Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Signed on 3 March 1918 in the fortress town of Brest-Litovsk, today Brest in Belarus, this separate peace took Bolshevik Russia out of the First World War. Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria imposed harsh terms that stripped Russia of its western borderlands, from the Baltic to Ukraine. The settlement lasted only eight months, but it shaped the new states of eastern Europe and deepened the divisions of the Russian Civil War.

By 1917 Russia's army and economy were exhausted by the fighting on the Eastern Front of World War I. The February Revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate, yet the Provisional Government that replaced him kept fighting. Germany, hoping to knock Russia out, allowed Vladimir Lenin to travel from Swiss exile to Petrograd in April 1917, and the Bolsheviks campaigned for an immediate end to the war. After they seized power in the October Revolution, part of the wider Russian Revolution, Lenin issued the Decree on Peace, and an armistice with the Central Powers followed on 15 December 1917.

The delegations met in the fortress, housed in wooden huts because the town had been burnt by the retreating Russians in 1915. The Soviet side, first led by Adolph Joffe, called for peace with no annexations and no indemnities. It soon emerged that Germany meant to detach Poland, Lithuania and Courland, citing the right of self-determination the Bolsheviks themselves proclaimed. Leon Trotsky, the commissar for foreign affairs, then took over the talks, hoping to drag them out until revolution broke out in central Europe. Meanwhile the Central Powers signed a separate treaty with the Ukrainian People's Republic on the night of 8 to 9 February 1918, in return for promises of grain.

On 10 February Trotsky announced that Russia would stop fighting but would not sign, a formula summed up as "no war, no peace". Six days later the Germans gave notice that hostilities would resume, and from 18 February their troops advanced almost unopposed through the Baltic region, Belarus and Ukraine. New and harsher terms followed on 23 February. Lenin threatened to resign unless the party accepted them, arguing that Russia must give up space to gain time, and the Soviet executive approved signing by 116 votes to 85. Grigori Sokolnikov signed on 3 March without discussing the terms.

Russia gave up its claims to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, most of Belarus and Ukraine, and confirmed the independence of Finland. In the Caucasus, Kars, Ardahan and Batumi were to return to the Ottoman Empire. The lost lands held about a third of the old empire's population, more than half of its industry and around nine-tenths of its coal mines. Germany planned client monarchies in the Baltic under German princes. A supplementary agreement of 27 August 1918 obliged Russia to pay six billion marks.

The treaty freed up German divisions for the 1918 Spring Offensive in France, although perhaps a million troops remained tied down occupying the east. In Russia it was bitterly divisive: the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries quit the government, and in July 1918 they assassinated the German ambassador, Wilhelm von Mirbach. Lenin moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow. After Germany's defeat, the Armistice of 11 November 1918 cancelled the treaty, and the Soviet government annulled it two days later. The borders of the region were then fought over during the Russian Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War, with Poland and the Baltic states emerging independent while Ukraine and Belarus came under Bolshevik rule. In the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922 Germany and Soviet Russia abandoned all claims arising from the war.

Our 1914 map shows the Russian Empire and German Empire before the treaty, and our 1920 map the new states that emerged on the lands Russia gave up.