The party’s agitators must protest, time and again, against the foul slander, launched by capitalists, that our party allegedly favors a separate peace with Germany.
The Bolsheviks’ main concern after October was to solidify their power and to expand it nationwide. This difficult task they had to accomplish within the framework of an active foreign policy, at the center of which stood relations with Germany. In Lenin’s judgment, unless Russia promptly signed an armistice with Germany, his chances of keeping power were close to nil; conversely, such an armistice and the peace that would follow opened for the Bolsheviks the doors to world conquest. In December 1917, when most of his followers rejected the German terms, he argued that the party had no choice but to do the Germans’ bidding. The issue was starkly simple: unless the Bolsheviks made peace, “the peasant army, unbearably exhausted by the war, … will overthrow the socialist workers’ government.”2 The Bolsheviks required a
Proceeding from this assumption, Lenin was prepared to make peace with the Central Powers on any terms as long as they left him a power base. The resistance which he encountered in party ranks grew out of the belief (which he shared) that the Bolshevik Government could survive only if a revolution broke out in Western Europe and the conviction (which he did not fully share) that this was bound to happen at any moment. To make peace with the “imperialist” Central Powers, especially on the humiliating terms which they offered, was to his opponents a betrayal of international socialism; in the long run, it spelled death for revolutionary Russia. In their view, Soviet Russia should not place her own short-term national interests above the interests of the international proletariat. Lenin disagreed:
Our tactics ought to rest… [on the principle] how to ensure more reliably and hopefully for the socialist revolution the possibility of consolidating itself or even surviving
On this issue the Bolshevik Party split in the winter of 1917–18 straight down the middle.
The history of Bolshevik Russia’s relations with the Central Powers, notably Germany, during the twelve months that followed the October coup is of supreme interest because it is on this occasion that the Communists first formulated in theory and worked out in practice the strategy and tactics of their foreign policy.
Western diplomacy traces its origins to the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century. From there diplomatic practices spread to the rest of Europe and in the seventeenth century received codification in international law. Diplomacy was designed to regulate and peacefully resolve disputes among sovereign states; if it failed and arms were resorted to, its task was to keep the level of violence as low as possible and to bring hostilities to an early end. The success of international law rests on the acceptance by all parties of certain principles:
1. Sovereign states are acknowledged to have an unquestioned right to exist: whatever disagreements divide them, their existence itself can never be at issue. This principle underpinned the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. It was violated at the end of the eighteenth century with the Third Partition of Poland, which led to that country’s demise, but this was an exceptional case.
2. International relations are confined to contacts between governments: it is a violation of diplomatic norms for one government to go over the head of another with direct appeals to its population. In the practice of the nineteenth century, states normally communicated through the ministries of foreign affairs.
3. Relations among the foreign offices presume a certain level of integrity and goodwill, including respect for formal accords, since without them there can be no mutual trust, and without trust diplomacy becomes an exercise in futility.
These principles and practices, which evolved between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, assumed the existence of a Law of Nature as well as that of a supranational community of Christian states. The Stoic concept of the Law of Nature, which theorists of international law from Hugo Grotius onward applied to relations between states, posited eternal and universal standards of justice. The concept of a Christian community meant that, whatever divided them, the countries of Europe and their overseas offspring belonged to one family. Before the twentieth century, the precepts of international law were not meant to apply to peoples outside the European community—an attitude which justified colonial conquests.
