Russia and the Central Powers were soon going to try to negotiate a peace treaty, officially
ending the war for Russia.
But the German and Austro-Hungarian delegates may want different things from such a peace,
and what happens when they disagree?
The German army puts its foot down.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week Jerusalem surrendered to the Allies, the Bolsheviks declared war on the Cossacks,
and at home in Russia, machinations concerning recent election results began as Lenin tried
to consolidate power.
They were also trying to consolidate an exit from this war.
This week on the 15th, an armistice was signed with the Central Powers, and it was to be
in effect already from the 12th to January 14th.
Here are some of its points: it had a seven-day termination notice.
This would be broken by the Germans, who resumed operations with two days notice.
No German troops were to reinforce the Russian front during the armistice.
Nor were the Germans to reinforce the western front from the Russian front.
This was also broken by the Germans, since at least seven divisions transferred west
during the armistice period.
Both Ottoman and Russian troops were to withdraw from Persia, and peace negotiations are to
begin at once.
So on the 20th, those who were to negotiate peace arrived at Brest-Litovsk.
That evening, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria threw a huge banquet for the delegates.
Immediately to his right from the head of the table was Adolf Joffe, head of the Soviet
delegation, who had just been sprung from a Siberian prison, and past him Austrian Foreign
Minister Count Czernin.
Joffe said to Czernin at one point that he hoped they’d raise the revolution in Austria-Hungary
too.
Czernin wrote in his dairy that night (Gilbert), “We shall hardly need any assistance from
the good Joffe, I fancy, in bringing revolution among ourselves.
The people will manage that if the Entente persists in refusing to come to terms.”
But Russia was willing.
Thing is, Germany could now acquire by legal treaty the territorial gains- and more- that
they’d been unable to take in the field over the past 3.5 years.
And most of the Germans involved in making a treaty had pretty much decided on a “winners’
peace” with Russia.
They certainly didn’t think they should give up any land at all that German soldiers
had died to take, and they damn sure wanted as many natural resources as possible for
the starving masses at home to offset the British blockade.
Chief of Staff Paul von Hindenburg and Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff wanted Germany to
annex all it could and create a border that would make any future war with Russia a lot
easier, even if that meant depriving Russia from just about any access at all to the sea.
They threatened a joint resignation if the German government did not agree to their demands
in the treaty talks.
Some top German businessmen also wanted annexations of key Russian mines and oil wells.
The official head of the German delegation was Foreign Minister Richard von Kuhlmann,
but the real man in charge of the mission was Max Hoffmann, who personally saw no need
to give in to a people he felt had been beaten and conquered.
Count Czernin did threaten to sign a separate Austrian peace with the Russians, in the face
of what he thought was German military arrogance, and Hoffmann responded by threatening to reassign
the 25 German divisions protecting the Austrians from any renewed Russian activity to the Western
Front.
Lenin and Trotsky, for their part, weren’t against a peace on bad terms for the Russians.
That was actually pretty okay with them.
They knew they had to fight a civil war, and there’s no way they could do that and fight
a foreign war at the same time, but Lenin wanted to sign an immediate peace while Trotsky
favored stalling since he thought a Bolshevik revolution in Germany was imminent.
Czernin probably wouldn’t have signed any separate peace whatever the case, but others
were thinking about it.
See, what had initially been a real success story for the British- the Battle of Cambrai-
which recently ended, was now being called by the Times “one of the most ghastly stories
in English history”.
With German troops moving west and Venice now vulnerable to Austrians, some British
leaders now thought positively of separate peace with Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans.
On the 18th, Jan Smuts met Austria’s Count Mensdorff- Pouilly -Dietrichstein in Geneva.
Mensdorff was former Austrian Ambassador to London.
Smuts proposed keeping the empire intact in return for a separate peace; Mensdorff said
Austria could not discuss a separate peace.
Same thing with the Ottomans later in Berne, they would not discuss a separate peace.
Sir Horace Rumbold, who was there in both Geneva and Berne, wrote (Gilbert), “Our
conversations with the Turks have, of course, been prejudiced by the conference at Brest-Litovsk.
In the last week, we have ascertained from a number of government Turks at Geneva that
conference in question has filled the Turks with extravagant hopes for the future of their
empire.
Not only do they hope to recover Mesopotamia, Palestine, etc., with the help of the Germans,
but they also expect to get portions of the Caucasus and to enter into an alliance with
such a state as Georgia.
In fact, they seem really to believe in the possibilities of the Turanian movement.”
This movement was actually more encompassing than pan-Turkism, and includes loads of peoples
of central Asia that spoke Turkic languages.
Ottoman Minister of War Enver Pasha had big hopes of spreading his rule to those Turkic-speaking
regions of Russian central Asia.
After the war, he would lead a ragtag army into central Asia to try and rally Turanian
feeling and was killed in 1922 in Turkestan in a skirmish against the Bolsheviks.
Well, some say that he died in a cavalry charge against them, but the memoirs of the Bolshevik
leader Yakov Melkumov say that Enver escaped that day and hid for four days until the Reds
could find him, whereupon Melkumov personally killed him.
But I digress.
In spite of this activity, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George insisted there was “no
halfway house between victory and defeat” and publicly there was no hint that any diplomatic
discussions were taking place.
He was, however, as depressed as everyone else was by the methods of warfare in use,
and told a newspaperman of “stopping the useless waste of life in attacks on the West
and dealing only heavy counter-strokes, while standing on the defensive.”
But the Russians still had plenty of fighting to do, as I said.
The Bolshevik forces had occupied Rostov at the end of last week, but now they were forced
to flee on the Black Sea, as General Alexei Kaledin, who hadn’t accepted the February
Russian Revolution, let alone the October one, forced them out.
Still, in spite of his issues with the Provisional Government between the revolutions, he clearly
stated that until the Provisional Government was restored, his Don Cossacks would take
total control of the Don region.
Also this week, the Bolsheviks demanded free passage for their troops through Ukraine.
The Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, denied this, and the Russian Civil War was now gonna
extend there.
Well, it was more than just that- the Rada also did not allow the Ukrainian Soviets to
hold a conference.
Soviet Russia then said Ukraine either allows democracy or can consider itself at war with
Russia.
Here are a couple of notes to end the week.
On the 18th, there was action on the Italian front as the Austrians attacked on the Monte
Grappa front near Monte Asolone, taking 2,000 prisoners.
The Italians would recapture the lost territory two days later.
And Adolphe Guillaumat replaces Maurice Sarrail as commander of the Allied forces on the Salonika
Front.
Sarrail had been unsuccessful there in the field and morale was terrible.
He had also angered Italy, Serbia, and Greece by recognizing Essad Pasha as ruler of Albania,
and his association with French politicians like Joseph Caillaux, arrested last week for
treason, sealed his fate with France’s new Clemenceau government.
Sarrail took no further part in the war.
And that was the week.
A Russian armistice signed, even as the Russian Civil War spreads and spreads.
And some allies dreaming of a separate peace, even as Enver Pasha dreams of a vast empire.
In hindsight, it’s easy to blame him for that and call it totally unrealistic, but
think of these guys we talk about every week.
Haig, the Kaiser, Enver, they all still had dreams of not just an end to the war, but
a glorious victory featuring a magnificent breakthrough.
Everyone still had that arrogance, the hubris.
Maybe they needed it in this war, because the one guy that wasn’t dreaming like that
was Lenin, and he was now out of it.
His dreams were now down to consolidating his country, but that would still take more
war, and that would still take hundreds of thousands of lives.
We are close to Christmas 1917 now - and three years ago some still believed the war might
be over by Christmas 1914.
And when Christmas came and it was still war, a few soldiers decided to make peace.
If you want to learn more about the Christmas Truce, you can click right here for that.
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