3 - 9 December 1917
German officers welcoming Soviet delegates at Brest-Litovsk for the Peace Conference. Soviet delegates left to right: Adolph Joffe, Lev Karakhan and Leon Trotsky, the Head of the Soviet Delegation © IWM (Q 70777)
3 December
Diary entry of Louis de Robien, attaché at the French Embassy
I ended the evening at the Military Mission, where General Niessel very
kindly made me stay for dinner. I had a long talk with Captain Sadoul, a
socialist and a friend of Trotsky’s. He told me that Trotsky receives
quantities of love-letters, flowers and cakes, just like Kerensky used to. He
would do well to be on his guard.
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917–1918, London 1969)
4 December
Letter to the Central Executive Committee of Soviets from a group of Putilov
factory workers, Petrograd
Comrades, Yesterday we wrote a letter saying that you have earned yourselves
enemies in the person of the workers by being more concerned about the bourgeoisie
than about the lower class of workers and peasants. For the second month,
workers have failed to receive their pound of sugar, but you are giving it to
the bourgeois confectioners who make sugar into all kinds of candles at ten
rubles a pound. As if a poor worker could buy that … You ought to be
worrying about the problems of everyday life, and take your percentage by the
thousands and not the hundreds, from the rich and not the poor. The power is in
your hands, don’t make yourselves enemies of the people. Requisition footwear
and clothing and food reserves from the rich.
Your comrades from the Putilov works
(Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917, New Haven and London 2001)
Lenin’s Ultimatum to Ukraine, Warning
Against Independence
All that concerns the national rights and the independence of Ukraine we,
the commissaries of the people, freely recognise without any limits or
conditions. Nevertheless, we accuse the Rada of Ukraine of the fact that, under
cover of phrases and declarations regarding national independence, it has given
itself over to a systematic bourgeois policy … By sheltering the
counter-revolutionary movement of Kaledine, and by running counter to the will
of the great mass of Cossack workmen in allowing the armies favourable to
Kaledine to pass through the Ukraine, and at the same time refusing such
passage to the armies hostile to that General, the Rada is opening the way to
an unheard-of treason against the revolution … For the reasons given, the
Council of The People’s Commissaries, calling to witness the Ukrainian People’s
Republic, submits to the Rada the following questions:
1. Does the Rada promise to renounce in future all action for the
disorganisation of the common front?
2. Does the Rada promise to refuse in future to permit the passage over
Ukrainian territory of any troops going into the region of the Don, the Urals?
3. Does the Rada promise to lend assistance to the armies of the revolution
in the struggle against the counter-revolutionary forces of the Cadets and of
Kaledine?
4. Does the Rada promise to put an end to the attempts to crush the armies
of the Soviet and of the Red Guard in the Ukraine, and return their arms,
immediately and without delay, to those from whom they have been taken?
In case a satisfactory reply has not been received within twenty-four hours,
the Soviet of the People’s Commissaries will consider the Rada in a state of
war with the influence of the Soviet in Russia and in Ukraine.
(Source Records of the Great War , Vol. VI, ed. Charles F. Horne, National
Alumni 1923)
5 December
V.I. Lenin and J. Stalin, ‘To all the toiling Moslems of Russia and the East’
Comrades and Brothers,
Great events are taking place in Russia … The old edifice of bondage
and slavery is tottering under the blows of the Russian Revolution. The days of
the world of despotism and oppression are numbered … The rule of
capitalist plunder and violence is collapsing. The ground is tottering under
the feet of the imperialist marauders. In face of these great events, we appeal
to you, the toiling and disinherited Moslems of Russia and the East. Moslems of
Russia, Tatars of the Volga and the Crimea, Kirghiz and Sarts of Siberia and
Turkestan, Turks and Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Cortzi of Caucasia,
all whose mosques and prayer houses were being destroyed and whose faith and
customs trampled under foot by the tsars and oppressors of Russia: Henceforth
your faith and your customs, your national and cultural institutions are
proclaimed to be free and inviolable … Moslems of Russia, Moslems of the
East, in this work of refashioning the world we count on your sympathy and
support.
Dzhugashvili-Stalin, People’s Commissar of National Affairs & V. Ulianov
(Lenin), Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Pravda
(V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin, The Russian Revolution: Writings and Speeches
from the February Revolution to the October Revolution, 1917, London 1938)
Diary entry of Louis de Robien,
attaché at the French Embassy
Today Trotsky made a new move towards us and … he came to the Embassy,
where he spent over an hour in conversation with M. Noulens. This visit, which
was purely a courtesy one, does not imply any recognition of the Soviet
government on our part but it is a first attempt at contact, from which much
can be expected … The conversation … took a more personal turn.
Trotsky described his tribulations during the first year of the war when he was
harried by the Tsar’s ambassadors and deported at their demand from France to
Spain, from Spain to the United States and from the United States to Canada. He
finally got stranded in Halifax, where the English interned him in a
concentration camp, while Mme Trotsky and her children were locked up in the
house of a policeman. M. Trotsky seems to have been much affected by this
separation. He at once started to spread revolutionary propaganda among the
three hundred Germans who were interned with him, and in a few weeks he had
converted them all to the Bolshevik way of thinking.
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917–1918, London 1969)
‘Trotsky
against the cadets’
Replying to some speakers [at Smolny] who disapproved of violence being
offered to members of the Constituent Assembly, Trotsky said: — ‘You are
shocked at the mild form of terror we exercise against our class enemies, but
take notice that not more than a month hence that terror will assume a more
terrible form, on the model of that of the great French Revolution. No prison
but the guillotine for our enemies. It is not immoral for a democracy to crush
another class. That is its right.’
(Report in The Times)
6 December
Diary entry of Joshua Butler Wright, Counselor of the American Embassy,
Petrograd
The German menace is now uppermost in everyone’s mind! Whether it be true
that the armistice is iniquitous and will allow the Central Powers to move
their troops from one front to the other; whether it will permit German and
Austrian officers to establish a staff and bureau here; whether Russia becomes
a vassal of Germany or a passive neutral; whether she can profit by this
disruption or must wait until it has subsided — all of this makes no
difference. Germany will draw heavily upon Russia to recoup her economic and
material losses and we must be prepared to offset it in any way that may be
deemed possible. I wish that we had more assurance that Washington knew this
phase of it and that we had a deeper thinking man at the head here.
(Witness to Revolution: The Russian Revolution Diary and Letters of J. Butler
Wright, London 2002)
7 December
‘Armistice Illusions’ (from our special correspondent)
The success of the ‘Government’ in bringing about an armistice and
initiating peace negotiations is celebrated with resounding paeans in the
Bolshevist camp. Victory is claimed for the proletariat over German
Imperialism. ‘The will of the Russian soldiers,’ writes Pravda, ‘has dictated
the Armistice. The German plenipotentiaries yielded to us on the question of
troops from East to West.’ The real truth seems to be that large masses of
German and Austrian troops have already left for the West … According to
various journals, the German military delegates at Brest-Litovsk have asked on
behalf of the Kaiser what are Russia’s intentions with regard to the ex-Emperor
and the members of the Imperial Family. The People’s Commissioners, informed of
this request, sounded some members of the Imperial Family still residing at
Tsarskoe Selo, who replied that the best solution would be to let them go
abroad. The ‘Government’ is stated to have agreed to this in principle, but
wishes to obtain the decision of the Constituent Assembly.
(Report in The Times)
‘Ultimatum
to the Rada’
The ‘Government’ has addressed an ultimatum to the Ukraine Rada, accusing it
of following a bourgeois policy by not recognising Bolshevist authority in the
Ukraine … It is rumoured tonight that the Rada has rejected [its] demands.
The area of civil war is thus extended to the Ukraine.
(Report in The Times)
8 December
Diary entry of Louis de Robien, attaché at the French Embassy
I have a certain sympathy for these visionaries who believe in the future of
humanity. Instead of lolling about in the apartments of the Winter Palace like
Kerensky, they lead a communal life at Smolny, and together they all eat a
simple dish of gruel which is brought in every day for the Comrade Commissars’
dinner.
(Louis de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia 1917–1918, London 1969)
9 December
The talks at Brest resumed on December 9. Kuhlmann again headed the German
delegation. The Austrian mission was chaired by Count Czernin, the Minister of
Foreign Affairs; present were also the foreign ministers of Turkey and
Bulgaria. The German peace proposals called for the separation from Russia of
Poland as well as Courland and Lithuania, all of which at the time were under
German military occupation … Ioffe, under instructions to drag out the
talks, made for vague and unrealistic counterproposals (they had been drafted
by Lenin), calling for peace ‘without annexations and indemnities’ and
‘national self-determination’ for the European nations as well as the colonies.
In effect, the Russian delegation, behaving as if Russia had won the war, asked
the Central Powers to give up all their wartime conquests.
(Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899–1919, London 1990)
The scene in the Council Chamber at
Brest-Litovsk was worthy of the art of some great historical painter. On one
side sat the bland and alert representatives of the Central Powers,
black-coated or much beribboned and bestarred, exquisitely polite ….
Opposite the ranks of Teutondom sat the Russians, mostly dirty and ill-clad,
who smoked their large pipes placidly through the debates. Much of the
discussion seemed not to interest them, and they intervened in monosyllables,
save when an incursion into the ethos of politics let loose a flood of confused
metaphysics. The Conference had the air partly of an assembly of well-mannered
employers trying to deal with a specially obtuse delegation of workmen, partly
of urbane hosts presiding at a village school treat.
(J. Buchan, A History of the Great War, Boston 1922)
9 December 2017
The treaty of Brest-Litovsk that signalled the end of Russia’s involvement
in the war was the conclusion of months of gradual withdrawal. Its year of
revolution had created enormous complications in waging war, many of them well
documented in these personal testimonies. In July Ukraine had asserted the
right of self-determination and its governing Rada (council) began to act as an
independent government. The October Revolution then of course exacerbated this
process of national fragmentation. Ukraine was represented at Brest-Litovsk
first as a ‘sovereign Ukrainian state’ and then, after the Rada’s rejection of
the ultimatum (see 4 December) demanding political control of Ukraine, as an
‘independent belligerent’. In a journal article Clifford F. Wargelin suggests
that Ukraine’s involvement in the negotiations, which opened the way for
others, notably Poland, to make similar representations over independence, was
an example of ‘spontaneous popular nationalism that transcended the ideological
and geopolitical interests of both sides in the war and threatened to disrupt
not only the peace negotiations but the stability and territorial integrity of
all of the eastern European empires’. The background is complex (later in the
negotiations the rival Kharkov-based Ukrainian Bolshevik government turned up,
demanding to negotiate in place of the delegation representing the Rada in
Kiev), and presumably some gnarled roots of the current Russian/Ukrainian
conflict can be traced back to this time. The Brest-Litovsk talks were to
continue for several months, until the treaty was eventually signed in March,
but one interesting issue that remains unresolved is the extent to which the
Germans tried to intervene in the fate of the tsar and his family. In her book
on the last days of the Romanovs, Helen Rappaport mentions a secret codicil to
Brest-Litovsk that guaranteed their safe handover to the Germans. It’s hard to
find evidence of this, though there is a certain amount of online speculation
involving the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and the usual ‘survival stories’.
But Wilhelm, related by marriage, presumably did raise the issue, and perhaps
more convincingly than George V, the tsar’s cousin and supposed ally.
