Abstract
The fate of Russia in the months following Brest-Litovsk depended on the outcome of a tense triangular relationship between the Allies, the Germans and the Bolsheviks. The Allies’ concern was to restore the Eastern Front, if possible, or at least to minimise the advantages gained by the Germans from their victory over Russia. For the Germans what mattered was to keep Russia out of the war and to exploit the country’s weakness (and especially that of its new government) to the utmost. What mattered to the Bolsheviks was, first and foremost, to stay in power and, secondly, to promote their international revolutionary objectives, in so far as these were compatible with staying in power.
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Notes and References
M. S. Kedrov, Bez bol’shevistskogo rukovodstva (1930), p. 28. Kedrov denounces Trotsky for sending this order, and subsequent Soviet writers have repeated his denunciation, claiming that he acted without the approval of Lenin, though no proof of this is ever given. Trotsky wrote in Izvestiya, 4 July 1918, that the measures he then took were ‘completely in accordance with the instructions I received from the Council of People’s Commissars and, in particular, from the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs’ (How The Revolution Armed, English translation, vol. I [1979], p. 262), but this was dismissed as a ‘lying, pettifogging statement’ by N. A. Kornatovskii in Krasnaya Letopis’, no. 3 (36), (1930), p. 35.
R. H. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917–1921, vol. I, Intervention and the War (1961), pp. 179–80.
M. J. Carley, ‘The origins of the French intervention in the Russian civil war’, in Journal of Modern History, vol. XLVIII (1976), no. 3, p. 420.
J. Sadoul, Notes sur la Révolution bolchevique (1971; originally published in 1919), p. 330.
W. Hard, Raymond Robins’ Own Story (1920), pp. 151–2;
see also W. P. and Z. K. Coates, Armed Intervention in Russia (1935), p. 65.
G. F. Kennan, Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920, vol. I, Russia Leaves The War (1956), pp. 500–5, 516.
Kennan, Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 vol. II, The Decision to Intervene (1958), pp. 134–5.
A. B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence (1968), p. 70. Alexandra Kollontai ‘spoke of a conspiracy of the British, the French and the Germans, while those nations were slaughtering each other in France’ (Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Alexandra Kollontai [1979], p. 142). A similar misreading of international politics seems to have governed Stalin’s behaviour in May-June 1941, when he discounted British warnings of imminent German attack as so much ‘provocation’: the British, as he saw it, obviously wanted to embroil Russia with Germany and then join Germany in a ‘world-imperialist’ onslaught on the workers’ state. As British aid flowed in during the months of Russia’s greatest need, the Soviet officials could conceal their delighted surprise only by complaining of the ‘inadequacy’ of this aid.
A. O. Chubaryan, V. I. Lenin i formirovanie sovetskoi vneshnei politiki (1972), p. 179.
A. O. Chubaryan, Brestskii mir (1964), pp. 157, 202. (Contrast the line of the British Communists, Mr and Mrs Coates, in their Armed Intervention in Russia p. 74: ‘There can be little doubt that had London and Washington acted on the sage advice tendered by Mr. Lockhart and Colonel Robins, Russia would not have quitted the war.’) See also John M. Thompson’s chapter in C. E. Black (ed.), Rewriting Russian History (1956), pp. 366–7.
W. Baumgart, Die Mission des Grafen Mirbach in Moskau, April-Juni 1918’, in Vierteljahrschift far Zeitgeschichte, 16 (1968), pp. 85–6.
V. I. Petrov, Otrazhenie stranoi sovetov nashestviya germanskogo imperializma v 1918 g. (1980), p. 221, n. 364.
L. H. Grondijs, La Guerre en Russie et en Sibérie (1922), p. 272.
R. H. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917–1921, vol. I, Intervention and the War (1961), p. 124.
Richard K. Debo, Revolution and Survival (1979), p. 59.
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© 1987 Brian Pearce
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Pearce, B. (1987). Brest-Litovsk and After. In: How Haig Saved Lenin. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18843-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18843-7_4
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