At this juncture, Trotsky came to Lenin’s assistance: switching sides, instead of supporting his own resolution he voted for Lenin’s. Trotsky’s biographer believes that he did so partly in fulfillment of a promise to Lenin to give in if the Germans invaded Russia and partly to avert what could have been a disastrous cleavage in the party.52 When another vote was taken, seven members voted in favor of Lenin’s motion and six opposed it.53 On the basis of this slenderest of majorities, Lenin drafted a cable informing the Germans that the Russian delegation was returning to Brest.54 Several Left SRs were shown the text, and when they approved it, it was transmitted by wireless.
Then came the shock. The Germans and Austrians, instead of immediately suspending their offensive, kept on advancing into Russia’s interior. In the north German units entered Livonia, while in the center they moved, still unopposed, on Minsk and Pskov. In the south the Austrians and Hungarians also went forward. On the face of it, these operations, carried out after the Russians had signaled their readiness to accept German terms, could have only one meaning: Berlin was determined to seize the Russian capitals and topple the Bolsheviks. This was where Lenin drew the line: according to Isaac Steinberg, he said on February 18 that he would fight only if the Germans demanded of his government to give up power.55
Days passed and there was still no response from the advancing Germans. At this point, panic seized the Bolshevik leaders: they passed emergency measures, one of which was to have especially grave consequences. On February 21–22, still without a word from the Germans, Lenin wrote and signed a decree entitled “The socialist fatherland in danger.”56 Its preamble stated that the actions of the Germans indicated they had decided to suppress the socialist government of Russia and restore the monarchy. To defend the “socialist fatherland” urgent measures were required. Two of these turned out to have lasting consequences. One called for the creation of battalions of forced labor made up of “all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class” to dig trenches. Resisters were to be shot. This initiated the practice of forced labor, which in time would affect millions of citizens. Another clause read: “Enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, German spies, are to be executed on the spot.” The provision introduced irrevocable penalties for crimes which were neither defined nor on the statute books, since all laws had by then been annulled.57 Nothing was said about trials or even hearings for the accused liable to capital punishment. In effect, the decree gave the Cheka the license to kill, of which it soon made full use. The two clauses marked the opening phase of Communist terror.
Lenin had warned his colleagues that if the Germans resumed military operations, the Bolsheviks would have to seek French and English help, which is what they now proceeded to do.
Although the Germans could not decide which to give precedence, they at least drew a distinction between their short-term interests in Russia, connected with the war, and Russia’s long-term geopolitical importance to them. The Allies had only one interest in Russia, and that was to keep her in the war. Russia’s collapse and the prospect of a separate peace were for the Allies calamities of the first order, likely to lead to a German victory, for with dozens of divisions transferred to the west, the Germans could crush the exhausted French and British forces before the Americans arrived in significant numbers. For the Allies, therefore, the uppermost priority in regard to Russia was reactivating the Eastern Front, with Bolshevik cooperation, if possible, and if not, then with any other force available: anti-Bolshevik Russians, Japanese, Czech prisoners of war interned in Russian camps, or, as a last resort, their own troops. Who the Bolsheviks were, what they stood for, was of no concern to them: they showed interest neither in the internal policy of the Bolshevik regime nor in its international objectives, which increasingly preoccupied the Germans. Bolshevik “fraternization” policies, their appeals to workers to strike and soldiers to mutiny, found as yet no response in Allied countries and hence gave no cause for alarm there. The Allied attitude was clear and simple: the Bolshevik regime was an enemy if it made peace with the Central Powers, but a friend and ally if it stayed in the fight. In the words of Arthur Balfour, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, as long as the Russians fought the Germans their cause was “our cause.”58 The U.S. Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, expressed the same sentiments in a message of January 2, 1918, meant for transmittal to Lenin’s government, although never sent:
