(14) October Revolution: Brest-Litovsk

The months immediately after the October Revolution (Nov. 6, New Style) included several major inflection points: the Constituent Assembly elections, the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly, the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, founding of the Red Army, the beginning of the civil war.

The Provisional Government headed by Kerensky had come to power in February (March, New Style) in the wake of a popular uprising that was directed in major part against the continuation of the war. Kerensky set himself on a course to continuing it, which was a major reason the "dual power" of the Soviets remained strong enough to sustain the October Revolution. Lenin as the head of the new government was determined to get Russia out of the war. And he was willing to make major concessions to do so. In a couple of weeks at the beginning of December 1917, the Soviet government negotiated an armistice in place on the German-Russian front. "This agreement provided for a cessation of hostilities up to the 14th of January, 1918, and stipulated that the two parties would immediately proceed to the inauguration of negotiations for a full-fledged peace treaty." (George Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 1956)

The very new Soviet government hoped seriously for an immediate revolution in the West, particularly in Germany, that would also be directed against a continuation of the war. Immediate as in weeks. That did not occur. And the Soviet authorities were quickly forced to recognize that in the context of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, which were headed on the Soviet side by Leon Trotsky. Kennan:

The refusal of the Allies to join in the armistice negotiations, coupled with the continued failure of the proletariat of the western countries to overthrow their governments in the expected manner, confronted the Soviet leaders with the necessity of preparing alone—an isolated, inexperienced, precariously situated regime, with a disintegrating army—to face the formidable representatives of Imperial Germany at Brest-Litovsk. This constituted the first serious reversal of Soviet diplomacy, and it was followed by evidences of sharpest resentment on Trotsky's part, directed against the Allied representatives in Petrograd. One has the impression that once the decision was made to proceed independently with the peace talks, the men in the Smolny Institute [in Russia] saw no reason why they should continue to observe any particular restraint with regard to the Allied representatives. Both the British and French Embassies experienced at that time severe difficulties and embarrassments at the hands of the Soviet authorities. [my emphasis]

Kennan devotes a chapter of Russia Leaves the War to the "Kalpashnikov Affair," which occasioned the Soviet government giving up on the hope that the United States would support them in seeking an early end to the war. Without going into the melodramatic details, the result was "a moment in the middle of December 1917 when the American representatives in Petrograd stood in acute danger of arrest and persecution, if not worse, at the hands of the Soviet authorities."

It included a dramatic moment in which Trotsky incited a crowd to sound like a 2016 Trump campaign rally in denouncing the American Ambassador David Francis in a way that inspired the crowd to cry, "Arrest Francis! Hang him! Shoot him!" It didn't come to that. But the whole sequence of events illustrated the tension and confusion and mutual distrust that hung over the relationship between the new Bolshevik government and the American representatives on the scene. Francis reportedly said during this period of the new regime, "I shall never recognize them nor have anything to do with these murderers. If ever the United States recognizes this anti-democratic party, as Robins seems to think, probably it will only be after I have resigned."

Due to some kind of miscalculation on the Soviet side, they did not sign the treaty initially negotiated with the Germans, thinking that the ceasefire would hold indefinitely. But this didn't take into account the fact that the Germans were in by far the more powerful position at the moment. Without concluding the actual peace agreement, Trotsky broke off the formal negotiations and announced a demobilization on the Russian western front. The Germans resume military operations and took effective control of even more territory. So the Russians then settled on new and less favorable German terms, concluding a treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3. Ukraine, then not controlled by the Soviet government, had settled three weeks early. The two together are known as the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, although the one usually referenced as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the March 3 one between Russia and Germany.

Joint German-Soviet military parade celebrating the agreement

The result was that the Soviets conceded control over the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuanian), Finland, Ukraine, and Polish territories held by the Czar.

Simone Bernard et al in "Der hohe Preis des Friedens" Die Russische Revolution (GeoEpoche 83:2017) explains that the Brest-Litovsk agreement reduced the territory under the Russian government's control to a space similar to that of the 1600s. Along with taking 55 million people out of what had been the Czarist Empire, it also initially deprived Russia of "a third of its agricultural lands, 54% of its industry, and 89% of its coal mines." (my translation)