The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Lenin now openly demanded a peace at any price. Trotsky had seen too much of Russia’s dilapidated Northern Front not to appreciate the force of Lenin’s point. But unlike Lenin, Trotsky thought that there might be a third position between Bukharin’s revolutionary war and Lenin’s ruinous peace. Counting not on revolution in Germany, but on the ability of the Reichstag majority to prevent a resumption of fighting, Trotsky proposed simply to end the talks by announcing that Russia was unilaterally abandoning the war. On 22 January, after Lenin’s appeal for an immediate settlement was rejected by the Executive Committee of the party, Trotsky narrowly won its backing for his daring new strategy. Rather than recognizing the treaty with Ukraine, on 10 February Trotsky broke off the negotiations declaring: ‘No peace. No war.’ In Petrograd, there was an euphoric reaction. If Trotsky had not delivered ‘peace without victory’ – the great hope of 1917 – he had, at least, secured an end to the fighting without the explicit acknowledgement of defeat.24