Early 1917. Eastern Front. The war was not going well for Imperial Russia. Russia had already suffered staggering casualties, more then any other of the Great Powers. The Russian front was pressed hard and was on the verge of collapse. The war effort could no longer be sustained and it was only a question of time when the Imperial Russia Army would completely break. Discontent was growing; at the front common soldiers lost complete trust in their leadership; at home, people suffered unbearable economic hardship, hunger and all the other horrors brought by war. The tsar had before, in one of his many foolish moves, made himself commander and chief in the war effort. Now the tsar was personally associated with the pains of war. As the Tsar of all Russians he was supposed to protect the people, as his dynasty had always claimed was its holy duty. He had utterly failed, he had lost complete credibility. The air of revolution was all over Russia.
Revolutionary activities had been around in Russia for a long time. Since the mysterious kidnapping attempt on Alexander I, by an unknown group of conspirators, all Russian tsars had to face the threat of assassination and violent revolution.
Alexander’s successor, Nicholas I tasted that reality almost immediately after he was made Tsar. On the same day of his coronation, on 14 December 1825, he faced a revolt by 3,000 young Imperial Army officers and other liberal-minded citizens. The Decembrist Revolt. Calling upon his loyal force, he crushed the rebellion and prevailed. But this experience cemented his autocratic character, he remained for the rest of his reign a committed reactionary, applying the remedy of suppression against any civil movement, within Russia and throughout Europe. This earned him the title the police man of Europe.
Thus it was Nicholas I who created in 1826 the Third Section of HIM Chancellery, which was in effect a secret police and enjoyed great extra constitutional powers. Like so many ideas put forward in history, it was believed that the Third Section would increase the wellbeing, security and stability of all of society. And in the beginning the Third Section was indeed positively received by the public, but it quickly became notorious, accused of abduction and torture. Its successor organization Okhrana, set up in 1880, was even more despotic, operating largely outside the constitution, infiltrating all kinds of civil organizations, abducting and killing people at will.
These crude measures were certainly successful for a long time in suppressing dissent and securing the tsars rule. But the price the regime had to pay was high; the seed for intensive hatred were planted. The inability of the Russian rulers to reform the country and to grant adequate civil rights to its people in time created the breading space for many revolutionary movements. The people wanted alternatives, new ideas. The second element that would steer Russia towards a revolution was put in place. All it took now was a moment of general agitation of the Russian people and a spark of outrage to unleash all the anger.
In February 1917 that moment arrived. The state of great despair of the general population brought about by the disastrous war effort, the spread of ideas offering an alternative to the status quo and the increasing difficulty of the Tsar to assert authority finally exploded into a full blown revolution. The tsar abdicated and a provisional government took power, terminating the centuries old rule of the Romanoff regime.
The new political leadership decided to stick to existing obligations with its western allies promising to continiue the war effort against the central powers to 'its glorious conclusion'. A bad decision as it would turn out. The Russian army had been in disarray and renewed offensives resulted in complete disaster, with the remnants of the Russian army completely demoralized. Russian soldiers deserted en masse. Many others warmed to communist ideas. In Moscow the new regime turned quickly unpopular and impressively it was perceived as a continuation of tsarist rule in another name, with the same people in command, the same institutions in place. After just a few months in power, the October Revolution took place, which propelled the Bolsheviks into power.
The Bolsheviks knew that their hold on power was weak, that they had powerful enemies and thus they had to consolidate their hold on power. In order to do this, they decided that they had to end Russian participation in the Great War, and to concentrate their forces at home.
Talks with the Germans ensued almost immediately. The location for the talks was Brest-Litovsk. It was a strange setting, with the Germans, dressed in their glamorous suits and uniforms, holding up the protocol of the past, offering vast banquettes and insisting on spending time together. After all, It has always been done like this for many centuries. On the other side, the representatives of the Russian proletariat, self declared enemies of aristocracy and all the upper classes.
The Russian chief negotiator was Leon Trotsky. Early into the negotiations it was clear that no deal could be made. Trotsky outright refused German demands and walks out with his famous words "No War, No Peace. He" believed that Europe was rife for a general revolution. Now that he and the Bolsheviks were in power, they would accelerate this process and he knew what had to be done: He proclaimed, that he would just have to blow open the doors of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Petersburg and publish all the secret treaties the tsarist and liberal regime had signed with the other great powers since the days of Metternich. He was sure, that this action would produce such an outrage among the common people of Europe, that the people would storm the streets and overthrow their respective governments, all over Europe. General Revolution. Trotsky wrote:
"In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition. Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.
The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice. That is precisely why, while openly proposing an immediate armistice to all the belligerent peoples and their Governments, we are at the same time publishing these treaties and agreements, winch have lost all binding force for the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants who have taken power into their own hands.
The bourgeois politicians and journalists of Germany and AustriaHungary may try to make use of the documents published in order to present the diplomacy of the Central Empires in a more advantageous light. But any such attempt would be doomed to pitiful failure, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we intend quickly to place before the tribunal of public opinion secret documents which treat sufficiently clearly of the diplomacy of the Central Empires. Secondly, and more important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as universal as imperialist robbery. When the German proletariat enters the revolutionary path leading to the secrets of their chancelleries, they will extract documents no whit inferior to those which we are about to publish. It only remains to hope that this will take place quickly.
The workers' and peasants' Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our programme, expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: 'Proletarians of all countries, unite.'"
Trotsky's WikiLeaks plan of course failed. The German Imperial Army simply continued their offensive against the newly established revolutionary government and made huge territorial gains. until the Bolsheviks accepted Germanys crushing demands and finally dropped out of the war. Russia itself was kept in turmoil through an ongoing civil war which ended only in 1920. No one outside an exclusive circle had ever heard of the tsarist secret treaties. No other state would follow the revolution and the Soviets would end up completely isolated. It was the start of the cold war, in which ironically Soviet Russia should become the most secretive, despotic actor.
We can certainly identify in our own times many similarities to that period in history. Especially in the Middle East, but also in many other parts of the world. The symptoms are the same as in the past: Restless and resentful populations, Repressive and arbitrary regimes, agitated people through economic hardship and a weakened, questioned Leviathan. But there is of course one big difference. Trotsky didn’t have the Internet and Twitter. The advance of the Internet and with it revolutionary communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook could indeed completely change the rules of the game. With awe we witness the current events in the Middle East and we know that this decade will have more in stock. Much more.
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