The abortive efforts of some Germans to topple the Bolsheviks had an epilogue. In early September, the German Consul General in Moscow, Herbert Hauschild, had a visit from Vatsetis. The Latvian officer, who had just been appointed Commander in Chief of the armed forces of Soviet Russia, told Hauschild that he was not a Bolshevik but a Latvian nationalist, and that if his men were promised amnesty and repatriation they would place themselves at the disposal of the Germans. Hauschild informed Berlin, which ordered him to drop the matter.*
The Brest Treaty called for a supplementary accord to regulate Russo-German economic relations.
The Germans were very eager to resume trade with Russia, their major commercial partner before 1914, when Russia had purchased from them nearly one-half of her imports. They wanted foodstuffs, first and foremost, as well as other raw materials, and they wished to establish a near-monopoly on Russia’s foreign trade. In June 1918, Moscow provided the Germans with a list of goods which it claimed to have available for export: it included grain, of which, in reality, it had none to spare. Krasin painted a dazzling picture of the vast markets that Soviet Russia could provide for German manufactured goods, and to prove it, negotiated with his old employer, Siemens, for imports of electrical equipment. None of the proposals had any basis in reality: they were bait to serve political ends. The Germans soon grew impatient with Soviet Russia’s failure to provide the promised goods. In June Dr. Alfred List, who had come to Moscow on behalf of the Bleichröder Bank, told Chicherin that the delays in Russian deliveries brought disappointment to those German circles “among which Great Russia could find the most likely sympathy for her political strivings.”201 Lenin was well aware that he could use such “circles”—bankers and industrialists—to neutralize other Germans, mainly among the military, who wanted to be rid of him. He therefore closely monitored the negotiations for the Supplementary Treaty, to which he attached the highest political importance.
The talks opened in Berlin at the beginning of July. The Soviet delegation was headed by Ioffe, who had the assistance of Krasin and various specialists sent by Moscow. The Germans fielded a large delegation of diplomats, politicians, and businessmen. The key person on the German side seems to have been a Foreign Ministry official named Johannes Kriege, whom the historian Winfried Baumgart calls the “gray eminence” of Germany’s policy toward Bolshevik Russia.202 Ioffe was under instructions to be very accommodating to German demands, but if the Germans became unreasonable, he was to make them understand that there were limits to Russia’s compliance. As Ioffe confirmed to Lenin from Berlin: “[our] whole policy must center on demonstrating to the Germans that if they push us too far we will have to fight and then they will get nothing.”203
91. A German-Russian love affair: contemporary Russian cartoon.
Considering the complexity of the issues involved, agreement was reached speedily. The Germans made harsh demands. Ioffe managed to wring some concessions from them, but even so the accord, known as the Supplementary Treaty, signed on August 27, gave Germany most of the advantages. At issue were territorial and financial matters.*
Concerning territorial questions, Germany pledged not to interfere with the relations between Russia and her border regions: this clause repudiated specifically the efforts of the German military to create, under the name “Southern Union,” a protectorate over the Caucasus and the adjoining Cossack regions.204 Russia acknowledged the independence of the Ukraine and Georgia, and further agreed to surrender Estonia and Livonia, neither of which she had conceded in the Brest Treaty. In return, Russia obtained transit rights to the Baltic ports which she had lost. The Germans had initially demanded Baku, the center of Russia’s petroleum industry, but they eventually consented to leave it in Russia’s hands in exchange for a promise of one-quarter of Baku’s annual production. Baku had been occupied by a British force sent from Persia in early August: the German willingness to leave the city to the Bolsheviks was contingent on the Bolsheviks’ expulsion of the British.205 The Russians also undertook to remove the Allied force from Murmansk, while the Germans agreed to evacuate the Crimea and make some minor territorial adjustments on Russia’s western border.
