Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Soviet Russia left the First World War in March 1918 by signing away a third of its population. The Bolsheviks had promised peace and had almost no army left to bargain with. Trotsky, leading the delegation, tried a formula of no war and no peace — announcing that Russia was simply ceasing to fight and would sign nothing — and the Germans answered by resuming their advance and taking territory at fifty miles a day against no resistance. Lenin then forced acceptance through the central committee against a majority that wanted a revolutionary war, arguing that the revolution mattered more than the territory and that the German revolution would undo the treaty anyway. The terms took Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Ukraine and part of Belarus out of Russian control — some 34 per cent of the population, 32 per cent of the farmland, 54 per cent of the industry and 89 per cent of the coal — plus an indemnity in gold. The consequences ran in several directions. It freed some fifty German divisions for the western front and the spring offensive of 1918, and it committed a million German troops to occupying Ukraine for grain that never materialised in the quantities expected. It also destroyed the coalition with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who left the government and assassinated the German ambassador to try to restart the war. The treaty was annulled by the armistice in November 1918, eight months after it was signed, exactly as Lenin had predicted, though not for his reasons. It is worth setting beside Versailles, which is usually called the harshest peace of the century. Brest-Litovsk was signed nine months earlier and took considerably more, which is the standard answer to the argument that Germany was uniquely ill-treated in 1919.
- Year: 1918 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
