Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

Lenin agreed to renounce Estonia and Livonia (Lithuania); sell Germany 25 percent of the output of the Baku oil fields; afford Germany use of the Black Sea fleet; and make reparations of 6 billion marks, half in gold reserves. Germany promised to send coal, rifles, bullets, machine guns, and evacuate Belorussia, promises from a depleted Germany not worth the paper on which they were printed.357 Three secret clauses—never mind the Bolshevik condemnation of capitalists’ “secret diplomacy”—provided for German action against Allied forces on Russian soil in the north and in the south, and expulsion of the British from Baku, a task for which Germany obtained the right to land there.358 Lenin clung to imperial Germany like sea rust on the underside of a listing ship. If during the wild rumors of 1914–17, the imagined treason of the tsarist court to the Germans had never been real, in 1918, the abject sellout to the Germans by the Bolsheviks was all too real. The August 27 treaty was a worse capitulation than Brest-Litovsk, and one that Lenin voluntarily sought. He was bribing his way to what he hoped was safety from German overthrow as well as the right to call upon German help against attempted Entente overthrow. “There was a coincidence of interests,” Lenin wrote by hand—avoiding secretaries—to the Bolshevik envoy to Sweden. “We would have been idiots not to have exploited it.”359 The Germans, for their part, were no less cynical, determined, as the foreign secretary expressed...