The Russian Revolution полностью

And yet there is nothing to indicate that in pressuring his colleagues to accede to German demands Lenin had expected an imminent collapse of the Central Powers. In none of his speeches and writings between December 1917 and March 1918, private and public, when he used every conceivable argument to bring the opposition around, did he claim that time was running out for Germany and that Soviet Russia would soon regain all that she had to give up. Quite the contrary. In the spring and summer of 1918 Lenin seemed to have shared the optimism of the German High Command that they were about to deal the Allies a crushing defeat. Leonid Krasin certainly was not speaking only for himself when on his return from Germany early in September 1918 he assured the readers of Izvestiia that, thanks to her superb organization and discipline, Germany would have no difficulty staying in the war yet another, fifth, year.¹⁰¹ The Bolshevik faith in Germany’s victory is evidenced by the elaborate accords that Moscow concluded with Berlin in August 1918, accords viewed by both countries as a prelude to a formal alliance.¹⁰² How inconceivable Germany’s defeat appeared to Moscow is attested to by the fact that as late as September 30, 1918, when Imperial Germany lay in her death throes, Lenin authorized the transfer to Berlin of assets valued at 312.5 million deutsche marks, as provided for by the August 27 supplementary accord to the Brest Treaty, although he could have delayed this payment with impunity and then canceled it. One week before Germany sued for an armistice, the Soviet Government reconfirmed that German citizens could withdraw deposits from Soviet banks and take them out of the country.¹⁰³ The inescapable conclusion from this evidence is that Lenin bowed to the German Diktat, not because he believed that Germany would be unable to enforce it for very long, but, on the contrary, because he expected Germany to win and wanted to be on the winning side.

The circumstances surrounding the Brest-Litovsk Treaty furnish the classic model of what was to become Soviet foreign policy. Its principles may be summarized as follows:

1. The highest priority at all times is to be assigned to the retention of political power—that is, sovereign authority and the control of the state apparatus over some part of one’s national territory. This is the irreducible minimum. No price is too high to secure it; for its sake anything and everything can be sacrificed: human lives, land and resources, national honor.

2. Ever since Russia had undergone the October Revolution and turned into the center (“oasis”) of world socialism, its security and interests take precedence over the security and interests of every other country, cause, or party, including those of the “international proletariat.” Soviet Russia is the embodiment of the international socialist movement and the base from which the socialist cause is promoted.

3. To purchase temporary advantages, it is permissible to make peace with “imperialist” countries, but such peace must be treated as an armed truce, to be broken when the situation changes in one’s favor. As long as there is capitalism, Lenin said in May 1918, international agreements are “scraps of paper.”¹⁰⁴ Even in periods of nominal peace, hostilities should be pursued by unconventional means with a view to undermining the governments with which one has signed accords.

4. Politics being warfare, foreign policy, as much as domestic policy, must always be conducted unemotionally, with the closest attention being paid to the “correlation of forces”:

We have great revolutionary experience, and from that experience we have learned that it is necessary to follow the tactics of relentless advance whenever objective conditions allow it.… But we have to adopt the tactic of procrastination, the slow gathering of forces when the objective conditions do not offer the possibility of making an appeal to the general relentless advance.¹⁰⁵

Yet another fundamental principle of Bolshevik foreign policy was to be revealed after the enactment of the Brest Treaty: the principle that Communist interests abroad had to be promoted by the application of divide et impera, or, in Lenin’s words, by the

most circumspect, careful, cautious, skillful exploitation of every, even the smallest “crack” among one’s enemies, of every conflict of interest among the bourgeoisie of the various countries, among the various groups or various species of the bourgeoisie within individual countries …¹⁰⁶

*The earliest Soviet polpredy were stationed in neutral countries: V. V. Vorovskii in Stockholm, and Ia. A. Berzin in Berne. After the Brest Treaty had been ratified, A. A. Ioffe took over the Berlin mission. The Bolsheviks tried to appoint first Litvinov and then Kamenev to the Court of St. James’s, but both were rejected. France also would not accept a Soviet representative until after the Civil War.