In November 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the
Bolsheviks took power in Russia. They issued a Decree on Peace proposing an immediate
end to Russian involvement in World War I. As the negotiations began, the Central Powers
issued demands which would allow them to keep the territories they gained from 1914-1916,
including Poland, Lithuania and western Latvia. The Bolsheviks found this to be unacceptable
and they withdrew from the negotiations, which resulted in the breakdown of the ceasefire.
As a result, the German Chief of Staff, Max Hoffman, responded by signing a peace
treaty with the Ukrainian People’s Republic on February 9th. By February 18th the ceasefire
officially ended and the Central Powers launched a major three-pronged offensive against the
Bolsheviks. The German Army crossed the Dvina River and marched on Dvinsk in the north, and
also toward Lutsk in Ukraine in the south. Both of these cities were occupied on February 19th.
Realising their peril, the Bolsheviks were now ready to accept the peace terms. However, the
German Chief of Staff Max Hoffmann was in no rush to accept their concessions. He demanded that
the Bolsheviks send their concessions in writing BY COURIER. Two days later, the letter arrived,
but the government in Berlin refused the terms.
Meanwhile, on the central front the Germans
moved straight for Moscow, taking Minsk on the 21st. To the north, massive fighting took place in
current-day Estonia, and the German troops landed in the north-western part of the country. The next
day, they took the town of Hapsal. On the 24nd, they marched south and entered the city of Pärnu,
linking up with the German army from the south. On the same day, the town of Viljandi and
the city of Tartu fell into German hands, and the city of Reval was captured a day later.
Around this time, the German army occupied the Russian city of Pskov. All this was done with
little to no resistance from the Soviet army. By February 27th, the Soviet capital,
Petrograd was bombed by a German plane and the city was at serious risk of falling.
The central front saw less action, with the city of Mogilev falling on the 27th. But, to the south,
the German Army entered into the Ukrainian city of Zhitomir. They rapidly advance, reaching the
capital Kiyv, on March 2nd. The German Chief of Staff Max Hoffman described the operation in
his diary. He wrote that – ‘It is the most comical war I have ever known. We put a handful of
infantrymen with machine guns and one gun onto a train and rush them off to the next station; they
take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up few more troops, and so on. This proceeding
has, at any rate, the charm of novelty.’
It was clear that the Bolshevik forces,
were on the verge of collapse… After many discussions in Petrograd, some
Bolsheviks still opposed any treaty with the Germans, but Lenin, who was in favour of a peace
agreement. prevailed and on March 3rd. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed between the Germans
and the Bolsheviks. The Soviets gave up Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and
Ukraine. The treaty, although very harsh, provided some relief to the Bolsheviks,
who were embroiled in a civil war.
Within Russia the treaty guaranteed a privileged
status for German economic interests. German property was exempt from nationalization – even
land and enterprises confiscated after 1914 could be reclaimed by their German owners. It
was also possible under the treaty for Germans to buy up Russian assets and thus exclude them
from the Bolshevik decrees of nationalization. For Russian patriots, who had long been obsessed
by the thought of the Slavs being subjected to the economic domination of the Teutons, the
Brest-Litovsk Treaty was a national catastrophe. Opposition to the treaty was not
limited to anti-Soviet circles. The Bukharin faction and the Left
Socialist Revolutionaries were thrown together by their rejection of the treaty
and combined to form a powerful opposition in the Soviet executive.
However, despite the treaty the Central Powers continued their
advance for another two months.
On March 4th, German troops entered the city
of Narva. They were now only 85 miles from the Soviet capital of Petrograd. As a response, Lenin
moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow.
In the south, by March 13th, the Germans
took the Ukrainian city of Bakhmach and the Austro-Hungarian and the Ukrainian armies
entered Odessa. Over the next 30 days the Central Powers continued their advance, and by April
9th, they controlled the cities of Kharkiv, Yekaterinoslav, Nikolaev and Rostov. The Germans
and the Ukrainians then shifted their focus on taking the rest of Southern Ukraine
first, and then planned to march into Crimea. They resumed the offensive on April 13th,
quickly taking the city of Zaporizhzhia, and then launching a two-pronged march from
the east and the west. From the east they took the city of Melitopol and from the
west they entered Crimea and took the city of Armiansk. By April 19th, both Central Powers
armies were joined up and continued their push into Crimea, taking the cities of
Dzhankoi and Simferopol within a week. By May 2st, the city of Sevastopol fell and all
of Crimea was under the control of the Central Powers. These easy victories in Ukraine were due,
in part, to the apathy of the locals and the low morale of Bolshevik troops compared to their
Austro-Hungarian and German counterparts.
In Ukraine, the Central Powers were
welcomed by the urban propertied classes, most of whom were Russians who were fed up
with the nationalist and socialist policies of the Ukrainian Rada government. But in
the countryside, where the troops ruthlessly requisitioned foodstuffs and shipped it West
to feed the citizens of Austria, the Ukrainian peasants were bitterly opposed to the German
presence. To begin with, the responsibility for collecting the grain had been left to
the Rada. It was to despatch 300 truckloads of grain per day – a sort of tribute to Berlin,
agreed under the Peace Treaty of February 9th, in exchange for the German troops’ protection of
Ukraine’s independence against Russia. However, they gradually reduced their sowings and concealed
their grain from the Rada collections agents. Subsequently, the Rada fell behind
with its payment of this tribute, and the German troops took it upon themselves to
go into the villages and collect the grain. They did so indiscriminately, taking vital stocks
of food and seed from many peasant farms. Worse, without the approval of the Rada,
they punished the peasants who refused to pay the levy in their military courts.
Millions of acres of unsown peasant land was turned over to the former landowners with
the aim of punishing the peasant saboteurs. The result was a wave of peasant revolts and guerrilla
wars designed to disrupt the German requisitions. Bridges and railway lines were destroyed and
German units were attacked from the woods. The Ukrainian countryside was thrown into chaos.
Most of these peasant activities were organized by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries
– both the Russians and the Ukrainians. But the Germans blamed the Rada for
failing to control the situation. At the end of April, in a coup supported by the
Russified landowners, who were equally opposed to these peasant wars, they arrested the Rada
government and replaced it with their own puppet regime under Hetman Skoropadsky, a General in one
of the first Ukrainianized army corps. He was one of Ukraine’s richest landowners, who had been
an aide-de-cap of the ruthless Tzar Nicholas II, and now he was to perform an equally servile
role for Ukraine’s new masters in Berlin.
Meanwhile, military operations of the
Central Powers had stopped in the centre, but their advance continued in the north,
as the Civil War had broken out in Finland between the Finnish Reds and the Finnish Whites.
In early April, the German Army landed in Finland, and within a week they took the town of Karis. In
another landing operation on April 12th, the town of Loviisa was captured. A day later, the Finnish
capital of Helsinki fell into German hands. The advance continued, and over
the next 3 weeks the cities of Lahti and Hämeenlinna were also captured. By
the end of the month, the fighting had stopped, with the Germans and the Finnish Whites
defeating the Finnish Reds in the Civil War.
During May of 1918, German hegemony was
established in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, with
even some Russian cities under German control.
This hegemony, however, would be short-lived.
Less than 6 months later, in November of 1918, the Central Powers surrendered to the Allies. As
a result, all the occupied territories in the East gained independence. That independence would be
retained by Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, while Ukraine and Belarus would
be divided by Poland and the Bolsheviks.
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