Whether the Germans had gotten wind of Bolshevik negotiations with France or by mere coincidence, it so happened that their impatiently awaited response arrived on the very morning the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom had voted to seek Allied help.66 It confirmed Lenin’s worst fears. Berlin now demanded not only the territories that its troops had seized in the course of the war but also those they had occupied in the week following the breakdown of the Brest negotiations. The Russians were to evacuate the Ukraine and Finland, as well as demobilize; they were to pay a contribution and make a variety of economic concessions. The note was phrased as an ultimatum requiring an answer within forty-eight hours, following which a maximum of seventy-two hours was allowed for the treaty to be signed.
The next two days, the Bolshevik leadership sat in virtually continuous session. Lenin found himself time and again in a minority. He eventually prevailed only by threatening to resign from all posts in the party and government.
As soon as he had read the German note, Lenin convened the Central Committee. Fifteen members turned up.67 The German ultimatum had to be accepted unconditionally, he said: “The politics of revolutionary phrasemongering have come to an end.” The main thing was that the German demands, humiliating as they were, “did not affect Soviet authority”—that is, they allowed the Bolsheviks to stay in power. If his colleagues persisted in their unrealistic course of action, they would have to do so on their own, because he, Lenin, would leave both the government and the Central Committee.
He then presented three cleverly worded resolutions: (1) that the latest German ultimatum be accepted, (2) that Russia make immediate preparations to unleash a revolutionary war, and (3) that the soviets in Moscow, Petrograd, and the other cities be polled on their views of the matter.
Lenin’s threat to resign worked: everyone realized that without him there would be neither a Bolshevik Party nor a Soviet state. On the first and critical resolution, he failed to win a majority, but because four members abstained, the motion carried 7–4. The second and third resolutions presented no problem. The tally over, Bukharin and three other Left Communists once again went through the motions of resigning from all “responsible posts” in the party and government so as to be free to agitate against the treaty inside and outside party circles.
Although the decision to accept the German ultimatum still required approval from the Central Executive Committee, Lenin felt sufficiently confident of the outcome to instruct the operators of the wireless transmitter at Tsarskoe Selo to keep one channel open for a message to the Germans.
That night Lenin gave the CEC a report on the situation.68 In the voting that followed he won a technical victory for his resolution to accept the German ultimatum, but only because the Bolshevik members who opposed it had walked out and a number of the other opponents abstained. The final count was 116 for Lenin’s resolution, 85 opposed, and 26 abstaining. On the basis of this far from satisfactory, but formally binding outcome, Lenin drafted in the early hours of the morning, in the name of the Central Executive Committee, an unconditional acceptance of the German ultimatum. It was at once communicated by wireless to the Germans.
In the morning of February 24, the Central Committee met to choose a delegation to go to Brest.69 Now numerous resignations from state and party posts were handed in. Trotsky, who had already quit as Commissar of Foreign Affairs, now gave up his other posts as well. He favored a closer relationship with the French and British on the grounds that they were anxious to collaborate with Soviet Russia and had no designs on her territory. Several Left Communists followed the example of Bukharin and turned in their resignations. They spelled out their motives in an open letter. Capitulation to German demands, they wrote, dealt a heavy blow to the revolutionary forces abroad and isolated the Russian Revolution. Furthermore, the concessions which the Russians were required to make to German capitalism would have a catastrophic effect on socialism in Russia: “Surrender of the proletariat’s position externally inevitably paves the way for an internal surrender.” The Bolsheviks should neither capitulate to the Central Powers nor collaborate with the Allies, but “initiate a civil war on an international scale.”70
Lenin, who had gotten what he wanted, pleaded with Trotsky and the Left Communists not to act on their resignations until after the Soviet delegation had returned from Brest. Throughout these trying days he displayed brilliant leadership, alternately cajoling and persuading his followers, never losing either patience or determination. It was probably the hardest political struggle of his life.
