For Russian patriots, who had long been obsessed by the thought of the Slavs being subjected to the economic domination of the Teutons, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was a national catastrophe. Prince Lvov, who was living in Tiumen’ at the time, became almost suicidal and, according to his aunt, would not get out of bed for several days. General Brusilov, a stalwart of the pan-Slav cause, was thrown into deep depression by the news. It was uncharacteristic of this great optimist, who had always managed to keep his spirits up, even at the darkest moments of the war. With his leg in plaster, still recovering from the wound inflicted on it during the fighting in Moscow, he lay in bed for days bemoaning Russia’s ruin. His wife later claimed that he found solace in religion: God took up the space vacated by the Fatherland in his mental world. It also made him more accepting of what he now saw as ‘Russia’s tragic destiny’. He was certainly not inclined to join the civil war against the treaty, although the Cheka, which could not understand why such an aristocrat would not join the Whites, later imprisoned him on the assumption that he had done just that. Brusilov’s refusal to take up arms against the Soviet regime was based on the conviction, as he put it in a letter to his brother, that ‘the people have decided Russia’s fate’. Although Brusilov’s heart was no doubt with the Whites, he knew only too well that their cause was doomed because they supported the resumption of the war. If there was one thing that Brusilov had learned from the experience of 1917, it was that the Russian people wanted peace at any cost, and that all the talk of the patriotic parties about defending Mother Russia and its borders was entirely alien to them.96
Opposition to the treaty was not limited to anti-Soviet circles. The Bukharin faction and the Left SRs were thrown together by their rejection of the ‘shameful peace’ and combined to form a powerful opposition in the Soviet Executive. The Left SRs resigned from Sovnarkom in protest at the treaty, and later took up terrorist measures, including the assassination of the German Ambassador, in the futile hope of wrecking it and reviving the revolutionary war. The emergence of the Bukharin faction, the Left Communists, grouped around the journal Kommunist, split the Bolshevik Party down the middle. Many of these young idealists, if not so much Bukharin himself, linked their support for a revolutionary war with their opposition to the rapprochement with the bourgeoisie which Lenin called for in the spring under the programme of ‘state capitalism’. They were opposed to the idea of any let-up in the war against the bourgeoisie — either in the form of peace with the imperialists abroad, or of a compromise with the capitalists at home. They saw the revolution as an international crusade against capitalism and, unlike Lenin, believed that this could be sustained through the revolutionary energies of the peasants and the workers within a genuinely democratic and decentralized system of Soviet power.
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The peace of Brest-Litovsk marked the completion of Lenin’s revolution: it was the culmination of October. In his struggle over the treaty, as in his struggle for power itself, Lenin had always been uncompromising. There was no sacrifice he was not prepared to make for the consolidation of the revolution on his own terms. As a result of his intransigence, the Bolsheviks had been isolated from the rest of the revolutionary parties and split down the middle on several major issues. The seizure of power, the closure of the Constituent Assembly and the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, all of which had been carried out on Lenin’s instigation, had plunged the country deeper and deeper into civil war. Russia itself had ceased to be a major power in the world. It was forced to retreat from the continent of Europe, to turn in on itself, and to look towards the east. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk there was no real prospect of the revolution spreading to the West. Lenin was quite adamant about this, and all his talk of the ‘inevitable revolution in Germany’ cancelling out the losses of the treaty was no more than bluff for the sake of party morale and propaganda.97 True, during 1919 and 1920, Lenin would flirt with the idea of exporting Communism through the Comintern; but this did not amount to much. To all intents and purposes, the ‘permanent revolution’ had come to an end, and from this point on, in Lenin’s famous phrase, the aim of the regime would be limited to the consolidation of Socialism in One Country.
