war in Europe.32
Steadily Lenin gained ground in the Central Committee. Sverdlov, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev backed him strongly, and Bukharin and the Left Communists, as they were becoming known, began to wilt in the heat of Lenin’s assault. At the Central Committee he circulated a questionnaire on contingency planning. Bukharin conceded that there were imaginable situations when he would not object in principle to the signature of a separate peace. Sverdlov’s Secretariat plied the local party committees with a version of the debate that was biased in Lenin’s favour. There was also a distinct lack of impartiality in the Secretariat’s arrangements for the selection of delegates to a Seventh Party Congress which would definitively decide between war and peace.33 And as Lenin had warned, the Germans were not fooled by Trotski’s delaying tactics. On 18 February they advanced from Riga and took Dvinsk, only six hundred kilometres from Petrograd. That evening, at last, a shaken Central Committee adopted Lenin’s policy of bowing to the German terms.
The vote had gone seven to five for Lenin because Trotski had joined his side. But then Trotski had second thoughts and again voted against Lenin. Germany and Austria-Hungary, however, increased their demands. The Soviet government had previously been asked to relinquish claims of sovereignty over the area presently occupied by the German and Austrian armies. Now Lenin and his colleagues were required to forgo all Ukraine, Belorussia and the entire south Baltic region to the eastern edge of the Estonian lands. Sovnarkom would lose all the western borderlands.
Sverdlov took the news to the Central Committee on 23 February that the Germans were giving them until seven o’clock the next morning to announce compliance. Momentarily Stalin suggested that their bluff should be called. But Lenin furiously threatened to withdraw from Sovnarkom and campaign in the country for a separate peace: ‘These terms must be signed. If you do not sign them, you are signing the death warrant for Soviet power within three weeks!’34 Trotski found a way to climb down by declaring a preference for revolutionary war but postulating that it could not be fought by a divided party. He therefore abstained in the vote in the Central Committee, and victory was handed to Lenin. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March. Cannily Lenin, Russia’s pre-eminent advocate of a separate peace, declined to attend the official ceremony and entrusted this task instead to Central Committee member Grigori Sokolnikov.
Opinion in the rest of the party had also been moving in Lenin’s favour; and at the Party Congress, which lasted three days from 6 March, his arguments and Sverdlov’s organizational manipulations paid off: the delegates approved the signature of ‘the obscene peace’. But at a price. Disgusted Left Communists, with Bukharin at their head, resigned from both Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were no less horrified, and pulled their representatives out of Sovnarkom. Not even Lenin was totally confident that the separate peace with the Central Powers would hold. On 10 March the seat of government was moved from Petrograd to Moscow, which had not been the Russian capital for two centuries, just in case the German armies decided to occupy the entire Baltic region. Nor was it inconceivable that Moscow, too, might become a target for the Germans.
In fact it was in Germany’s interest to abide by the terms of the treaty so as to be able to concentrate her best military divisions on the Western front.35 Ludendorff needed to finish off the war against Britain and France before the USA could bring her formidable military and industrial power in full on their side. Only then would Germany have the opportunity to turn on Russia. The Bolsheviks had to keep on hoping that socialist revolution would occur in Berlin before any such contingency might arise.
In the meantime Sovnarkom faced enormous difficulties. By the stroke of a pen Russia had been disjoined from Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic region. Half the grain, coal, iron and human population of the former Russian Empire was lost to the rulers in Petrograd and Moscow. There would have been an economic crisis even without the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The harvest of summer 1917 was only thirteen per cent below the average for the half- decade before the Great War; but this was 13.3 million metric tons of grain short of the country’s requirements.36 Ukraine, southern Russia and the Volga region usually enjoyed good enough harvests with which to feed themselves and sell the remainder in the rest of the Russian Empire. These three regions had a shortfall in 1917–18, and possessed no surplus to ‘export’ to other parts. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk made a bad situation worse.
In addition, such peasant households as had surplus stocks of wheat and rye continued to refuse to sell them. The state, which maintained its monopoly on the grain trade, tried to barter with them. But to little avail. The warehouses of agricultural equipment had been nearly emptied. Industrial output in general was tumbling. In 1918 the output of large and medium-sized factories fell to a third of what it had been in 1913.37 The multiple difficulties with transport, with finance and investment and with the unavailability of raw materials continued. Enterprises closed down also because of the ‘class struggle’ advocated by the Bolsheviks. Owners retired from production and commerce. Inflation continued to shoot up. In January 1918 a military-style system was introduced on the railways so as to restore efficiency. The banks had been nationalized in the previous December and many large metallurgical and textile plants were state owned by the spring.38
Even so, the decrees to assert control by government and by people were unable to restore the economy. The increased state ownership and regulation were, if anything, counter-productive to the restoration of the economy. The Bolshevik party was menaced by a gathering emergency of production, transportation and distribution which the Provisional Government had failed to resolve. Lenin had blamed all problems on ministerial incompetence and bourgeois greed and corruption. His own attempt to reconstruct the economy was proving to be even more ineffectual.
Within a couple of years the party’s opponents were to claim that Sovnarkom could have rectified the situation by boosting investment in consumer-oriented industrial output and by dismantling the state grain-trade monopoly. Yet they were not saying this in 1917–18.At the time there was a recognition that the difficulties were largely beyond the capacity of any government to resolve. All of them were adamantly committed to the prosecution of the war against the Central Powers. The necessity to arm, clothe and feed the armed forces was therefore paramount. A free market in grain would have wrecked the war effort. The Bolsheviks alone were willing, just about willing, to sign a separate peace with the Germans and Austrians. But they set their face determinedly against economic privatization. What the liberal administration of Prince Lvov had nationalized they were not going to restore to the conditions of an unregulated market.
For they were a far-left political party, and proud of their ideas and traditions: they renamed themselves as the ‘Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’ expressly in order to demarcate themselves from other types of socialism.39 Ideological impatience infused their thinking. Lenin was more cautious than most Bolsheviks on industrial and agrarian policies, and yet he never seriously contemplated de-nationalization. If he had done, he would not have got far with his party. Victory in the Brest-Litovsk controversy had already stretched the party to breaking-point. Any further compromise with Bolshevik revolutionary principles would have caused an unmendable split. As it was, the Treaty threatened its own disaster. A country which already could not properly feed and arm itself had lost crucial regions of population and production. Could the October Revolution survive?
5
New World, Old World
Bolshevik leaders had assumed that people who supported them in 1917 would never turn against them and that the party’s popularity would trace an unwavering, upward line on the graph. In the Central Committee before the October Revolution, only Kamenev and Zinoviev had dissented from this naive futurology — and their scepticism had incurred Lenin’s wrath. Certainly there were excuses for misjudging the potential backing for the party. The Bolsheviks had not yet got their message through to millions of fellow citizens, and it was not unreasonable for them to expect to reinforce their influence once their reforms and their propaganda had had their desired effect. Lenin and his associates could also point out that the Constituent Assembly results had underplayed the popularity of the Sovnarkom coalition because the candidate lists did not differentiate between the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
Nor had it been senseless to anticipate socialist revolution in central and western Europe. Bread riots had led to upheaval in Russia in February 1917. There were already reports of urban discontent in Germany and Austria
