Revolutions - 10.78- Neither War Nor Peace

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

What's better than war and peace? Neither war nor peace!

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.78, neither war nor peace. Last week, we left off in Brestle-Tofsk on January 5th, 1918, with the Central Powers unrolling a radically reimagined map of Eastern Europe depicting the dismemberment of the Russian Empire and telling the Russian negotiating team, accept this map as the basis of peace or else. As this map represented Abjet,

capitulation to the central powers, Russian commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky knew it could have explosive political implications for the Bolsheviks back home. He told the central powers he would have to speak directly to his government, and later that day boarded a train to return to Petrograd. Meanwhile, on that same afternoon of January 5, 1918, his comrades were dealing with another matter

that could have explosive political implications. This was the day the long-awaited Constituent Assembly promised ever since the moment Nicholas abdicated the throne, finally convened. It was finally, finally time for a democratically elected Assembly of the Nation to write a new post-revolutionary constitution for Russia. More immediately, this might very well spell the end of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik Party. There was a halfway decent chance that by the time Trotsky got back to Petrograd, he would no longer be commissar of foreign affairs. There may even be a warrant out for his arrest.

When the election results for the Constituent Assembly were announced in December, the frustrated rivals of the Bolsheviks thrilled at the knowledge that they would finally be able to oust Lenin's unnatural government. The Wright SRs would control the largest block of votes, and they ran their printing presses night and day pumping out pamphlets, placards, newspapers, and leaflets, all trumpeting the slogan, all power to the Constituent Assembly. This was meant to replace and overcome the old slogan co-opted by the Bolsheviks, all power to the Soviets. The Wright SRs also sent activists into the trenches,

into the barracks and the factories to talk up the constituent assembly as the sacred culmination of the revolution. But for all the Wright SRs talk about defending the constituent assembly, all they would do is talk about defending the constituent assembly. When militant members of the party showed the SR Central Committee, their plan to assassinate Lenin and Trotsky, the Central Committee forbade the plot. When about 10,000 SR-aligned soldiers in Petrograd volunteered to stage an armed demonstration, coinciding with the opening of the Constituent Assembly, to remind the Bolsheviks they weren't

the only ones who knew how to use a machine gun, the SR Central Committee rejected the offer. No guns, no violence. They believe the universally recognized sanctity of the Constituent Assembly would be all the protection it needed. And besides, civil war among the socialists would only benefit the counter-revolution. This latter point may well have been true, but it led the right SRs and their allies to unilaterally disarm on the eve of a major political showdown. When the SR regiments were told they could only demonstrate if they came out unarmed, they told the messenger, are you making fun of us, comrade, you are asking us to a demonstration, but tell us to come without weapons. And the Bolsheviks,

are they little children? They will for sure fire at unarmed people. And we, are we supposed to open our mouths and give them our heads for targets? Or will you order us to run, like rabbits? If they were deprived of the means of fighting back, they would not come out at all. And so, when the time came, they did not come out at all. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, obviously had no scruples about coming out under arms. On January the 3rd, Lenin's government placed Petrograd under martial law. They prohibited public assemblies and issued proclamations ordering soldiers to stay in their barracks and workers to stay in their factories. On January 5th, the day the constituent assembly opened, an SR delegate described the scene as he approached the Torreed Palace. The closer one

approached, the fewer pedestrians were seen and the more soldiers, Red Armymen and sailors. They were armed to the teeth. Guns slung over the shoulder, bombs, grenades and bullets in front and on the side, everywhere, everywhere they could be attached or inserted. The entire square in front of the Torreed palace was filled with artillery, machine guns, and field kitchens. Machine gun cartridge belts were piled up pell-mell. The number of armed men and weapons, the sound of clanking, created the impression of an encampment, getting ready either to defend itself or to attack. Opposed to this clanking Bolshevik encampment was an SR-organized street demonstration under strict orders. No guns, no violence.

Now, perhaps as many as 50,000 people turned out for this demonstration, though that is the high side of the estimate. Whatever the number was, though, it was less than the organizers had hoped for. They were also disappointed by the crowd's composition. It was almost entirely middle-class professionals, basically the educated white-collar types who had been on strike since the October Revolution. There were no workers. There were no common soldiers.

It was not exactly a march of the masses that the SRs envisioned. As the demonstrators approached the neighborhood of the Torreid Palace, they encountered armed soldiers operating under the flag of martial law. In at least two separate incidents, these soldiers opened fire on the unarmed procession, scattering them chaotically and killing somewhere between 10 and 20 people. For all that had happened in 1917, This was actually the first time Russian soldiers had fired on unarmed demonstrators since the February revolution.

There was some brief hope among the SRs and the professional middle classes that this new bloody Sunday would finally fatally discredit the Bolsheviks, that the nation would rise in outrage against Lenin and his murderous thugs, revealed to be no different than the Tsar and his Cossacks. But here's the thing. Nobody cared. Nobody is going to care about. any of this. Meanwhile, inside the Torreed Palace, 463 deputies assembled for the opening session, roughly half the total number elected. Of those in the hall, there were 259 right SRs, 136 Bolsheviks, and 48 left SRs. This gave the right SRs for the moment an outright majority. Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik Central Committee were on hand to direct what they reasonably believed to be an incredibly precarious moment for their government, a government they had self-enshrined

back in October. Given the SR majority, the venerable Victor Chernoff was elected chairman of the Constituent Assembly. But from the beginning, the session was unruly. The Bolsheviks were by now masters of vocal and physical disruption. Whenever non-Bulshevik speakers rose, Bolshevik deputies jeered, hooted, booed and interrupted. The hall was also full of armed soldiers who were there to provide security, all of them actively sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. What's more, the soldiers had gotten into the vodka at a welcome banquet for delegates, and they drank continuously for the next 12 hours. If they heard things they didn't like, or saw people they didn't like, they would point their guns at them for drunken and menacing amusement.

Lenin's strategy for the Constituent Assembly was to introduce a poison pill as soon as possible, possible. This poison pill was a document called the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses. The very first article stated, Russia is hereby proclaimed a Republic of Soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. All power, centrally and locally, is vested in the Soviets. It then proceeded through short bullet points, ratifying everything the Bolsheviks had done since October, and concluding with the statement, the Constituent Assembly considers that now power must be vested wholly and entirely in the working people and their authorized representatives, the Soviets, of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. Supporting Soviet power and the decrees of the Council of People's commissars, the Constituent Assembly considers that its own task is confined to establishing the fundamental principles of the socialist reconstruction of society.

if the Constituent Assembly approved this document, it meant they were abdicating their right to craft their own constitution. It simply handed all sovereign legitimacy to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who had taken control of the Soviets of workers and soldiers and peasants deputies. As Lenin expected the SR majority defeated this motion 237 to 136. And with this done, the Bolsheviks declared that the Constituent Assembly was controlled by counter-revolutionary enemies of the Soviet and staged a walkout. All of this was going 100% according to plan, and the Bolshevik Central Committee convened in another room in the Torreid Palace. While Chernoff and the SRs gave long-winded speeches

in the main assembly hall, the Bolshevik leaders drafted a proclamation, dissolving the constituent assembly. This done, Lenin then issued instructions to the soldiers guarding the palace. Don't use force against any of the delegates. Don't prevent anyone from leaving, but absolutely do not allow any new people in the building. The session continued all night, but finally, at 4 o'clock in the morning of what was now January the 6th, an armed sailor strode up to the Tribune, just as Victor Chernoff was in the middle of approving the confiscation of land without confiscation. The sailor unceremoniously interrupted Chernoff and told him to stop talking and shut it down for the night. Chernoff spent about 20 minutes trying to keep things going, and he had the support of his fellow delegates,

but he did not have the support of the armed and drunken soldiers filling the assembly hall, shouting, enough, enough, and down with Chernoff. So the delegates voted to adjourn. Technically, the SRs adjourned the Constituent Assembly until 5 p.m. But when they left, the guards locked up the building and then blocked anyone trying to get in. Later that morning, Pravda published the government decree dissolving the constituent assembly. They justified this by saying, The right socialist revolutionary and Menshevik parties are in fact carrying on outside the constituent assembly

a most desperate struggle against Soviet power, calling openly in their press for its overthrow and describing as arbitrary and unlawful the crushing of the resistance of the exploiters by force of the working classes, which is essential in the interest of emancipation. from exploitation. They are defending the saboteurs, the servants of capital, and are going as far as undisguised calls to terrorism, which certain unidentified groups have already begun. It is obvious that under such circumstances, the remaining part of the Constituent Assembly could only serve as a screen for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow Soviet power. Now, it didn't really matter that this is kind of the opposite of what the SR Central Committee had been doing over the last

several weeks. Yes, they wanted a government enshrined by the Constituent Assembly to replace the Soviet government led by Lenin, but they were absolutely and explicitly trying to dampen down calls for violence. But like I said, that didn't matter. And after a single session, lasting just about 12 hours, the long-awaited Constituent Assembly never reconvened. That was it. It was done. Now, you might be asking yourself, how on earth can Lenin and the Bolsheviks get away with it? this? Hasn't everyone been waiting for the constituent assembly since March? Didn't most of the voters vote against the Bolsheviks? How can they just brazenly shut down the assembly without triggering like a mass uprising? Well, here's the thing. By January 1918, the vast majority of Russians,

including all of those tens of millions of voters, didn't really care about the constituent assembly. At the local level, it was regarded as some far-off assembly of elite intellectuals doing God-know-what. The decree on peace satisfied the soldiers and sailors. The regulation on worker control satisfied urban labor. The decree on land was all the rural peasants that ever wanted. And remember, too, for all of these groups, their local Soviets were the one political institution that continued to have real legitimacy. They were not faraway assemblies of elite intellectuals, but local assemblies composed of their own people. So when the news arrived that the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved because they opposed Soviet power, which is, after all,

what Lenin had set them up to do, well, then who needs them? Who cares? All power to the Soviets. On top of all that, Lenin was ready with the great alternative to the Constituent Assembly. On January 10th, the Executive Committee of the Soviets convened the third all-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers deputies, deliberately convened at that moment to act as the popular alternative to what was now portrayed as a nefariously anti-Soviet constituent assembly. They also convened a third all-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasants' Deputies, composed almost entirely now of Bolshevik and LeftSR delegates. Those delegates voted on January 13 to merge with the Congress of Workers and Soldiers deputies, which also just so happened to be

composed almost entirely of Bolsheviks and Left SRs. Once these two congresses merged, they became the single, all-Russian Congress of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies, and they claimed the mantle of legitimate popular sovereignty. It would not be unreasonable to call this Congress the founding of the Soviet Union. The Congress overwhelmingly approved the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited Peoples, whose first article was, Russia is hereby proclaimed a Republic of Soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants' deputies. The second article then said, The Russian Soviet Republic is established on the principle of a free union of free nations as a federation of Soviet national republics.

And though there would be a few nomenclature shifts along the way, this is really the origin point to the Soviet Union, and why it's called the Soviet Union. It also laid the permanent foundation of Russian communism. The Congress abolished private ownership of land, granted the Supreme Economic Council, authority to convert factories, mines, railways, and other means of production and transport into state property, consolidated all banks into a single state institution. As a general statement of political and

economic ideology, they said their fundamental aim was to abolish all exploitation of man by man, to completely eliminate the division of society into classes, to mercilessly crush the resistance of the exploitors, to establish a socialist organization of society, and to achieve the victory of socialism in all countries. As this auspicious Soviet Congress wrapped up, Lenin addressed them. Comrades, he said, before the Third Congress of Soviets closes, we must establish with complete impartiality the momentous part it has had to play in the history of the international revolution and of mankind. There are incontestable grounds for saying that the third Congress of Soviets has opened a new epoch in world history, and there is growing awareness of

its significance in these times of world revolution. It has consolidated the organization of the new state power, which was created by the October Revolution, and has projected the lines of future socialist construction for the whole world, for the working people of all countries. The new system of the Socialist Soviet Republic, as a Federation of Free Republics of the different nations inhabiting Russia, has been finally accepted in this country in the sphere of of domestic politics. But as Lenin and his government were set to embark on this new epoch in world history, after apparently winning the political war at home, they faced a looming threat from abroad that might tend to turn this from an epoch into a tiny blip. The armies of the central power

were massed on the Russian border, representing the or else if the Russians did not sign the terms of the treaty Trotsky brought back with him from Brestle-Tofsk. And so, we now turn our attention from domestic politics to foreign affairs. Just days after successfully shuddering the Constituent Assembly, a group of about 80 Bolshevik leaders convened to discuss the terms of the peace. Three factions emerged from this discussion. The smallest was led by Lenin, who advocated signing the terms, now without delay or argument.

Lenin's read on the situation was the Russian army was in no position to fight. He said, there is no doubt that it will be a shameful piece, but if we embark on a war, our government will be swept away. For the moment, he said they needed to focus on ensuring the revolution survived in Russia. Germany is only just now pregnant with revolution, he said, but we have already given birth to a completely healthy baby. Besides, he said, the bourgeoisie has to be throttled, and for that, we need both hands free. In Lenin's opinion, resumed the war with Germany would be absolutely catastrophic. But Lenin once again found himself opposed by a majority of his own party.

Most Bolsheviks favored turning this imperialist war into a revolutionary war, to do as the Jacobins had done in 1792, and call upon the people to defend the revolution and then march off and crush the fragile old powers of Europe. This faction was led most passionately by Nikolai Bukharan. who had joined the party as a teenager after the Revolution of 1905. After years of loyal service to the party in exile, Bukharin became one of the most influential political leaders in Moscow in 1917, and he directed the Bolshevik takeover of Moscow in the midst of the October Revolution. As a reward for this, he was now editor of Pravda.

Bukharin was also now the leading voice of what would be called the Left Communists, who organized around total opposition to peace with the central powers and the immediate declaration of revolutionary war to the death. In between Lenin and Bukharin was commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky. He concurred with Lenin that the Russian army was in absolutely no position to fight a war, but he was also acutely aware that if the Bolsheviks did not prove their hostile independence from German imperialism and shut down rumors that they were just a bunch of paid German agents, the revolutionary project both at home and abroad would be wrecked.

So Trotsky formulated a novel slogan, neither war nor peace. The Russians would reject the German terms and then simply announced that so far as they were concerned, the war was over. The inner circle of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party was wary of both Lenin's demand for peace at almost any price and Bucharne's call for revolutionary war.

And so they voted to endorse. endorse Trotsky's diplomatic novelty, neither war nor peace. So Trotsky returned to Brestletovsk, and the talks resumed on January 15. Trotsky went right back to trying to play for time with all the rhetorical stalling he could muster, hoping against hope the German proletariat would rise up and make all of this a moot point. But by now, even the patiently tolerant Baron von Kulman was getting extremely annoyed at the stalling. Finally, On January 27th, the Baron received a telegram from the Kaiser demanding action. This must be ended as soon as possible, the Kaiser wrote.

Trotsky must sign by 8 p.m. tomorrow without procrastination, peace on our terms. In the event of refusal or attempts at procrastination and other pretexts, the negotiations are broken off at 8 o'clock on the night of January 28th, and the armistice will be terminated. That same day, at another negotiating table in Bresli-Tovsk, the central powers negotiated a peace with representatives of the Ukrainian Rada, now recognized as the Independent Republic of Ukraine. In exchange for peace and recognition, the Rada pledged massive shipments of grain to feed the famished populations of Germany and Austria. They also gave permission for the armies of the central powers to enter Ukraine, which will be able to. was pretty important because on that same day, a small army of red guards led by Moravev, the guy who led the defensive Petrograd at the Battle of Polkovo, pushed its way into Kiev

and took control of the city on behalf of a Bolshevik-aligned Ukrainian Soviet, which denounced the Rada's claim to political legitimacy. Civil war in Ukraine was now well underway, and both sides would need all the help they could get. Meanwhile, back at the Russian negotiations, negotiating table. Trotsky came back on January the 28th to respond to the final, final ultimatum. Almost everybody expected him to just sign the treaty. There was nothing else for him to do. But instead, Trotsky carried his program of neither war nor peace to its logical and somewhat absurd conclusion. He said Russia would not sign the ignoble terms as presented by the central powers, and they would not be an accomplice to the dismemberment and destruction of the Russian

empire. So would they go back to fighting? No, absolutely not. Trotsky announced to a stunned audience, we are demobilizing our army. We refuse to sign a peace based on annexations. We declared that the state of war between the central empires and Russia is at an end. The war was over, but there would be no peace treaty. Baron von Kulman exclaimed, this is unheard of, but there was nothing he could actually do in that moment. Trotsky and the rest of his negotiating team got on the train and left. Now, as the German leaders huddled to figure out how to respond to this, I must stop briefly here and insert every historian's favorite Soviet decree.

On January the 25th, 1918, Pravda announced a new policy that would take effect at the end of the month. This decree read, In order to establish in Russia the same way of counting time as used by almost all civilized people, the Council of the People's Commissars decrees the introduction of the new calendar into lay use after the end of the month of January of this year. Accordingly, one, the first day after 31 January of this year is to be counted not as the 1st of February, but as the 14th of February. The second day counted as the 15th and so on.

That's right. This is the moment Russia drops the Julian calendar and adopts the Gregorian calendar. So they went from January 31st, 1918, to February 14, 1918, and that was that. From here on out, there will be no more triple-cross checking different sources and books to make sure the proper dating chronology is being followed. From here on out, all dates everywhere will be the same. Thank God, long live the revolution. While the calendars were unifying, the Kaiser got his advisors together. Though nobody wanted to resume the war against the Russians, Hindenburg and Ludendorf told the Kaiser that all of their plans for a final campaign in the West in the spring of 1918 required the absolute guarantee the Russian army was finished, and it required access to Ukrainian agriculture. They couldn't afford to fight on the Eastern Front, but they all. also couldn't afford not to fight on the Eastern Front. So on February 17, 1918, of the now

blessedly unified calendar, the Central Powers launched an offensive campaign against Russia. The Germans advanced from west to east. The Austrians moved from southwest to northeast. The Turks moved from south to north, all of them advancing rapidly through territory undefended by any army. One German commander remarked at the outset of this campaign, This is the most comic war that I have ever experienced. It is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece, and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks,

and trains another detachment, and moves on. The procedure has, in any event, the charm of novelty. With an unstoppable invasion now underway, the Bolshevik Central Committee convened on February 18th, and Lenin finally secured a one-vote majority for his motion to sign the peace treaty right now. Immediately, no more delays. The deciding vote came from Trotsky. Neither war nor peace had now run its course, and peace was the only viable option left. Lenin transmitted Russia's surrender without delay, but then the central powers just ignored him.

They did not respond. Their armies simply kept advancing. In the north, German armies entered Livonia. In the center, enemy forces entered Minsk and Pisk and Pskof. In the south, Austrian, Hungarian, and Turkish armies kept pushing into Russian territory. This went on for days and days and days without them ever acknowledging the Russian willingness to sign the peace treaty. With the total envelopment of Russia now on the table, Lenin finally admitted they might have no choice but to fight back. On February 22nd, the government published a decree under the

headline, The Socialist Fatherland is in danger. Point one announced a sort of Russian Leveon Mass, declaring, the country's entire manpower and resources are placed entirely at the service of revolutionary defense. This Leveon Mass called for a scorched earth defensive war waged by all Russians everywhere. It harkened back to the great patriotic war against Napoleon. Workers and peasants were ordered to engage in all manner of sabotage and self-destruction to deny the invaders' access to food, resources, or industrial technology. After calling for mass labor efforts to build trenches, defenses, and fortifications,

point six of the decree said, These battalions are to include all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class, men and women, under the supervision of Red Guards, those who resist are to be shot. Then the eighth and final point read, enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, and German spies are to be shot on the spot.

These two points, making summary execution the first, last, and final punishment for hindering the defense of the revolution gave the recently established Cheka the legal mechanism they would use to mercilessly defend the Soviet government going forward. forward. It can also reasonably said to mark the beginning of the coming red terror. In the midst of this now-declared national emergency, Lenin and the other Bolsheviks also reached out to the

allies to see if they might be interested in supporting them. And unlike the decree on peace, which the Allies ignored, the British and French responded very quickly that they were absolutely willing to give whatever monetary and material aid necessary to help Lenin's government fight the central powers and keep the eastern front of the war alive. Like I said before, at this point, any ideological or clash of civilization-style considerations were absolutely irrelevant to the decision-makers of the Allied powers. They were willing to support anybody who promised to keep Russia in the war. For his part, Lenin was certainly not going to let ideological purity get in the way of access

to vital resources to defend the Soviet government. caught up another business, Lenin voted in favor of accepting allied aid in abstentia, writing a note to Trotsky that read, Please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism. But all of this became irrelevant that same day. The Germans transmitted new terms on February 23rd, which were far harsher than they had been in December. And though Bucharin, the left Bolsheviks and the left SRs wanted to keep fighting, fighting, Lenin convinced the majority of the Central Committee that they needed to sign whatever

the Germans put in front of them, right now, or it would be the end of all of them. So, a Russian delegation returned to Brestletovsk on March the 1st, and I should mention that Trotsky resigned as commissar of foreign affairs so that he wouldn't have to be the one to sign this ignoble peace. When the team arrived, they announced that they would sign whatever the central powers put in front of them, a kind of final protest to prove that they were doing this with a bayonet to their throat and a gun to their head. But this time it was the central powers who stalled, and while they kept the Russians waiting, their armies entered Kiev and evicted the small force of Soviet Red Guards. Finally, on March 3, 1918, the Russian Soviet Republic and the representatives

of the Central Powers signed the Treaty of Brestle-Topsk. It was a doozy of a treaty. With the stroke of a pen, the Russians renounced 750,000 square miles, abandoning essentially all territory Russia had acquired since the 1600s. They renounced all claims to Poland, Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Transcaucasia, all of which would become either nominally independent states under German protection, or, in many cases, directly annexed into the German Empire. This amounted to roughly a third of the total population of the Russian Empire, a third of their

most productive agricultural land, a quarter of their industrial capacity, a quarter of their railroad tracks, and three quarters of their coal and iron deposits. The treaty also granted German national special economic exemptions inside of Russia, leaving German-owned property exempt from any nationalization efforts on the part of the Soviet government. This, I should mentioned, immediately led to a mass sell-off of Russian-owned property industry factories and estates to German buyers, turning Russia overnight into something of a colony of German capital. The treaty of Brestletovsk probably saved the Soviet government, but it did so at an almost unfathomable cost. Right, left, and center all howled upon reading the terms of one of the most

pathetically abject capitulations in the history of modern diplomacy. It of course, infuriated patriots and nationalists, as it surrendered a gobsmacking amount of wealth, land and people to the Germans. It also infuriated the growing coalition of left communists, who believed Lenin had treacherously sold out the international proletariat, extinguished all hopes for worldwide revolution, and turned Russia into an exploited colony of German imperialism. The treaty would in time cause the permanent rupture of the Bolsheviks and the left SRs, who hated the treaty with every fiber of their being. But for Lenin, however ignoble the treaty, however pathetic the treaty, it was a necessary treaty.

It was necessary both for the sake of the Soviet socialist government, but also for global socialist revolution. In response to critics from the left, Lenin could point out the simple fact that while they called for a Leveon mass, the people were not actually willing to take up arms. the peace might be unpopular among the political leadership, but war was even more unpopular among the masses. And for all its negative aspects, the Treaty of Brestletofsk had one unmistakable virtue. The Soviet government was left intact.

The revolutionary baby was not smothered in the crib. Between the Third Congress of the Soviets enshrining would amount to a Soviet constitution, and the Treaty of Bresli Tovsk, where the Soviet government won international recognition, Lenin believed he had a small but fertile plot where the seeds of future worldwide socialist revolution could be planted, tended, and sowed. But before they could export their produce abroad, they must first harvest it at home.