The German notification of impending military action reached Petrograd on the afternoon of February 17. At the meeting of the Central Committee, which convened immediately, Lenin renewed his plea to return to Brest and capitulate, but he again suffered a narrow defeat, 6-5. The majority wanted to wait and see whether the Germans would carry out their threat: if they indeed marched into Russia and no revolution broke out in Germany and Austria, there would still be time to bow to the inevitable.
The Germans were true to their word. On February 17, their troops advanced and occupied Dvinsk without encountering resistance. General Hoffmann described the operation as follows:
This is the most comic war that I have ever experienced – it is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece, and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks, entrains another detachment, and moves on. The procedure has in any event the charm of novelty.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "Brest-Litovsk." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 589-87. Print.
Lenin, Sochineniia, XXII, 677.
K. F. Nowak, ed., Die Aufzeichnungen des General majors Max Hoffmann, I (Berlin, 1929), 187.
Further Reading:
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov / Lenin
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