Peace with Germany

Peace with Germany

A bolshevik promise was to end the war. The decree on peace was a plea to other nations for an immediate truce and a just peace with no ‘annexations, no indemnities’. Lenin was convinced that revolutions in Europe would ensure that equitable peace settlements would be reached.

The Bolsheviks were split 3 ways:

1)Lenin believed that he had to have peace at any price to ensure the survival of the regime. There was no army to fight the Germans and when they began to advance in the Ukraine, Lenin feared that they might move on to Petrograd and throw the Bolsheviks out.

2)Bukharin and the left Communists wanted to turn the war into a revolutionary war to encourage a European socialist revolution. Bukharin believed that the majority of the party supported him and that Lenin’s policy was fatal for the revolution.

3)Trotsky, the Bolshevik negotiator, kept negotiations going as long as he could, hoping that revolution would break out in Germany and Austria. When the Germans grew impatient, he withdrew from the negotiations saying that there would be ‘neither war nor peace’, meaning that the Russians would not fight nor sign the treaty either.

Establishing a new government

Lenin had proclaimed Soviet power but did not exercise power through the Soviet. He formed an entirely new body called the Sovnarkom. It was exclusively made up of Bolsheviks. Lenin had no intention of sharing power with the Mensheviks or any other socialist groups in the Soviet.

A lot of Socialist leaders did not think that it would last long at all - Tsereteli gave it 3 weeks. Its power was strictly limited and there was no guarantee that the central government could get its laws passed. How did Lenin survive? He gave the workers and peasants what they wanted.

Power