German peace terms with Russian Provisional Government

What kind of territory and reparations would Germany demand get if the Russian Provisional government have made peace.

Would they go for otl treaty of brest litovsk or demand Baltic and Poland and some Caucasus land for the ottoman empire
 

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What kind of territory and reparations would Germany demand get if the Russian Provisional government have made peace.

Would they go for otl treaty of brest litovsk or demand Baltic and Poland and some Caucasus land for the ottoman empire
Probably Lithuania and Poland and perhaps some reparations or demilitarization to sell things at home. IIRC the terms offered in 1915 were quite lenient for this reason: turn the war into a 1 front war.
 
General Hoffmann, the German military representative at Brest-Litovsk, said that even the Bolsheviks could have got much better terms - if they had cared to negotiate instead of delivering balkony speeches to arouse the German workers to revolution. Poland had been re-created by the Central Powers in 1916, and was still the object of quarrels between Austria-Hungary and Germany. So, negotiating Poland back under Russian rule would have been a real masterpiece for the Provisional Government, rather unlikely, but not totally impossible. Everything else, the Russians could have succeeded to keep, even the Ottomans would have been contend to regain the provinces lost in 1878 only. - The Germans were divided over what they really wanted. The civilian side wanted peace with Russia and the opportunity to move all German forces to the west. OHL (i.e. Ludendorff) wanted the kind of eastern empire created by B-L. IOTL, Ludendorff gained the upper hand, because the Bolsheviks weren't negotiating at all. With the PG really negotiating, the German civilian side might gain prevalence here. (Especially if Russophobe Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg is no longer in charge.)
 
The provisional government was in power from February to October 1917 and in that time launched the failed Kerensky offensive and the Germans countered with the Riga offensive and operation Albion. Then in February 1918 the Germans launched operation Fist Punch after getting jerked around by the Bolsheviks, advancing 159 miles in a week.

Armistice negotiations begin with the facts on the ground. If the provisional government opened serious negotiations before the Kerensky offensive the facts on the ground would not have included the territory captured after the counter attack, or Riga or the Baltic Islands. Further, the massive gains made in 11 days in February 1918 would have been inconceivable 9 months earlier, cutting most of the Baltics out of the scope of negotiations.
 
Why should we assume that the Germans, if successful in the West, will then abide by any "moderate" terms they had agreed to in 1917 with Russia? (And that a separate peace in the summer of 1917 would indeed result in a German victory in the West was pretty widely believed at the time.)
 
Why should we assume that the Germans, if successful in the West, will then abide by any "moderate" terms they had agreed to in 1917 with Russia? (And that a separate peace in the summer of 1917 would indeed result in a German victory in the West was pretty widely believed at the time.)

Easy; the Germans really only got away with B-L because the Reds literally did not have a functioning army to put up any resistance. By the time the Western Front had died down, the Russians will be capable of putting up enough of a resistance as to make renegading on their terms foolish... to say nothing of the fact that it would then give the Entente grounds to renagade on THEIR terms should Germany need to turn a large enough portion of her army east and demobalize the keep the internal social situation from exploding.
 
Why should we assume that the Germans, if successful in the West, will then abide by any "moderate" terms they had agreed to in 1917 with Russia? (And that a separate peace in the summer of 1917 would indeed result in a German victory in the West was pretty widely believed at the time.)

Why wouldn't they?
 
Why should we assume that the Germans, if successful in the West, will then abide by any "moderate" terms they had agreed to in 1917 with Russia? (And that a separate peace in the summer of 1917 would indeed result in a German victory in the West was pretty widely believed at the time.)

A peace with Russia at any point in 1917 would not save Germany, any hope of German victory collapsed with the Russian transport network in winter 16/17. The simple fact is that the Central Powers was starving to death both industrially and physically and the only way they could break the noose was either destroying the Western Allied armies (basically impossible post Marne) or by making peace with a Russia that was functional enough to supply them with the raw materials they needed. Post Christmas 1916 Russia could not be that supplier even if they wanted to.
 
Why wouldn't they?

Maybe you think it is plausible that the Germans will say to themselves "Now that the Western Allies are subdued, we can without much trouble further weaken Russia' s ability to make trouble for us in case there is some future war of revenge, and we can further increase their economic dependence on us. But no, we pledged to take only slight amounts of territory from them, and we have to respect that--we can never make further demands on them, even though such demands would be strategically advantageous for us, and even though we could easily find some excuse for them--e.g., 'self-determination for Ukraine'!"

Somehow I doubt it. Not that I'm demonizing the Germans. It's just that in international politics, "Don't hit a man when he's down" doesn't seem to be a universally respected maxim.
 
My point is that it was widely believed in both Russia and the West in 1917 that a separate peace could lead to the Germans scoring a knockout blow in the West in 1918 before the Americans had a chance to arrive in any great numbers. This belief may well have been mistaken, but as long as it was held, a Russian government would have to worry that even the most "moderate" peace agreement would ultimately leave Russia at Germany's mercy.
 

raharris1973

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I would think that if the Germans agree to a peace in the east, try to smash west, and win, they will still not be so impressed by their own power that they feel like starting a sequel war with Russia, or risking one by making big demands to revise the previously agreed settlement.

Sure, some Germans will *want* to do that, but multiple sectors of German society, not all of them interested in war for the fun of it, need to be accounted for.

I mean if the Russo-German peace involves the Germans pulling back from some occupied territory, but only after a general peace in Europe, then sure, the Germans if they win in the west would be pretty likely to say "nah,we decided not to withdraw", but if both sides armies are actually repositioned on whatever the agree Russo-CP border is, within a month or two of the Russo-CP peace, then I don't see German enthusiasm for saying "we won the war in the west. but let's not enjoy it, let's get started again in the east", a fresh invasion of Russia is unlikely in the extreme, unless Russia provokes it, or suffers from an utter collapse of order, both becoming incapable of resistance and generating chaos the Germans feel they have to manage.
 
There might be little appetite after a German victory in the West for an all-out war in the East, but given the strength of Germany and the weakness of Russia, I doubt that one would even be required to wring further concessions from the Russians. And in any event, even if a victorious Germany does temporarily comply with the 1917 terms, she is going to have strategic superiority in Europe for a long time to come, and there will very likely be future opportunities for her to weaken Russia still further, e.g., by supporting separatist movements.
 
I doubt that one would even be required to wring further concessions from the Russians.

What actually happened IOTL was the 27 August 1918 amendment to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk reduced some of the harshness and set out quite reasonable terms of payment for the reparations bill, nothing like what the WAllies did to Germany a few months later.

The biggest factor of difference will be the end of the 'silent dictatorship' with the coming of peace, as its legal basis of the 1851 Prussian Siege Law will not apply in peacetime. This means that dealing with Russia will go back into the hands of the Politicians and civilian powers that be, and they are concerned with trades, budgets, employment and the like and don't put a great stock preventative war for no reason. This will be reinforced by the electoral reform in Prussia announced in the Kaisers 1917 Easter Message, which will transform the Executive branch of the German government (which was full of double-hatted Prussian Ministers) as well as the delegates to the Bundesraat (17 of 61 votes).
 
German soldiers were not a horde of mindless Orcs. After the actual war in the West would be over, the German government would be really hard-pressed to restart hostilities in the East.
 
What actually happened IOTL was the 27 August 1918 amendment to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk reduced some of the harshness and set out quite reasonable terms of payment for the reparations bill, nothing like what the WAllies did to Germany a few months later.

On the August 27 supplemental treaties:

"At first glance, the supplementary treaties appeared to be in the same punitive direction as the original Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: the Bolsheviks renounced formal claim to the territories of Estonia and Livonia, and recognized the independence of Georgia; Germany would withdraw from Belorussia, but at a cost of 25 per cent of Baku's oil output; Soviet expropriations of German property were to be compensated by the payment of six billion marks. In return, Germany assured Soviet Russia that there would be no further territorial occupation and no support for counter-revolutionary schemes. A secret military appendix, however, provided the most important promise for the Soviets: Germany pledged to offer its own and Finnish troops to help combat Allied intervention troops from northern Russia and Baku. In an eleven-point official communique to the German foreign ministry clarifying the Soviet interpretation of the supplementary treaties, the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin took note of: Germany's "readiness to use its influence" to ensure that Ukraine did not support the other independence movements within Russia; Germany's obligation, in the event of Russian failure to drive out Entente forces in north Russia, to undertake such action, if necessary with the help of Finnish troops (with it being "understood that any Russian territory occupied in the course of such action will be again evacuated by the German and Finnish troops after the expulsion of the Allied forces [...]"); and the German use of its influence to ensure the procurement of one-fourth of Georgian manganese ore exports.

"The supplementary treaties were the first clear indication that the German army was willing to do more than simply impose onerous conditions for peace, with regard to Russia. Rather, it actively committed Germany to direct military collaboration, and hence should be considered a wartime precursor to the trends which would develop in the immediate post-war scene..." https://books.google.com/books?id=512IDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA13

The treaties were of course the work of a Germany that was anything but certain of victory and worried that the Entente might re-establish an Eastern Front by supporting anti-Bolshevik governments--or that the Bolshevik government itself might change its mind about Brest-Litovsk. I am not sure they can be taken as a measure of what a *victorious* German government might do. (And in any event, the supplementary treaties did not change the fact that Russia still had to give up large amounts of territory, including Ukraine.)

I agree, of course, that there would be serious political problems in using German soldiers to wage an all-out war in the East after that in the West was won. But it's not even clear this would be necessary, given the disintegration of the Russian army. For example, Polish troops might be used in the borderlands (to "restore Poland's historic borders," perhaps with the old Rzeczpospolita reborn as a "federation" dominated by a pro-German Poland).
 
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raharris1973

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There might be little appetite after a German victory in the West for an all-out war in the East, but given the strength of Germany and the weakness of Russia, I doubt that one would even be required to wring further concessions from the Russians. And in any event, even if a victorious Germany does temporarily comply with the 1917 terms, she is going to have strategic superiority in Europe for a long time to come, and there will very likely be future opportunities for her to weaken Russia still further, e.g., by supporting separatist movements.

Now that's a good point. Still, those types of separatist crises are going to be resolved based on the success or failure of low-level actions, not necessarily guaranteeing that German strategic superiority factors into things.
 
Now that's a good point. Still, those types of separatist crises are going to be resolved based on the success or failure of low-level actions, not necessarily guaranteeing that German strategic superiority factors into things.

Indeed. So long as German support is subtle and minor (Arms sales, moral/diplomatic support, ect.) and generally isen't calling for any major risks or sacrifice from the population they'll certainly be able to push their influence further east. But anything that runs the risk of spilling into actual military intervenention? The Reichstag would need to approve and would never stomach it.
 
Of course winning the war would guarantee that Germany would for a long time be a satisfied, stable parliamentary-constitutional monarchy, just like such other war-winners as Italy and Japan! :p
 

raharris1973

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Of course winning the war would guarantee that Germany would for a long time be a satisfied, stable parliamentary-constitutional monarchy, just like such other war-winners as Italy and Japan! :p

Here's where any scenario-builders have some legitimate authorial license, among the possibilities for a postwar victory:

1) a long time a satisfied, stable parliamentary-constitutional monarchy

2) Have postwar disorders and disorientation that culminates in the 1920s or 1930s in a new wave reactionary regime that is militaristic and expansionist.(IE, the Italy and Japan examples). The precise road to this though will be different than for Rome and Tokyo - after all, not only did Germany win the war, but it also is not getting shortchanged by its nominal allies, who are much less powerful.

3) Somewhat similar to #2. H-L somehow succeed in using victory and whatever challenge remains (from Britain, America) to justify sidelining of parliamentarism. I find this pretty unlikely

4) Have postwar disorders and disorientation, including intrigues from reactionary and militaristic circles, result in a leftist revolution in victorious Germany.
 
Of course winning the war would guarantee that Germany would for a long time be a satisfied, stable parliamentary-constitutional monarchy, just like such other war-winners as Italy and Japan! :p

Winning the war would mean that electoral reform that was first mooted just before the war, and publicly promised by the Kaiser in his 1917 Easter Message would actually happen. The Prussian 3 class franchise based on the amount of tax paid, public ballot and indirect election of deputies would be changed to a single franchise, secret ballot and direct election of deputies. This would break the grip on power in Prussia held by the rich and result in a Prussian Diet that was actually representative of the people.

'Who gives a shit' I hear you ask!

The Prussian Prime Minister was ex officio the Imperial Chancellor, the 17 Prussian votes in the 61 member Bundesraat was by far the biggest voting bloc and many Prussian Ministers were double hatted as Imperial State Secretaries. Basically, how goes Prussia so goes the Empire; so liberalising Prussia through electoral reform will in effect liberalise the Empire. However how the newly enfranchised and empowered ex-soldiers in a victorious Germany will vote is a mystery to me.
 
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