In the financial settlement, Russia agreed to pay Germany and German nationals full compensation for the losses which they had suffered in consequence of measures taken by the tsarist and Soviet governments, as well as for the costs which Germany claimed to have incurred for the upkeep of the Russian prisoners of war. The Germans estimated this sum to be between 7 and 8 billion deutsche marks. After Russian counterclaims had been taken into account, it was reduced to 6 billion: of this, 1 billion was to be paid by Finland and the Ukraine. Russia undertook to repay, over eighteen months, half of the 5 billion deutsche marks it owed by transferring to Germany 24.5 tons of gold, an agreed-upon quantity of rubles, and 1 billion rubles’ worth of merchandise. The other half Soviet Russia was to repay from the proceeds of a forty-five-year loan floated in Germany. These payments were to satisfy all German claims, governmental as well as private, against Russia. Moscow reconfirmed the provisions of Brest by virtue of which it was to return to their German owners all nationalized and municipalized properties, including confiscated cash and securities, and allow them to repatriate these assets to Germany.
Although upon coming to power the Bolsheviks had condemned secret diplomacy in the strongest terms and made many secret treaties of the “imperialist powers” public, where their own interests were involved they showed no aversion to such practices. There were three secret clauses attached to the Supplementary Treaty, signed by Ioffe for Russia and Hintze for Germany: these became public knowledge only years afterward and have not been published to this day in the Soviet Union. They formalized Germany’s acceptance of Moscow’s requests of August 1 for German military intervention.
One of these secret provisions elaborated Article 5 of the Supplementary Treaty, in which the Russians undertook to expel the Allies from Murmansk. The clause specified that if the Russians were unable to do so, the task would be accomplished by a combined Finno-German force.*
To work out the plan of this operation, the commander of the Petrograd Military District, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, went at the end of August to Berlin at the head of a delegation of the Commissariat of War.206 He agreed that the projected assault on Murmansk would be carried out by German troops; as previously proposed, the mission of the Russian forces would be to intercept the British in the event they advanced on Moscow from Archangel. The two sides clashed over Petrograd. Ludendorff insisted that the Germans had to occupy Petrograd as a base of operations against Murmansk, but Moscow would have none of it. To minimize the bad impression that the movement of German troops across Russian territory would produce, Moscow suggested a variety of deceptive measures, one of which had the German troops serving under the “nominal” command of a Russian officer.207 The actual commander, the Russians agreed, would be a German general: at one point the Soviet side suggested for the part Field Marshal August von Mackensen, the Adjutant General of the Kaiser, who had dealt Russian forces a crushing defeat in Galicia in 1915.208 The operation was being mounted when Germany surrendered.209
The second secret clause, even more sensitive because it involved German action not against foreign forces but against Russians, confirmed German acceptance of the Bolshevik request to initiate operations against the Volunteer Army. The Germans committed themselves to such action in the following words:
Germany expects Russia to apply all the available means to suppress immediately the insurrections of General Alekseev and the Czechoslovaks: Russia, on the other hand, recognizes [
This commitment the Germans also took seriously. On August 13, Ioffe communicated to Moscow that after the Supplementary Treaty had been ratified, the Germans would take energetic measures to crush the Volunteer Army.210
Germany promised to intervene against the British and Denikin’s army in response to Soviet requests. The third secret clause came at German insistence and was forced on the unwilling Russians. It obliged the Soviet Government to expel from Baku the British force that had been there since August 4. As in the case of the other two clauses, it stipulated that if Soviet forces proved unequal to the task, the Wehrmacht would assume responsibility, † This provision was also not implemented, because the Turks occupied Baku on September 16, before the German forces were ready to move.
The three secret clauses ensured that if Germany had not collapsed, she would have secured not only an economic but also a military stranglehold on Soviet Russia.
