In March 1918 Lenin’s government signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The treaty negotiations provoked a deep split in the Bolsheviks’ ranks and broke up the alliance with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.
One of the very first acts of Lenin’s regime had been the proclamation of a Decree on Peace which called for a general armistice and negotiations for ‘a just and democratic peace’. When the fighting continued, Lenin agreed a separate ceasefire with the Germans and started the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. Foreign Commissar Trotsky, who led the Soviet negotiations, had no intention of actually concluding a peace treaty. Instead, he aimed to spin out the negotiations and to use them as a platform for propaganda, the hope being that the revolutionary situation in Europe would mature and the war could be stopped by mass action. The Germans played along with this charade for a while but in January 1918 issued an ultimatum that demanded the annexation of large chunks of the western areas of the former Tsarist Empire in return for a peace deal.
Lenin and Stalin wanted to accept the German terms on grounds that the alternative was losing the war and with it the revolution. Opposed were Nikolai Bukharin and ‘Left Communist’ supporters of a revolutionary war against Germany, who argued that the European proletariat would rise in support of Bolshevik Russia. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries also favoured a revolutionary war. Trotsky proposed a compromise formula of ‘neither war nor peace’ – a unilateral declaration of an end to hostilities. Trotsky’s proposal was accepted and this is what he told the astonished German negotiators at Brest-Litovsk.
Trotsky’s calculation that the Germans would acquiesce in such a peace because it would enable them to concentrate on defeating their western enemies proved to be disastrously wrong when Berlin launched an Eastern Front offensive that achieved rapid success. Faced with the prospect of military collapse, the Bolsheviks had little choice but to accept the Germans’ terms, which had hardened considerably. Even so, it was only after a sharp debate at a specially convened party congress in March 1918 that the Bolsheviks voted in favour of the peace treaty. At the same gathering they changed their name to the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
CIVIL WAR COMMISSAR
The Brest peace paved the way for the Russian Civil War. Now Russia was no longer at war, the Bolsheviks’ opponents did not hesitate to use force in an attempt to topple them from power. The deal also provided a pretext for foreign intervention as Russia’s former allies moved to stop supplies they had sent to the Tsar and the Provisional Government from falling into German hands. More allied troops poured into Russia when the First World War ended in November 1918 and foreign military intervention became part of an anti-Bolshevik crusade aimed at regime change in Russia.
The civil war was a close-run thing. At its height in 1919, the Bolsheviks were corralled in central Russia, under attack from all sides by ‘White Armies’ led by former Tsarist generals and admirals. Having resigned from the Foreign Commissariat as a result of the Brest-Litovsk debacle, Trotsky played a central role in the Bolshevik victory over the Whites. As commissar for war, he raised a 5-million-strong Red Army, controversially recruiting to its ranks 50,000 former Tsarist officers and NCOs.
During the civil war, Stalin was Lenin’s troubleshooter-in-chief on the front line. Stalin’s contribution to the Red victory was, as Robert McNeal has observed,
second only to Trotsky’s. Stalin had played a smaller role in the overall organisation of the Red Army, but he had been more important in providing direction on crucial fronts. If his reputation as a hero was far below Trotsky’s, this had less to do with objective merit than with Stalin’s lack of flair, at this stage of his career, for self-advertisement.61
In June 1918 Stalin was sent to Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1924) to protect food supply lines from southern Russia. With the city about to fall to the enemy, Stalin responded with a wave of arrests and executions of those deemed disloyal and traitorous. He was outraged by the attempted assassination of Lenin in August 1918 by Fanny Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had been banned by the Bolsheviks. Stalin cabled to Moscow that he was responding to this ‘vile’ act by ‘instituting open and systematic mass terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents’.62
While in Tsaritsyn, Stalin clashed with Trotsky over the role of the bourgeois military specialists who had sided with the Bolsheviks. Stalin was all in favour of using whatever expertise was available but he distrusted these specialists and preferred to rely on those with established political loyalties. When Stalin obstructed Trotsky’s appointment of a former Tsarist general to command the Bolsheviks’ Southern Front, the war commissar demanded his immediate recall to Moscow. Lenin, who agreed with Trotsky on the use of bourgeois military specialists, acceded to this but retained his confidence in Stalin.
In January 1919 Stalin was sent to the Urals to investigate why the Perm region had fallen to Admiral Kolchak’s White Army. Stalin was accompanied by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the fearsome head of the Cheka – the agency of the Bolsheviks’ ‘Red Terror’ during the civil war. Reporting back to Moscow, they highlighted the number of former Tsarist officers who had defected to the Whites.
Trotsky’s recruitment of former Tsarist officers was debated at the Bolshevik party’s 8th congress in March 1919. Since Trotsky was at the front, it fell to Lenin to defend his war commissar’s position. Notwithstanding his own doubts, Stalin sided with Lenin against those who wanted to stop employing bourgeois military specialists.
In the spring Stalin was sent to bolster the defence of Petrograd, which was threatened by General Yudenich’s White Army based in Estonia. For several months he was a highly visible figure of authority in the Petrograd area, touring the front line and inspecting military bases. In October 1919 Stalin went to the Southern Front to help with the defence of the southern approaches to Moscow, which were threatened by General Denikin’s troops.
Stalin’s next assignment was the South-West Front, whose forces were attacked by the armies of newly independent Poland in April 1920. Recreated in the aftermath of the First World War, the new Polish state was carved out of territory that belonged to Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Tsarist Russia. Its border with Russia was demarcated by an international commission headed by the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon. This border, which became known as the ‘Curzon Line’, was unacceptable to the Poles, who decided to grab as much territory as they could while civil war raged in Russia.
Headed by Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the Poles’ campaign went well at first, but the Red Army soon halted and then reversed their advances. The question arose of taking the fight into Polish territory, with the aim of defeating Piłsudski and inspiring a proletarian revolution in Poland that would then spread to Germany and the rest of Europe. Stalin was cautious as he had already experienced many rapid advances and reverses during the civil war. His front had to contend also with Baron Wrangel’s White forces based in Crimea. In an interview with Pravda in mid-July, Stalin said:
our successes on the anti-Polish Front are unquestionable. . . . But it would be unbecoming boastfulness to think that the Poles are as good as done with, that all that remains for us to do is to ‘march on Warsaw’. . . . It is ridiculous to talk of a ‘march on Warsaw’ . . . as long as the Wrangel danger has not been eliminated.63