To understand Germany’s Soviet policy a few words need to be said about her so-called Russlandpolitik. For while her immediate interest in making peace with Russia derived from military considerations, Germany also had long-range geopolitical designs on that country. German political strategists had traditionally shown a keen interest in Russia: it was not by accident that before World War I no country had a tradition of Russian scholarship remotely approaching the German. Conservatives regarded it as axiomatic that their country’s national security required a weak Russia. For one, only if the Russians were unable to threaten Germany with a second front could her forces confidently take on the French and the “Anglo-Saxons” in the struggle for global hegemony. Second, to be a serious contender in Weltpolitik, Germany required access to Russia’s natural resources, including foodstuffs, which she could obtain on satisfactory terms only if Russia became her client. Having established a national state very late, Germany had missed out in the imperial scramble. Her only realistic chance of matching the economic prowess of her rivals lay in expanding eastward, into the vastness of Eurasia. German bankers and industrialists looked on Russia as a potential colony, a kind of surrogate Africa. They drafted for their government memoranda in which they stressed how important it was for victorious Germany to import, free of tariffs, Russian high-grade iron ore and manganese, as well as to exploit Russian agriculture and mines.13
To transform Russia into a German client state, two things had to be done. The Russian Empire had to be broken up and reduced to territories populated by Great Russians. This entailed pushing Russia’s frontiers eastward through the annexation by Germany of the Baltic provinces and the creation of a cordon sanitaire of nominally sovereign but in fact German-controlled protectorates: Poland, the Ukraine, and Georgia. This program, advocated before and during the war by the publicist Paul Rohrbach,14 had a strong appeal, especially to the military. Hindenburg wrote the Kaiser in January 1918 that Germany’s interests required Russia’s borders to be shifted to the East, and her western provinces, rich in population and economic capacity, to be annexed.15 Essentially this meant Russia’s expulsion from continental Europe. In the words of Rohrbach, the issue was whether “if our future is to be secure, Russia is to be allowed to remain a European power in the sense that she had been until now, or is she not to be allowed to be such?”16
Second, Russia had to grant Germany all kinds of economic concessions and privileges that would leave her open to German penetration and, ultimately, hegemony. German businessmen during the war importuned their government to annex Russia’s western provinces and subject Russia to economic exploitation.17
From this perspective, nothing suited Germany better than a Bolshevik Government in Russia. German internal communications from 1918 were replete with arguments that the Bolsheviks should be helped to stay in power as the only Russian party prepared to make far-reaching territorial and economic concessions and because their incompetence and unpopularity kept Russia in a state of permanent crisis. State Secretary Admiral Paul von Hintze expressed the consensus when in the fall of 1918 he stood up to those Germans who wanted to topple the Bolsheviks as unreliable and dangerous partners: eliminating the Bolsheviks “would subvert the whole work of our war leadership and our policy in the East, which strives for the military paralysis of Russia.”18 Paul Rohrbach argued in a similar vein:
The Bolsheviks are ruining Great Russia, the source of any potential Russian future danger, root and branch. They have already lifted most of that anxiety which we might have felt about Great Russia, and we should do all we can to keep them as long as possible carrying on their work, so useful to us.19
If Berlin and Vienna agreed on the desirability of quickly coming to terms with Russia, in Petrograd opinions were sharply divided. Setting nuances aside, the division pitted those Bolsheviks who wanted peace at once, on almost any terms, against those who wanted to use the peace negotiations as a means for unleashing a European revolution.
