News of the successful Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 had an electrifying effect under these conditions. In every barracks and factory, workers discussed the victory of the Russian working class. It was a sea-change in the situation; a ray of hope in the darkness of world war. The Soviet government’s first decree to the peoples of the world was for an immediate armistice and a democratic peace based on self-determination and the renunciation of annexations. The Bolsheviks then went on to publish the secret agreements of the Tsarist regime and the old Kerensky government with the Allies and repudiated all the territory that had been promised to Russia. Soviet Russia was leaving the war.
The announcements had a powerful effect on the psychology of the international working class. In 1917 a massive mutiny affected 54 divisions of the French army, and in December a strike wave began that led in the following May to a walkout of 250,000 workers in Paris. The strikes in Britain in 1918 encompassed well over a million workers. In January 1918, 700,000 workers in Austria-Hungary joined a general strike in support of the Bolsheviks’ peace proposals. In February Austro-Hungarian sailors joined in the protests, temporarily controlling half of the war fleet. A sailor condemned to death for his actions in the mutiny stated before his execution, “What happened in Russia emboldened us. Over there, a new sun has risen that will shine not only for the Slavs but for all the nations, and it will bring them peace and justice.”
Already in April 1917 Germany had experienced the second mass strike against the war. Two hundred thousand workers struck in Berlin and Leipzig. This was followed in January 1918 by the greatest strike of the war years, when over one million armament workers downed tools against the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the German regime had forced upon the Bolshevik government. This demonstrated the profound effect of the propaganda conducted by Leon Trotsky during the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The January strike was organized in the main by an opposition trade union group called Revolutionäre Obleute (The Revolutionary Shop Stewards). They had come together because of their opposition to the war and the political truce of the Labour leaders. They later joined the USPD and, like the Spartacus League, maintained a separate existence within the Party. When the strike ended in defeat, over 50,000 strikers were drafted into the army and sent to the front. Lenin later commented that this action marked “a turn of sentiment among the German proletariat.”