On 8 August, Ludendorff and the German Emperor, William II, had concurred in Hintze’s assumption that the Bolsheviks’ downfall would be contrary to the German interest. When Joffe asked a day later whether Hintze could guarantee that Germany would not violate the demarcation line if the Soviet troops were withdrawn and committed elsewhere, he had received an affirmative answer. On 10 August, Lenin had directed the Supreme Military Council to develop and execute ‘in the shortest possible time’ a plan to shift ‘all units possessing combat capability’ from the western front to the east. An order to that effect had gone to the Western and Northern Screens the next day, and Vatsetis had sent Lenin a copy of an order putting his armies on notice to prepare for a general offensive.30 Also on the 11th, Lenin told Joffe to accept all the German financial, economic, and territorial demands without any more discussion and get the supplementary treaty signed. The terms did not make any difference, he said, because the German revolution would nullify them. Lenin and Hintze were equally eager to hasten the negotiations, Hintze because he believed the Bolsheviks’ ‘agony’ was in its terminal phase. But two obstacles arose at mid-month: the German High Command demanded the right to conduct an expedition against the British at Baku, and newspapers in the Don region published the agenda of the Cossack mission to Spa. Owing to those, two identical secret notes that were part of the treaty package had to be revised (somewhat to the Soviet benefit), and the signing did not take place until 27 August. Lenin had exploited the German contradictions with brilliant results. In return for a legal claim, which he did not propose to honor, to a vast array of Russian assets, he had harnessed the revolution’s potentially most deadly enemy to the 59 the red army 1918–1941 Bolshevik cause. In doing so, he had also entered into a military relationship with one of the capitalist camps. Article 5 in the supplementary treaty obligated the Soviet forces to expel the Allies from northern Russia. The secret notes extended that commitment to include Baku and German participation in both areas if the Soviet forces could not achieve the desired results. It further required the Soviet Government to‘take all possible measures in order to crush immediately’ the Czechs and Denikin’s Volunteer Army. On its part, Germany undertook in the notes ‘to see that [Krasnov] should not obtain military support from the Ukraine’, to ‘adopt all measures at her disposal’ against the Volunteer Army, and not to support Turkish incursions into the Caucasus.31 The result could hardly be called an alliance. Neither party acted out of any sense of common interest, and both harbored undisclosed reservations. Lenin, in all likelihood, did not want to see any of the Soviet military commitments put into effect other than that to crush the Czechs. Ludendorff and General Max Hofmann, the commanding general in the east, believed the divisions they were assembling for Operation Keystone could be more profitably used to unseat the Bolsheviks. On the other hand, few alliances have had as significant effects. The German guarantee of 9 August, the supplementary treaty, the secret notes – and the decisive turn on the Western Front that began on 8 August, the Black Day of the German Army – relieved the Soviet regime of the one threat to its existence that it otherwise had no hope of surviving and set it on the road to military power. In his autobiography, Trotskiy characterizes the month he spent aboard his train in the front line at Sviyazhsk as the interval in which the fate of the revolution was decided and effective military organization was achieved. During it, he maintains, the Red forces underwent a transition from an aggregation of raw, undisciplined detachments prone to panic and riddled with treason, from the ‘lowest ebb of the revolution’, the fall of Kazan, to a stage of competence that enabled them for the first time to take the strategic initiative. He attributes the achievement to discipline and morale instilled by his own ‘harsh methods’, persuasion, political propaganda and agitation, and the infusion of ‘workercommunists’ into the ranks.32 Indeed, a remarkable transformation took place, but it owed much more to other circumstances. Those saved the revolution, and they did not result from the kind of lifting-by-one’s-own-bootstraps Trotskiy describes but from collaboration on the part of Bolshevism’s enemies, deliberate in the German and inadvertent in the Czech and Allied instances. redeployment east After 10 August, the Supreme Military Council conducted a massive west-to-east redeployment that stripped the Northern and Western Screens and in effect turned the defense of Leningrad against Finnish or Allied attack (neither of which was very likely) over to the Germans as well. At the turn of the month, East Front 60 ‘in a fiery ring of fronts’ had 43,500 bayonets and sabers (and a total 60,000 of all troops),‘about’ 110 artillery pieces, and ‘about’ 700 machine guns against – by the Soviet estimate – 52,000 Czech and White Guard bayonets and sabers, 150–90 artillery pieces, and 580–630 machine guns.
On 8 August, Ludendorff and the German Emperor, William II, had concurred in Hintze’s assumption that the Bolsheviks’ downfall would be contrary to the German interest. When Joffe asked a day later whether Hintze could guarantee that Germany would not violate the demarcation line if the Soviet troops were withdrawn and committed elsewhere, he had received an affirmative answer. On 10 August, Lenin had directed the Supreme Military Council to develop and execute ‘in the shortest possible time’ a plan to shift ‘all units possessing combat capability’ from the western front to the east. An order to that effect had gone to the Western and Northern Screens the next day, and Vatsetis had sent Lenin a copy of an order putting his armies on notice to prepare for a general offensive.30 Also on the 11th, Lenin told Joffe to accept all the German financial, economic, and territorial demands without any more discussion and get the supplementary treaty signed. The terms did not make any difference, he said, because the German revolution would nullify them. Lenin and Hintze were equally eager to hasten the negotiations, Hintze because he believed the Bolsheviks’ ‘agony’ was in its terminal phase. But two obstacles arose at mid-month: the German High Command demanded the right to conduct an expedition against the British at Baku, and newspapers in the Don region published the agenda of the Cossack mission to Spa. Owing to those, two identical secret notes that were part of the treaty package had to be revised (somewhat to the Soviet benefit), and the signing did not take place until 27 August. Lenin had exploited the German contradictions with brilliant results. In return for a legal claim, which he did not propose to honor, to a vast array of Russian assets, he had harnessed the revolution’s potentially most deadly enemy to the 59 the red army 1918–1941 Bolshevik cause. In doing so, he had also entered into a military relationship with one of the capitalist camps. Article 5 in the supplementary treaty obligated the Soviet forces to expel the Allies from northern Russia. The secret notes extended that commitment to include Baku and German participation in both areas if the Soviet forces could not achieve the desired results. It further required the Soviet Government to‘take all possible measures in order to crush immediately’ the Czechs and Denikin’s Volunteer Army. On its part, Germany undertook in the notes ‘to see that [Krasnov] should not obtain military support from the Ukraine’, to ‘adopt all measures at her disposal’ against the Volunteer Army, and not to support Turkish incursions into the Caucasus.31 The result could hardly be called an alliance. Neither party acted out of any sense of common interest, and both harbored undisclosed reservations. Lenin, in all likelihood, did not want to see any of the Soviet military commitments put into effect other than that to crush the Czechs. Ludendorff and General Max Hofmann, the commanding general in the east, believed the divisions they were assembling for Operation Keystone could be more profitably used to unseat the Bolsheviks. On the other hand, few alliances have had as significant effects. The German guarantee of 9 August, the supplementary treaty, the secret notes – and the decisive turn on the Western Front that began on 8 August, the Black Day of the German Army – relieved the Soviet regime of the one threat to its existence that it otherwise had no hope of surviving and set it on the road to military power. In his autobiography, Trotskiy characterizes the month he spent aboard his train in the front line at Sviyazhsk as the interval in which the fate of the revolution was decided and effective military organization was achieved. During it, he maintains, the Red forces underwent a transition from an aggregation of raw, undisciplined detachments prone to panic and riddled with treason, from the ‘lowest ebb of the revolution’, the fall of Kazan, to a stage of competence that enabled them for the first time to take the strategic initiative. He attributes the achievement to discipline and morale instilled by his own ‘harsh methods’, persuasion, political propaganda and agitation, and the infusion of ‘workercommunists’ into the ranks.32 Indeed, a remarkable transformation took place, but it owed much more to other circumstances. Those saved the revolution, and they did not result from the kind of lifting-by-one’s-own-bootstraps Trotskiy describes but from collaboration on the part of Bolshevism’s enemies, deliberate in the German and inadvertent in the Czech and Allied instances. redeployment east After 10 August, the Supreme Military Council conducted a massive west-to-east redeployment that stripped the Northern and Western Screens and in effect turned the defense of Leningrad against Finnish or Allied attack (neither of which was very likely) over to the Germans as well. At the turn of the month, East Front 60 ‘in a fiery ring of fronts’ had 43,500 bayonets and sabers (and a total 60,000 of all troops),‘about’ 110 artillery pieces, and ‘about’ 700 machine guns against – by the Soviet estimate – 52,000 Czech and White Guard bayonets and sabers, 150–90 artillery pieces, and 580–630 machine guns.