ABSTRACT
Civil war Sovnarkom's first two legislative acts were the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land, published on 26 October 1917. Although the decrees notionally redeemed two of the Bolsheviks' revolutionary pledges-to secure peace for the country and land for the peasants-it was still the military situation and the agrarian crisis which were to prove the most intractable problems for the new regime over the next four difficult years. The most pressing task was to secure a separate peace with Germany. Trotsky, as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, was in charge of the Soviet negotiating team, but Stalin remained close to Lenin in Petrograd while the talks proceeded at Brest-Litovsk on the Russo-Polish frontier. Finally the swingeing German peace terms were agreed to, with heavy losses in territory and economic resources on the Soviet side, which caused bitter misgivings and renewed divisions within the party leadership. Although Lenin and Stalin did not always see eye-to-eye on every detail of the Brest-Litovsk treaty negotiations, nevertheless the latter ultimately supported Lenin in his pragmatic policy of 'sacrificing space in order to gain time'. Time was indeed essential, for no sooner had the Soviet government withdrawn from the international conflict than it was faced with the military resistance of its political enemies at home, supported logistically, financially, and militarily by the governments of the western capitalist powers who wished, in Winston Churchill's words, 'to strangle bolshevism in its cradle'.
