Three clear factions emerged at the decisive meeting of the Central Committee on 11 January. The Bukharin faction, which was the biggest, with 32 votes out of 63 at a special meeting of the party leaders on 8 January, and the support of both the Petrograd and the Moscow Party Committees, favoured fighting a revolutionary war against Germany. This, it was said, was the most likely way to spark an uprising in the West, which was what really mattered. ‘We have to look at the socialist republic from the international point of view,’ Bukharin argued in the Central Committee. ‘Let the Germans strike, let them advance another hundred miles, what interests us is how this affects the international movement.’ The Trotsky faction, which was the second biggest, with 16 votes at the meeting on 8 January, was equally concerned not to give up hope of a revolution in the West (there were already signs of a sharp upturn in strikes in Germany and Vienna) but doubted that the peasant guerrilla bands, upon which Bukharin was calling, could seriously withstand a German invasion. Trotsky thus put forward the unusual slogan of ‘Neither war nor peace’, which was basically designed to play for time. The Soviet delegation would declare the war at an end and walk out of the talks at Brest-Litovsk, but refuse to sign an annexationist peace. If the Germans invaded, which the Bolsheviks could not prevent in any case, then at least it would appear to the rest of the world as a clear act of aggression against a peaceable country.
From Lenin’s point of view, at the head of the third and smallest faction, Trotsky’s slogan was ‘a piece of international political showmanship’ which would not stop the Germans advancing. Without an army willing to fight, Russia was in no position to play for time. She had no choice but to sign a separate peace, in which case it was better done sooner than later. ‘It is now only a question of how to defend the Fatherland,’ Lenin argued with what was for him a rather new tone of patriotic pathos. ‘There is no doubt that it will be a shameful peace, but if we embark on a war, our government will be swept away.’ There was no point putting the whole of the revolution at risk on the chance (which he himself was now beginning to doubt) that a German revolution might break out. ‘Germany is only just pregnant with revolution, but we have already given birth to a completely healthy child.’ The reconstruction of Russia and the demands of the civil war both demanded an immediate peace, or as Lenin put it with his usual bluntness: ‘The bourgeoisie has to be throttled and for that we need both hands free.’88
With only Stalin, Zinoviev and three others behind him in the Central Committee, and a mere fifteen votes at the broader party meeting on 8 January, Lenin was forced to ally with Trotsky against the Bukharin faction. The risk of losing socialist Estonia to the Germans, or of being forced to give in to their demands at the point of a gun, which he saw as the likely outcome of Trotsky’s international showmanship, still seemed a price worth paying to prevent what he saw as the suicidal policy of a revolutionary war. Trotsky’s mischievous slogan of ‘Neither war nor peace’ was endorsed by the Central Committee, and Trotsky himself sent back to Brest-Litovsk with orders to spin out the talks.
For three more weeks Trotsky played for time, while the German High Command became more impatient. Then events finally came to a head on 9 February, when a telegram arrived from the Kaiser in Berlin ordering Kühlmann to present the German demands as an ultimatum. If it was not signed by the next day, the German and Austrian armies would be ordered to advance. The Kaiser had finally been convinced by the German High Command that the peace talks were a waste of time, that the Russians were merely using them to stir up revolt among his troops, and that the treaty with the Rada, signed on the same day as the Kaiser’s telegram, opened the door to a military imposition of a separate peace on the Russians through the occupation of the Ukraine. There was clearly no more room for procrastination — and Trotsky was forced to lay down his hand. The next day he told the astounded conference that Russia was ‘leaving the war’ but refused to sign the German peace treaty. Nothing quite like it had ever been heard before in diplomatic history — a country that acknowledged defeat and declared its intention not to go on fighting but at the same time refused to accept the victor’s terms for an end to the war. When Trotsky finished speaking the diplomats sat in silence, dumbfounded by this coup de théâtre. Then the silence was at last broken by the scandalized cry of General Max von Hoffman: ‘Unerhört!’89
