The recommendations of the Foreign Ministry and the General Staff clashed at a conference at Bad Homburg on February 13 which the Kaiser chaired.48 Kühlmann pressed the conciliatory line. The sword, he argued, could not eliminate “the center of the revolutionary plague.” Even if German forces occupied Petrograd, the problem would not disappear: the French Revolution demonstrated that foreign intervention only inflamed nationalist and revolutionary passions. The best solution would be an anti-Bolshevik coup carried out by Russians with German assistance: but whether he favored such policy, Kühlmann did not say. The Foreign Minister received support from the Vice-Chancellor, Friedrich von Payer, who spoke of the widespread desire for peace among the German people and the impossibility of overthrowing the Bolsheviks by military force.
Hindenburg disagreed. Unless decisive steps were taken in the east, the war on the Western Front could drag on for a long time. He wanted to “smash the Russians [and] topple their government.”
The Kaiser sided with the generals. Trotsky had come to Brest not to make peace, he said, but to promote revolution, and he did so with Allied support. The British envoy in Russia should be told that the Bolsheviks are enemies: “England should fight the Bolsheviks alongside the Germans. The Bolsheviks are tigers, they must be exterminated in every way.”49 In any event, Germany had to act, otherwise Britain and the United States would take over Russia. The Bolsheviks, therefore, “had to go.” “The Russian people have been turned over to the vengeance of Jews, who are connected with all the Jews in the world—that is, the Freemasons.”*
The conference decided that the armistice would expire on February 17, following which German armies would resume offensive operations against Russia. Their mission was not clearly spelled out. The military plan to overthrow the Bolsheviks was soon given up, however, because of the objections of the civilian authorities.
In accord with these instructions, the German staff at Brest informed the Russians that Germany would recommence military operations on the Eastern Front at noon, February 17. The Mirbach mission in Petrograd was ordered home.
Despite their bravado, it is by no means clear that the Germans knew what they wanted: whether to compel the Bolsheviks to accept their peace terms or to remove them from power. Neither then nor later were they able to decide on their priorities: whether they were primarily interested in seizing more Russian territory or installing in Russia a more conventional government. In the end, territorial greed prevailed.
The German notification of impending military action reached Petrograd on the afternoon of February 17. At the meeting of the Central Committee, which convened immediately, Lenin renewed his plea to return to Brest and capitulate, but he again suffered a narrow defeat, 6–5.50 The majority wanted to wait and see whether the Germans would carry out their threat: if they indeed marched into Russia and no revolution broke out in Germany and Austria, there would still be time to bow to the inevitable.
The Germans were true to their word. On February 17, their troops advanced and occupied Dvinsk without encountering resistance. General Hoffmann described the operation as follows:
This is the most comic war that I have ever experienced—it is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece, and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks, entrains another detachment, and moves on. The procedure has in any event the charm of novelty.51
For Lenin, this was the last straw. Though it was not entirely unexpected, he was appalled by the passivity of Russian troops. Given their unwillingness to fight, Russia lay wide open to the enemy’s advance. Lenin seems to have been in possession of the most sensitive decisions of the German Government, possibly supplied by German sympathizers through Bolshevik agents in Switzerland or Sweden. On the basis of this information, he concluded that the Germans contemplated taking Petrograd and even Moscow. He was infuriated by the smugness of his associates. As he saw it, there was nothing to prevent the Germans from repeating their coup in the Ukraine—that is, replacing him with a right-wing puppet and then suppressing the Revolution.
But when the Central Committee reassembled on February 18, he once again failed to win a majority. His resolution in favor of capitulation to the German demands received six votes against seven cast for the motion jointly presented by Trotsky and Bukharin. The party leadership was hopelessly deadlocked. There was a danger that the division would split the party’s rank and file, destroying the disciplined unity which was its main source of strength.
