On August 27, 1918, additional agreements to the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty were signed in Berlin. If Vladimir Lenin had already called the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk “obscene,” now Russia was completely turning into a German semi-colony. “It was a modern form of economic vassalage,” German historian Fritz Fischer wrote about the agreements. What prompted Lenin to ask for more?

The ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918 did not stop the creeping advance of German troops to the east, beyond the agreed demarcation line. On May 8, the Germans entered Rostov, and on May 10, Lenin warned his comrades about a possible campaign against Petrograd and Moscow “in the event of the victory of the German military party.” As Leon Trotsky recalled, in this case Ilyich was ready to retreat beyond the Urals: “We will reach Kamchatka, but we will hold on.” (I wonder if he knew that he was quoting almost verbatim the words of Emperor Alexander I, spoken in 1812?)

However, there was soon nowhere to retreat: the uprising of the Czechoslovak corps brought down Soviet power in the east of the country. In June 1918, the Czechoslovaks and the White Guards who appeared out of the ground occupied Siberian, Ural, and Volga cities one after another. On July 6, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were part of a coalition government with the Bolsheviks, rebelled in Moscow. The goal of the uprising was to break the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, so it began with the murder of the German ambassador Count Mirbach.

Although the Socialist Revolutionary rebellion was quickly suppressed, the death of the ambassador did not add warmth to relations with Berlin. On the eve of the seemingly inevitable rupture of relations with Germany, Lenin on July 10 summoned the commander of the Latvian Rifle Division, Joakim Vatsetis, and asked whether the Latvians would fight the Germans if they marched on Moscow - even in his “guard” at that moment he was not sure.

Why didn't the Germans break with Lenin?

Lenin, having no insider information from the German headquarters, determined the situation correctly with the instinct of a politician. There really was a military party (the Kaiser himself and General Erich Ludendorff, the second person in the army hierarchy, belonged to it), which insisted that it was time to end the tricks with the Bolsheviks and rely on the “socially close” monarchists. How could Moscow respond? “Our tactics,” wrote the then People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, “was to oppose the interests of German industry and trade to the military government.”

German industrialists as early as the spring of 1918 criticized the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty as, from their point of view, completely unsatisfactory. Yes, territorial acquisitions are not bad, but there are more important things. Anticipating the post-war loss of overseas markets, they wanted to compensate for them by creating a completely controlled economic space in eastern Europe, “German India”. Therefore, the arrival of the prominent Bolshevik Leonid Krasin in Berlin in June 1918 was more opportune than ever: before the war, he worked for Siemens and with his help quickly established contact with representatives of leading German concerns.

In addition to the mountains of gold that Krasin promised German industry, two more circumstances played against the plans of the military party. Firstly, not a single political force in Russia, even the most loyal to the Germans, agreed to recognize the conditions of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty in full. Not to mention taking on additional responsibilities.

Secondly, after the Bolsheviks lost control of the territories beyond the Volga, the ghost of the Eastern Front rising from the revolutionary ashes again loomed before the Germans. Actually, this slogan - the fight against “German-Bolshevism” - was raised by the white governments in eastern Russia. At the moment when the fighting on the Western Front marked a turning point in favor of the Entente, it was like death for Berlin.

Meanwhile, it was the Bolsheviks, making every effort to save themselves, who at the same time protected the Germans from direct contact with the Czechs and Russians thirsty for “German-Bolshevik” blood. In July, Ludendorff himself stated that “if the influence of the Entente [in Russia] increases, then we will probably have to move forces from West to East.” To avoid this, there was nothing left to do but cooperate with Lenin.

Together against the Whites and the Entente

This marriage involuntarily continued until August 1, 1918, when Moscow took a decisive step towards turning it into a real military-political union. Chicherin proposed to the new German ambassador Karl Helferich to conclude a Soviet-German agreement on a joint struggle against the Entente and the Whites on Russian territory. Helferich himself was opposed to such an agreement, but in Berlin they grabbed the proposal with both hands, and there were good reasons for this.

On August 1–2, the landing of Anglo-American units in Arkhangelsk began. Two days later - the Japanese in Vladivostok, then the British in Baku. Both Berlin and Moscow viewed these landings as the vanguard of the Allied armies, landed with the aim of striking Germany from the rear, and at the same time sweeping the Bolsheviks from the scene. On August 5, Moscow put an end to its six-month attempts to balance between the Entente and Germany, officially breaking off relations with England, France and Japan.

In response to Chicherin's proposal, the Germans demanded decisive measures from Moscow to defeat the Czechoslovaks on the Volga, threatening otherwise to issue an ultimatum to allow their troops to pass there. The Bolsheviks, for whom German troops in the center of Russia meant Berlin’s complete control over their life and death, were, of course, not happy with this option. They promised to deal with the Czechs themselves. Provided that the Germans eliminate flank threats: they do not take advantage of the situation to capture Petrograd and refuse to support the Don Ataman Pyotr Krasnov. (In the spring and summer of 1918, the German command supplied such a quantity of weapons to the Don Cossacks who rebelled against the Reds that Krasnov was even able to transfer part of it to Denikin’s Volunteer Army.)

Since the Germans had already stocked Krasnov with weapons, and they still had nothing to feed Petrograd, they easily accepted these conditions. Berlin went even further: in a package of additional agreements signed on August 27, the Soviet government was promised assistance in expelling the allies from Murmansk, Arkhangelsk and Baku (if the Reds did not have enough of their own forces), as well as participation in the fight against the Volunteer Army. During the negotiations, even the name of the potential commander of the joint German-Finnish-Soviet group in the north surfaced - the Bolsheviks proposed Field Marshal von Mackensen for this role. As an alaverda, Moscow provided the broadest economic preferences to German industry, promised extensive supplies of raw materials, and finally agreed to pay an indemnity of 6 billion marks.

Here we need to make a small digression. When in the spring of 1918, German industrialists made plans to capture the Russian market, they calculated that they would need loans in the amount of 2 billion marks to finance the exports required for this. This is a huge amount, beyond the capabilities of German banks; suffice it to say that before the war the entire gross national income of Germany was 40 billion. Now - what luck! – the Russians agreed to pay for their own enslavement. Moreover, of the total amount of indemnity, 1.5 billion were paid in gold and credit notes, the rest - in raw materials, goods and securities.

Lenin's mistake corrected by the Entente

Never since, perhaps, the Tatar-Mongol yoke have such difficult conditions been imposed on Russia (today, paying as indemnity a similar share of Germany’s GNP would cost $480 billion). At the same time, they were imposed on her by a country that by that time had lost its chances of winning the First World War. Already on August 8, the British near Amiens so effectively broke through the front of the German army that its crisis became obvious. Why did Lenin make a enslaving deal with the losers in five minutes (or, more precisely, in three months)?

Firstly, the time factor. Lenin had no time to wait for the final defeat of Germany. On August 7, the day before Amiens, the Whites took Kazan. And where they would end up in a month - in Ryazan or Moscow - no one would have been able to predict then. In these conditions, any military assistance would be very useful.

Secondly, and this is even more important, the defeat of Germany at that moment frightened Lenin no less than victory. In October, at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, he will declare: “On the one hand, we have never been so close to the international proletarian revolution as we are now, and on the other, we have never been in such a dangerous position.” The logic was simple: if earlier the imperialist predators devoured each other on the Western Front, then, having finished with Germany, the winners would take on Soviet Russia without a pause. These fears tormented Moscow so much that on November 3, Chicherin officially invited the Entente countries to begin peace negotiations, which surprised them a lot. They did not at all believe that they were at war with Russia.

Under these conditions, Lenin believed that it would be much better if the world massacre lasted at least six months. Back in the spring of 1918, Trotsky admitted: “No matter how clever we are, no matter what tactics we invent, only the European revolution can save us in the full sense of the word.” The continuation of the war increased the chances of such a revolution in the Entente countries.

That is why the Bolsheviks sincerely tried to fulfill the terms of the agreements of August 27. In September, they managed to send 93.5 tons of gold to Berlin out of the total volume planned under the agreement of 245.5 tons. And only on October 31, when all of its allies abandoned Germany and it was on the verge of capitulation, Moscow suspended the next delivery.

It is interesting that Lenin, considered a genius of political tactics, almost made a fatal mistake in this case. If he had had enough resources to help the Germans hold out in 1918, then the continuation of the war would have caused a build-up of Entente forces in Russia to rebuild the Eastern Front. In this case, the fate of the Bolsheviks was predetermined - next year the Second Reich would drag them into the abyss.

But Ilyich is probably the luckiest politician in Russia in the 20th century: the curve of history got him out this time too. Having defeated Germany with all their might, the Anglo-French were forced to begin demobilizing their armies. Otherwise, the soldiers, brutalized by the war, could really start a world revolution. In January 1919, unrest began in British units; in London, crowds of soldiers almost went out of control, repeating February 1917 in Petrograd.

True, there was still a fresh Japanese army that almost did not participate in the war. But it was Japan that bet on the “Sinicization” of Russia: a permanent civil war allowed it to turn Siberia into its protectorate. Therefore, its 70,000-strong contingent in the Far East (the largest of the interventionist forces) did not so much help the Whites as create problems for their rear, supporting the separatism of the Cossack atamans and increasing the supporters of the Reds with their atrocities.

The Bolsheviks ultimately not only held out, but also regained most of what they had lost in the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, annulling it two days after the Germans signed the terms of the armistice on the Western Front. Should we thank Lenin's foresight for this? But what if the Allies, already exhausted by the war to the extreme, lacked the last inch to put the squeeze on Germany? What if, in the fall of 1918, soldier mutinies and riots under the slogan of immediate peace had broken out in the capitals of the Entente? Then the Germans would have a chance to reduce the war to a draw and, by sacrificing part of Alsace-Lorraine, maintain their gains in the east. And Russia would remain “German India”.

“We must be grateful to the tenacity of the French, the determination of the British and the enterprise of the Americans - their sacrifices and will annulled the most cruel provisions of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which tore almost half of its territory from Russia,” wrote Russian historian Anatoly Utkin. As far as I know, he is so far the only representative of Russian academic science who has voiced this seemingly obvious idea.-

The author is a military historian

Why Russia did not become a “German India”