Sovdepia under German Pressure

Abstract

Between March and May of 1918, a period when the war in France was going badly for the Allies and well for the Germans (though not as well as had been hoped by their Supreme Command), the Germans extended their power over large parts of European Russia.¹ Thanks to their separate peace treaty with the anti-Bolshevik regime in Kiev they were able to occupy the whole of the Ukraine — and then proceeded, in flagrant contempt of their treaty with Soviet Russia, to push on beyond even the borders claimed by the extremest Ukrainian nationalist, into the Crimea and part of the Don territory.² The new Muscovy was to be cut off, as of old, from all independent access to the sea: after the Baltic coast, that of the Black Sea must be brought under German control. Not only, moreover, would the German occupation of the Ukraine oblige Soviet Russia to depend in her foreign relations on the courtesy of Germany — it would deprive her of her principal source of grain. This grain was desperately needed by Germany (and Austria-Hungary), in order to break the British blockade on food imports.³ To the north, German military aid to the ‘Whites’ in the civil war in Finland would enable Germany, it was hoped, to gain control of Soviet Russia’s last remaining possible ‘window to the West’, her Murman coastline: where, furthermore, as already mentioned, a U-boat base might be established which would be of great value in the naval conflict with Britain.