At Smolney that night the Executive Committee listened to a report, and voted for its rejection. The resolution declared that the dominant parties in Germany, compelled by a popular demand to grant concessions to the principles of a democratic peace, were nevertheless trying to distort the idea to aid their own annexationist policy. Already Germany was showing her hand. She contended that the will of the people of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland had already been manifested. The Russians declared this allegation to be devoid of all foundation. “Under martial law and under the yoke of a military censorship, the peoples of the occupied countries could not express their will,” they said. “The documents upon which the German government bases its allegation at Brest prove the manifestation of the will of a few privileged groups only, and in no way the will of the masses in those territories. “We now declare that the Russian Revolution remains faithful to the policy of internationalism. We defend the right of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland to dispose of their own destiny, actually and freely. Never will we recognize the justice of imposing the will of a foreign nation on any other nation.” The Russian Soviet appealed to the people of Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria in these words: “Under your pressure, your governments have been obliged to accept the motto of no annexations and no indemnities, but recently they have been trying to carry on their old policy of evasion. Remember that the conclusion of an immediate democratic peace will depend actually and above all on you. All the people of Europe look to you, exhausted and bled by such a war as there never was before, that you will not permit the Austro-German imperialists to make war against Revolutionary Russia for the subjugation of Poland, Lithuania, Courland, and Armenia.” The Soviet bombed the German trenches with propaganda. On January 2 they circulated a pamphlet in the German lines declaring that the peace conditions submitted by the Central Powers showed the German promises of a democratic peace to be unconscionable lies. The pamphlet asserted that Germany wanted to free the peoples on Russia’s western frontier from the sphere of revolution, in order to subjugate them to the German will, that they might impose an Austrian monarchy on Poland and make Lithuania and Courland German duchies. The Russians asked for transfer of any further negotiations to Stockholm. In Germany the military party declared that the break between Russia and Germany was caused by this demand, keeping their people in ignorance for some time of the fact that the break had come from Germany’s refusal to evacuate Russian territory. Trotzky himself went to the second conference, protesting that his government would not yield. “We did not overthrow the Tsar to bow to German imperialism,” he said. Germany practically delivered an ultimatum: “Parleys at Brest-Litovsk or none.”