
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August 8 - August 13, 2021
Kühlmann had entangled his opposite numbers in a web. But it was woven as much of Bolshevik self-d...
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the jubilation on the Soviet side following the apparently generous Christmas Day agreement was such that the leadership of the German delegation began to worry that, once the Bolsheviks were forced to confront the true nature of the agreement, the shock would derail the entire peace process.
The territories to which the Christmas Day agreement applied, the territories from which the German Army would progressively withdraw and to which the principle of self-determination would then be applied, were not the border regions occupied by Germany since 1915, but those further to the north and east, including Estonia and segments of Belorussia and Ukraine that had been occupied only in the final phase of the German advance. The result was a public relations disaster that permanently discredited the Brest-Litovsk peace.
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian or Latvian causes, however dubious the counter-claims of the Bolshevik regime, the espousal of self-determination by Imperial Germany now appeared as nothing more than a manipulative ruse. Events in Berlin and Vienna over the following weeks should have been enough to demonstrate that far more was at stake.
With Vienna entering its third year of slow starvation, the optimistic Christmas Day announcement from Brest had raised great hopes. When, over the following days, it emerged that thanks to the clumsy rapacity of the ‘Prussian militarists’, the Austrian population might starve for months to come, the reaction was immediate. On 14 January, Vienna was swept by enormous mass strikes.
Kühlmann was boxed in. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were oblivious to the disastrous political consequences of their aggression. When the Kaiser agreed with the Brest negotiating team to redraw Germany’s eastern boundary in such a way as to minimize the number of undesirable new Polish inhabitants in the Reich, Ludendorff and Hindenburg threatened to resign.
Germany’s workers were threatening to strike, but if the Kaiser’s generals were not granted a military dictatorship, they too seemed ready to rebel.37
the tensions in Berlin were as nothing compared to the situation in Petrograd. In January 1918, as the illusion of a cheap peace evaporated, the Bolsheviks were finally forced to face the seriousness of their situation. In 1917 the much maligned revolutionary defensists had refused to contemplate separate peace talks with Germany, precisely because they had foreseen the dilemma that Lenin and Trotsky now found themselves in.
The Bolsheviks, as always, comforted themselves with the thought that Germany would soon erupt in revolution. Trotsky responded by raising the stakes and issuing a radical peace appeal to the world, challenging the Entente to apply self-determination to Ireland and Egypt.
Knowing the condition of the Russian units stationed in front of Petrograd, he rejected the idea of a revolutionary war of resistance as a pipe dream. The Soviet regime would have to make a separate peace, however ruinous the terms.
Anxious to exploit the dilemma now facing the Bolsheviks, American and Entente representatives in Petrograd began to wonder whether Germany’s aggression might not offer a chance to reconstruct a ‘democratic war’ alliance.
What Wilson was trying to do in January 1918 was to untangle a confusion that since 1917 had become nearly complete.41 In the course of the last year he himself had been forced to abandon his own ‘peace without victory’ formula, thereby forcing Russia’s democrats to fight a war they could only lose. Lenin and Trotsky, the chief beneficiaries of that disaster, were negotiating on the basis of the peace formula proposed by their despised democratic opponents. Meanwhile, the Reichstag majority and its vision of a peace based on self-determination had been made to seem like a mere smokescreen for
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The 14 Points with which the President responded to this contorted situation were no radical manifesto. Neither of the two key terms usually ascribed to Wilsonian internationalism – democracy and self-determination – appear anywhere in the text.42 What Wilson was attempting to do was respond to the disastrous situation created over the last 12 months by the derailment of his policy first for peace and then for war.
Five of the 14 Points restated the liberal vision of a new system of international politics to which Wilson had been committed since May 1916. There must be an end to secret diplomacy. Instead, there must be ‘open covenants of peace openly arrived at’ (Point 1), freedom of the seas (Point 2), the removal of barriers to the free and equal movement of trade (Point 3), disarmament (Point 4). The fourteenth point called for what would soon be known as the League of Nations,
Nowhere in the 14 Points does Wilson mention democracy as a norm. Rather he stressed the freedom of nations to choose their own form of government.
The phrase ‘self-determination’ appears nowhere either in the 14 Points or in the speech with which Wilson delivered them to Congress on 8 January 1918. In January of that year it was the Bolsheviks and Lloyd George who tossed this explosive concept into the international arena.
With regard to the colonial question, what concerned Wilson were not the rights of the oppressed people so much as the violence of inter-imperialist competition.
I mean why would he care about Africa the racist shitsack
As far as the subordinate populations themselves were concerned, Wilson called simply for the ‘observance of the principle that in determining all questions of sovereignty . . . the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’. Quite apart from the fact that the claims of the colonial powers were thereby given no less weight than those of the subordinate populations, it was significant that Wilson spoke here of the interests, not the voice, of those populations.
The significance of this choice of words becomes clear when it is contrasted with what Wilson had to say about the territorial question at issue in the European war. Here too he invoked not an absolute right to self-determination but the gradated view of the capacity for self-government that was typical of conservative nineteenth-century liberalism.
with regard to the peoples of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires (Point 12), the Balkans (Point 11) and Poland (Point 13), the tone was more paternalistic. They would need ‘friendly counsel’ and ‘international guarantees’. What this foreign oversight would guarantee was not ‘self-determination’ but ‘security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development’.
On the contrary, Wilson extended to the Bolsheviks praise of a kind he had never offered to the Provisional Government. Whereas in May 1917 Wilson had lined up with the Entente in lecturing Alexander Kerensky and Irakli Tsereteli on the need to continue the war, he now characterized the Bolshevik delegation, who were about to agree a separate peace, as ‘sincere and in earnest’.
Wilson is a sucker huh
What is striking about this formulation was precisely Wilson’s unproblematic use of the term ‘Russia’ and ‘national policy’ with regard to an empire that was in the process of violent decomposition.46 At the moment when the 14 Points began to circulate around the world, nationalist movements in Ukraine, the Baltic and Finland were dissociating themselves from the Soviet regime to which Wilson was giving such fulsome praise.
Wilson seems to have hoped that his 14 Points once adopted by the Austrian and German opposition might have opened the door to general peace talks. But he was too late. If he had been willing to contemplate general negotiations in the summer of 1917, it might have radically altered the complexion of politics in both Russia and Germany.
With America only just having entered the war and the democratic enthusiasm in Russia at full spate, the political pressure such a peace move would have exerted on London and Paris would have been immense. But by early 1918 the balance of power in Germany had shifted against the Reichstag majority and the Entente were more adamant than ever.
As a result, in January 1918 it was the Bolsheviks to whom Wilson brought relief. Their propagandists saw to it that the Russian text of Wilson’s declaration was plastered all over Petrograd. Lenin had it telegraphed to Trotsky as a token of his triumphant success in pitting the imperialists against each other.
Two days after President Wilson had issued his bland proclamation of support for the ‘Russian’ people, on 10 January 1918 the representatives of independent Ukraine arrived at Brest-Litovsk to make their own peace claim. This changed the political complexion of the talks.
Ukraine was a problem on a different scale. It was a strategic asset of the first rank, the disposition of which would decide the future of Russian power and shape of the new order in the East. As 1918 began, Ukraine was controlled neither by the Germans nor by the Bolsheviks. Here, their rival visions of a new order would clash directly and the full complexity of the moral and political balance would become apparent.
After the overthrow of the Tsar, in Kiev, as in the rest of Russia, a revolutionary authority had established itself. Unlike in Petrograd the revolutionaries in Ukraine had immediately set up a rudimentary parliamentary forum, the Rada. In this assembly the parties inclined to nationalism, led by the local brand of agrarian Social Revolutionaries, had a clear majority. But no significant voices made a claim to independence.
It was the breakdown of legitimate authority in Petrograd that forced Kiev into a declaration first of national autonomy and then in December 1917 of outright independence. Whatever its differences might have been with the Provisional Government, the Rada could not accept the Bolsheviks’ claim to speak on its behalf.
In the pre-war years, Ukraine had accounted for one-fifth of total world exports of grain, a share twice that of the United States. Petrograd and Moscow needed that grain as much as did Vienna and Berlin. Ukraine was no less vital to Russia’s future as an industrial power. The region produced all of Russia’s coking coal, 73 per cent of its iron and 60 per cent of its steel. Ukraine’s manganese was exported to all the blast furnaces of Europe.3 If an independent government established itself in Kiev this would be a huge blow to the Soviet regime.
already in December as the first exchanges between the Soviet authorities and Kiev deteriorated into hostility, the all-important qualification to Lenin and Stalin’s endorsement of self-determination became apparent.
The Bolsheviks approved self-determination, but only insofar as it was the ‘revolutionary masses’ who were in control. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian Rada was nothing more than an assembly of property owners serviced by their Menshevik and Social Revolutionary lackeys.
On 12 January, after sitting through an infuriating lecture from the Soviets on the ‘legitimate’ procedures for self-determination, General Max Hoffmann, who since the Christmas crisis had been pilloried in the international press as the archetypal German militarist, lost his temper. Why, he demanded to know, should the representatives of Imperial Germany take lessons in legitimacy from the Bolsheviks, whose own regime was ‘based purely on violence, ruthlessly suppressing all who think differently’.
Trotsky was unabashed. His retort was a classic dose of Marxist state theory: ‘... the General is completely right when he says that our government is founded on power. All history has known only such governments. So long as society consists of warring classes the power of the government will rest on strength and will assert its domination through force.’ What the Germans were objecting to in Bolshevism was ‘the fact that we do not lock up the strikers, but the capitalists who lock out the workers, the fact that we do not shoot the peasants who raise their claim to the land, but that we arrest
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Lol you hypocritical prick
Trotsky’s statement was of such stark clarity that it echoed down the century. If he was right and if government was always ultimately founded on violence, how could political action ever be squared with a moral standpoint?
For the Brest talks, this remarkably frank exchange spelled a disastrous degeneration. How could a peace negotiated between actors with such diametrically opposed views, who could agree only on the historical efficacy of force, ever be anything more than an armed truce?
Within days of Trotsky’s revealing retort, the Bolsheviks provided a vivid demonstration of their uncompromising commitment to violence as a means of making history. On the morning of 18 January, the negotiations were halted to allow Trotsky to return to Petrograd with a map showing the full extent of Germany’s demands. But the first item on the Bolsheviks’ agenda that day was not the peace, but the final liquidation of the democratic revolution in Russia.
As Trotsky was haggling with the Germans in Brest, heavily armed Red Guards were sweeping anti-Bolshevik protestors from the streets of the Russian capital, killing several dozen.8 The Assembly opened at 4 p.m. and promptly elected Victor Chernov, leader of the Social Revolutionaries, the winners of the election, as its president. Outside, Red Guard cannons were trained on the Assembly building. Inside, the majority faced the continuous, raucous barracking of the Bolshevik faction, with Lenin and the rest glaring down from the balcony. Despite the attempt at intimidation, the Assembly
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And guess fucking what
The Assembly was never to reopen. Its violent suppression was a shattering blow to the democratic hopes once placed in the revolution. As Maxim Gorky wrote, ‘For almost a hundred years the finest Russians have lived by the idea of a Constituent Assembly . . . in the struggle for this idea, thousands of the intelligentsia and tens of thousands of workers and peasants have perished . . .’. Now, Lenin and his regime of People’s Commissars had ‘given orders to shoot the democracy that demonstrated in honor of this idea’.
The elected delegates of the Social Revolutionaries, who had braved Bolshevik intimidation to applaud the appeal to unite against the threat of civil war, Lenin mocked as the un-dead, who after sleeping in their coffins for the last six months, had arisen to mechanically applaud the counter-revolution. The Bolsheviks and the men of the February revolution were now on different sides of the barricades. Against those who called for peace, Lenin hailed ‘the class struggle that has become civil war, not by chance . . . but inevitably . . .’ Lenin, of course, was making his own inevitabilities.
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Furthermore, nothing was more likely to isolate that dictatorship from Russia’s allies in the Entente than the decision, anticipated in London and Paris since December 1917, and finalized by the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee on 3 February 1918, to repudiate Russia’s massive foreign debts: $4.92 billion piled up in the pre-war era, $3.9 billion since the start of the war, the latter sum formally guaranteed by the British and French governments.
The Bolsheviks responded that the loans to the Tsar’s government were part of an imperialist web designed to make Russia the servant of Western capitalism. The Russian people had ‘long since redeemed’ anything they owed, with ‘a sea of blood and mountains of corpses’. Henceforth the issue of debt repudiation would pose a fundamental obstacle to any rapprochement between the Soviet regime and the Western Powers. Lenin and Trotsky had burned their boats.
Meanwhile at Brest, faced with the full demands of the Central Powers, the Bolshevik strategy was one of delay and it fell to Trotsky to manage the strategic retreat.
in the wider war time was not on their side. To capitalize on their victory over Russia, Ludendorff and Hindenburg were now planning a massive effort in the West. Given the timetable for what must surely be Germany’s final offensive, the High Command urgently needed to settle the situation in Russia. Furthermore, though Trotsky and the left of the Bolshevik Party exaggerated the prospect of a revolutionary overthrow, the solidity of the home front in both Germany and Austria was now seriously in question.
On 28 January, a week after the protests in Vienna had ebbed away, the factory cities of Germany were swept by an unprecedented wave of industrial action. The strikers’ demands were openly political – a reasonable peace with Russia and domestic political reform, an end to martial law and the abolition of Prussia’s three-tiered electoral system.
despite the moderation of these demands, the strike split the SPD from its bourgeois friends in the Reichstag majority. With the Vaterlandspartei baying from the right, the Catholic Centre Party and the Liberals could ill afford to associate too closely with the ‘disloyal’ Socialists. Just as the negotiations at Brest reached their most critical point, just as President Wilson was demanding to know who spoke for Germany, the progressive Reichstag coalition was in disarray.
First they staged a confrontation between the main Soviet delegation and the delegation of the Rada. Predictably, the Bolsheviks launched into vituperative denunciation. But with the Germans holding the ring, the Ukrainian delegates were not cowed.
‘The government of the Bolsheviks, which has broken up the Constituent Assembly and which rests on the bayonets of hired red guards, will never elect to apply in Russia the very just principle of self-determination, because they know only too well that not only the republic of the Ukraine, but also the Don, the Caucasus, Siberia, and other regions do not regard them as their government, and that even the Russian people themselves will ultimately deny their right.’18 Trotsky was visibly embarrassed by this retort. But his answer to the Rada was the same as the answer he had given to Hoffmann.
With the Rada government in flight, the territory actually represented by their articulate young representatives at Brest was little larger than the conference room in which they were currently sitting. This was true enough. But, as should have been obvious, if it came down to a simple trial of stren...
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Given their utterly depleted state, they required not only a formal treaty with a vestigial Ukrainian government, but a workable grain-delivery contract. With Bolshevik forces occupying much of northern Ukraine, Count Czernin could not abandon his efforts to reach an agreement with Trotsky. This meant that they had to return to the question of the Baltic states and establish ground rules for what was actually meant by self-determination.
