Germans Invade Russia After Calling off Armistice
Austrian troops enter Kamianets-Podilskyi in the first days of the offensive.
February 18 1918, Lutsk--At first, Trotsky’s unilateral proclamation at Brest-Litovsk that the war was over was welcomed in Germany. However, a few days later, at a meeting of the German Crown Council, the Kaiser demanded that the Bolsheviks be “beaten to death,” that large annexations should be secured, and Russia should be effectively dismembered. This “plan” soon attracted the support of Hindenburg & Ludendorff, who favored large annexations to feed the German war machine, perhaps reaching as far as the Caucasus. The civilians present were horrified--establishing a new empire in the East would take resources and manpower that would be needed in the West, and would make any negotiated settlement with the other Allies impossible. Gaining an empire to prepare for a war in the future was pointless; any gains in the east would be more than offset by the fact that Austria-Hungary, who had learned their lesson, would not join them again.
Nevertheless, the Kaiser and military had their way, and on February 16 the Germans gave the Russians 48 hours notice that they would be calling off the armistice; this was less than the week required by the original armistice terms, but the Germans justified this by saying that the Russians had already violated the armistice by demobilizing and moving troops away from the front. The Germans had, of course, redeployed troops themselves, but still had 53 (second-rate) divisions available. The Russians, on the other hand, had effectively disbanded their own army; while some troops remained near the front, they were not prepared or willing to put up a fight. The new Red Army, only four days old, mainly existed on paper; what few forces it did have were busy fighting the Ukrainians or Cossacks.
On February 18, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians began their advance, meeting little more than token resistance all along the front. In the north, German forces tasked with taking the rest of the Baltic coast secured the key rail junction of Dvinsk [Daugavpils] on the first day. In the center, they moved towards Minsk and Smolensk, hoping to threaten Moscow. In the south, the Germans had officially signed a peace treaty with Ukraine, but given the threat they faced from the Reds, the Rada actually welcomed the German advance; Lutsk fell on the first day.
Soon, the Germans were advancing using the Russians’ own railways, often at the rate of over thirty miles per day. General Hoffmann, commanding the operation, wrote:
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 a few more troops, and so on. The proceeding has, at any rate, the charm of novelty.
The Germans captured large stores of materiel left behind by the Russian army, taking over 1500 guns in the first three days. As the Russian forces had melted away, only around 9000 PoWs were captured in the same timeframe.
Many of the Bolsheviks, meanwhile, were sent into a panic; for nearly a week, they had thought that Trotsky’s gambit had worked. Trotsky, realizing he had gambled and lost, through his support behind Lenin, and an emergency meeting of the Central Committee narrowly approved an immediate acceptance of the last German peace offer; despite all the evidence, Bukharin and his supporters still urged a revolutionary war.
That evening, Trotsky broadcast a radio message to the Germans:
Sovnarkom lodges a protest over the German government’s movement of troops against the Russian Soviet Republic, which had declared the state of war ended and had started to demobilize its army on all fronts...Sovnarkom finds itself forced, in the situation that has arisen, to declare its readiness formally to conclude peace on the terms the German government demanded at Brest-Litovsk.
The Germans’ demands had grown in the meantime, however; even this capitulation would not be enough.
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