Of all the Bolshevik decrees passed in their first days of power none had the same emotional appeal as the Decree on Peace. The revolution had been born of the war — or at least of the yearning that it would end. Russia had been brought to its knees after three long years of total war and its people wanted peace above all else. On 26 October, when Lenin made his immortal announcement to the Soviet Congress that ‘We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!’, the first thing he turned to was the question of peace. This had been the basis of his party’s claim to power, the one demand which all the delegates brought with them from their barracks and their factories to the Soviet Congress. When Lenin read out the decree — a bombastic ‘Proclamation to the Peoples of All the Belligerent Nations’ proposing a ‘just and democratic peace’ on the old Soviet formula of no annexations or indemnities — there was an overwhelming wave of emotion in the Smolny hall. ‘Suddenly’, recalled John Reed, ‘by common impulse, we found ourselves on our feet, mumbling together into the smooth lifting unison of the Internationale. A grizzled old soldier was sobbing like a child. Alexandra Kollontai rapidly winked the tears back. The immense sound rolled through the hall, burst windows and doors, and soared into the quiet sky. “The war is ended! The war is ended!” said a young workman near me, his face shining.’84
But of course the war had not ended at all. The Decree on Peace was an expression of hope, not a statement of fact. It was one thing to call for peace, another to bring it about. The other belligerent powers had no intention of signing a general peace: both sides were more intent than ever on slogging it out to the bloody end. The Allies had been spurred on by the intervention of the United States, and the Central Powers by the prospect of transferring troops to the west as the Eastern Front was run down. There was no real reason why either should listen to Russia’s appeals for peace, especially not now that her military position had been so weakened. She had lost her status among the Great Powers; and her calls for a general peace without annexations or indemnities sounded like the arguments of a loser.
As the Bolsheviks saw it, the peace campaign was inextricably linked with the spread of the revolution to the West. It was this that, in their view, would bring the war to an end — or rather transform it, as Lenin had predicted, into a series of civil wars in which the workers of the world would unite to overthrow their imperialist rulers. The belief in the imminence of a world revolution was central to Bolshevik thinking in the autumn of 1917. As Marxists, it was inconceivable to them that the socialist revolution could survive for long in a backward peasant country like Russia without the support of the proletariat in the advanced industrial countries of the West. Left to themselves, without an industrial base to defend their revolution, and surrounded by a hostile peasantry, the Bolsheviks believed that they were doomed to fail. The October seizure of power had been carried out on the premise, naive though it may sound today, that a worldwide socialist revolution was just around the corner. Every report of a strike or a mutiny in the West was hailed by the Bolsheviks as a certain sign that ‘it was starting’.
As long as this expectation remained alive, the Bolsheviks did not need a foreign policy in the conventional sense. All they needed to do was to fan the flames of the world revolution. ‘What sort of diplomatic work will we be doing anyway?’ Trotsky had said to a friend on hearing of his appointment as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. ‘I shall issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples and then shut up shop.’ The basic aim of the Soviet peace campaign was to serve as a means of revolutionary propaganda; and in this sense it was not a peace campaign at all. The Decree on Peace was a popular summons to revolution. It called on the peoples of the belligerent countries to revolt against the war and to force their rulers into peace talks. ‘This proposal of peace will meet with resistance on the part of the imperialist governments — we don’t fool ourselves on that score,’ Lenin had warned the Soviet Congress. ‘But we hope that revolution will soon break out in all the belligerent countries; and that is why we address ourselves to the workers of France, England and Germany.’ As George Kennan once observed, this was the first example of what was later to become known in Soviet foreign policy as ‘demonstrative diplomacy’ — diplomacy designed not to promote agreements between mutually recognized national governments within the framework of international law, but ‘rather to embarrass other governments and stir up opposition among their own people’.fn1485
