Why Didn't Kerensky Make Peace in 1917?

Instead of alienating the military and people with a desperate and disastrous offensive, why didn't Kerensky sue for terms? Surely he realized that the war was so incredibly unpopular that the political fallout from doing a Brest-litovsk-style deal would be significantly less? Did he have an inflexible sense of honor? Did he think the Russians could succeed? Some other reason?
 

Deleted member 1487

He thought the war could still be won, wanted to be at the peace table on the victor's side, believed that his country needed to get something to justify having fought at all (sunk cost fallacy), didn't want to alienate his allies, wanted to honor Russia's agreement not to make a separate peace earlier in the war, and wanted access to credit markets after the war so didn't want to piss off the financiers during it.
 
He thought the war could still be won, wanted to be at the peace table on the victor's side, believed that his country needed to get something to justify having fought at all (sunk cost fallacy), didn't want to alienate his allies, wanted to honor Russia's agreement not to make a separate peace earlier in the war, and wanted access to credit markets after the war so didn't want to piss off the financiers during it.
Thank you.
 
Expanding on what Wiking said, Kerensky believed that if he just held on for another year, that the war would be won. He was correct, but he must have misjudged the will of the Russian people to end the war on their own terms.
 
To add on to what wiking said, I believe the credit bit was very important. I don't have access to my books on it atm, but I remember reading that Kerensky was very afraid that the incredibly lucrative credit deals and other money pouring in from the rest of the Entente that had essentially bankrolled Russia's development for years before the war would dry up and leave Russia in dire straits. Ironically he wasn't exactly wrong, given that the USSR had to deal with industrializing itself without the massive support of western powers following the Russian Civil War and the result was, at times, very nasty.
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
I think he knew that for Russia to be where he wanted it to be, as a modern industrial and free nation, he needed the support of the West. He also did not want to give the Germans territory, which they probably would have demanded.

But most of all, I think his military evaluation of the situation was terrible. He seems to have thought that the Brusilov Offensive meant that the Central Powers were on death's door on the Southern part of the front, and that the Germans were too bogged down in the West to take advantage of any disruption in the Russian ranks. The truth of the matter of course is that the Russian Army was a force that had shot its offensive potential pursuing the Brusilov Offensive and was currently being undermined by Bolshevik agitators at the front and a breakdown in military discipline caused by the refusal to obey officer's commands. Kerensky thought that peace with honor was a real possibility. It wasn't.
 
I've heard that Pavel Milyukov may have thought that after the revolution, that it would be a revolutionary France situation where the troop's morale would be higher and they fight harder. Granted if they had Brusilov, as CIC didn't they at least know the Russian army was in poor shape to fight?
 
Kerensky he attacked because he foolishly believed that with revolutionary ardor, the Russian soldier would now be fighting better than under the Tsars, ignoring all the actual real problems that plagued the army.

I always believed an option for Kerensky was to simply remain on the defensive and not attack. Russian morale would likely have held up better for defensive battles as opposed to failed offensives. Then if necessary, he could always use peace negotiations as a delaying tactic. If he really believed that US entry would win the war, he could even withdraw his forces way into the interior knowing that Germany could not possibly follow up and occupy all the land while he protected the Russian army in a Fabian strategy. He just needed to keep Leningrad and Moscow.

We need to remember that outside of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, almost nobody in Russian high politics wanted peace now at any price. Outside of Lenin, nobody wanted the peace terms that Germany would accept at Brest-Litovsk. Even other Bolsheviks were against Brest-Litovsk and felt some other solution had to be found.
 
Kerensky he attacked because he foolishly believed that with revolutionary ardor, the Russian soldier would now be fighting better than under the Tsars, ignoring all the actual real problems that plagued the army.

I always believed an option for Kerensky was to simply remain on the defensive and not attack. Russian morale would likely have held up better for defensive battles as opposed to failed offensives. Then if necessary, he could always use peace negotiations as a delaying tactic. If he really believed that US entry would win the war, he could even withdraw his forces way into the interior knowing that Germany could not possibly follow up and occupy all the land while he protected the Russian army in a Fabian strategy. He just needed to keep Leningrad and Moscow.

We need to remember that outside of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, almost nobody in Russian high politics wanted peace now at any price. Outside of Lenin, nobody wanted the peace terms that Germany would accept at Brest-Litovsk. Even other Bolsheviks were against Brest-Litovsk and felt some other solution had to be found.
Thanks.
 
I also believe I read - or could generally surmise - that scoring a big win and ending the war would have given his government a great deal of capital and legitimacy to function long term and fend off domestic challengers.
 
He thought the war could still be won, wanted to be at the peace table on the victor's side, believed that his country needed to get something to justify having fought at all (sunk cost fallacy), didn't want to alienate his allies, wanted to honor Russia's agreement not to make a separate peace earlier in the war, and wanted access to credit markets after the war so didn't want to piss off the financiers during it.

And he was right. It could still be won, just not in the timeline that his government stayed in power. It would have been far better for Russia to not try a 1917 offensive and just attempt to stay as an army in being and await developments. A far better outcome would have been to transfer 6-8 divisions to the Turkish front and move to a fully defensive mindset in the East. This may have enabled Russia to survive, but it would be a gamble.
 

Cook

Banned
Instead of alienating the military and people with a desperate and disastrous offensive, why didn't Kerensky sue for terms?

The Tsar lost power, and the Provisional Government was established, because the Tsar was seen as ineffective in fighting the Germans; worse, this wife and daughters were accused of being pro-German. The Provisional Government didn't propose and armistice because the popular mood in the country was for continuing the fight; the provisional government, responsive to public opinion, had to keep fighting. They were also very dependent upon their allies for financial support.

However, at the London Conference in August 1917, the Russians requested permission to, temporarily suspend all offensive operations, at least until they had sufficiently stabilised the situation in the country, and improved the army; the allies grudgingly consented, but the provisional government was then toppled by the German financed Bolshevik coup.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks didn't have to respond to public opinion because they never had any intention of allowing a vote anyway; they signed an armistice because they were being financed by the Germans for that very reason, and because to the Bolsheviks, any treaty was purely tactical in nature, never intended to be lasting.
 
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We need to remember that outside of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, almost nobody in Russian high politics wanted peace now at any price. Outside of Lenin, nobody wanted the peace terms that Germany would accept at Brest-Litovsk. Even other Bolsheviks were against Brest-Litovsk and felt some other solution had to be found.

It's not like Lenin himself was thrilled about having peace - they delayed the surrender for months hoping something would happen, that the German/French/British workers would follow their example and rise up and have a world revolution etc etc, it didnt happen and after all the time talking the Germans were fed up and instad of asking for bits of Poland and Lithuania they demanded Brest-Litovsk crippling Russia for the next 30 years.
 
And he was right. It could still be won, just not in the timeline that his government stayed in power. It would have been far better for Russia to not try a 1917 offensive and just attempt to stay as an army in being and await developments. A far better outcome would have been to transfer 6-8 divisions to the Turkish front and move to a fully defensive mindset in the East. This may have enabled Russia to survive, but it would be a gamble.

Something along these lines could make for a very interesting timeline.
 
If Kerensky tried to make a separate peace with Germany on anything like Brest-Litovsk terms, he would not only lose the support of the moderate socialists and Kadets (in other words, the only parties that supported him) but the Bolsheviks would be the very first to cry "treason!" and "sell-out to German imperialism!" (Of course they were in favor of peace, they would explain, but with the German workers and soldiers, not Wilhelm II--who would undoubtedly be overthrown if only Russia got a *real* revolutionary government to serve as an inspiration to the German masses...)
 
Add to all of the above that the so-called "Provisional Government" which was Kerensky's only claim to fame was a self-appointed clique of notables--notables in terms of the Old Regime; none of them were involved in overthrowing the power of the Tsar and indeed the first item on their agenda was considering ways and means of putting a new Tsar in power ASAP. (They were forced to conclude this was not possible at the moment).

I'd be speaking a little bit hyperbolically to say the PG had absolutely no legitimacy whatsoever. It had a little bit of limited legitimacy--in that the non-revolutionary but still important classes in Russia supported it, by default and in desperation. But by any democratic criterion, they ought to have simply yielded to the Soviets. Note that at this point the Soviets, the self-formed "councils" (this is what "soviet" means in Russian, "council") of workers running their various factories and other workplaces and forming higher level Soviets by delegation to city level and in cooperation on a federal level, did command the allegiance of the vast majority of urban Russians. The PG got more legitimacy from being recognized as having some function by the Petrograd Soviet than it could possibly have on its own behalf. Even so, soldiers and the like regarded PG orders as real if and only if the Soviet countersigned them. Note also--at this point "Soviet" was no synonym for "Bolshevik." The Bolsheviks did not dominate the Soviets; a diversity of opinion ruled in these directly democratic bodies.

I'm not saying then that the Bolsheviks were the legitimate government. At this point they most certainly were not, not even the dominant party. I'm saying the Soviets should have been regarded as such full stop, and that insofar as the elite PG looked like an actual government, it was due in very large part to foreign recognition of it as such --and the foreign governments that really mattered were the Entente Allies. If Kerensky did anything to alienate France and Britain he would not only lose their support financially and militarily and diplomatically, he'd undercut his own claim to hold power in Russia itself! Not completely sever it as the anti-revolutionary Russian classes--the landlords, the officers, the capitalists, the middle-class supporters of these classes, etc--would surely cling to the PG and proclaim it the true Russian state--but these classes had lost control of the majority classes and their claims would be desperate and empty. Save insofar as the lower classes recognized a need for the skills and abilities of these conservative classes. But ultimately, after the Civil War, the Bolsheviks either replicated their abilities in their own ranks, or coopted former Old Regimists who concluded that the Bolsheviks had won and were therefore the legitimate government and therefore served it for patriotic reasons.

Kerensky was joined at the hip to the Entente and had no option to opt out of the war with Germany. Whether he might have preserved more power for longer by adopting a more defensive strategy is an interesting question, but the Bolsheviks were not utterly dependent on the war going badly for their bid for power, nor on German gold, though both of these things surely helped them. Perhaps if Kerensky had delayed the October Revolution by a defensive strategy, the Bolsheviks might have felt forced to offer to share power meaningfully with the radical Social Revolutionaries of the countryside, and been forced to keep them onside hence changing the nature of the post-revolutionary government. But I don't figure the self-named PG lasting long enough for Allied victory under any circumstances, or broadening its legitimacy enough to rule; eventually, with or without Bolshevik dictatorship, the Soviets could and would take all power to themselves.
 

NoMommsen

Donor
Was there any political relevant faction at all in Russia at that time pressing or at least opting for peace even under bad (for the ruling classes) conditions - beside Lenin and the Bolsheviks ?
 
It would be very interesting to know how often the suggestion came up in worker's Soviets--or in soldier's Soviets!

That was the interesting thing about Soviets--they were spontaneously invented by the revolutionary masses in the 1905 Revolution, not the brainchild of some theorist or other, and at the bottom level of the hierarchy they were directly democratic, their "constituency" assembled en masse in their various workplaces. Thus, although organized parties quickly took to seeking to place candidates in the higher levels and winning over the majority in the base level ones, they also were a venue for "non-party" people free (insofar as they dared risk offending their peers anyway) to say whatever they liked. I would guess that lots of non-party workers and soldiers did express the wish that Russia simply sign a truce, accepting penalties if necessary, and get it over with immediately. And even some who knew from higher up in their parties that leadership frowned on defeatism (if that was indeed the position of the SRs--and perhaps the leadership of the SRs (Social Revolutionaries, largely non-Marxist agrarian radicals) largely favored ending the war too. Or perhaps not, or did not say so because persuasive more right-wing leaders like Kerensky gave eloquent reasons for Russia to follow through on the war. Anyway at the base Soviet level it would not surprise me if even partisans of parties that opposed defeatism formally were themselves in favor of immediate peace and said so.

But I could be guessing wrong--perhaps patriotism still trumped self-interest even among strata in the direct line of fire, and only the bolder Bolshevik propagandists were laying out the unpopular case for defeatism--bearing in mind Lenin said not so much "peace at any price!" as "turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary war!" In other words-defeat for the bourgeois state, but not therefore peace for the proletariat who must expect to fight, not foreign brothers misled into mutual slaughter, but their own ruling classes and their associates. So strictly speaking even the Bolsheviks were not promising peace--although of course individual propagandists tailoring their line for individual audiences might dumb it down or dissemble about the class war. Just as Lenin portrayed Brest-Litovsk as the Bolsheviks delivering on the promise of "Land! Peace! Bread!" to the demobilized, largely peasant, soldiers returning home. KISS*, don't you know...

In case this English cynical acronym is unfamiliar to anyone--"Keep It Simple, Stupid!"
 
But I could be guessing wrong--perhaps patriotism still trumped self-interest even among strata in the direct line of fire, and only the bolder Bolshevik propagandists were laying out the unpopular case for defeatism

Iirc, when the Germans occupied the Baltic islands of Dago and Osel in October, they ran into little resistance. That sounds as if Russian soldiers were starting to "vote with their feet" even before the Bolshevik coup.
 
Kerenskey was an old school honor bound gentleman. "We owe it to the dead" Also my compatriots are right. He needed UK and French support, and the price was remaining in the war.
 
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