A promise of peace and an army coming apart

The Bolsheviks took power promising peace, but Germany and Austria-Hungary negotiated from their military position. An armistice on 15 December 1917 was followed by peace talks at Brest-Litovsk on 22 December. Adolph Joffe and then Leon Trotsky led a delegation advocating open diplomacy and national self-determination. For General Max Hoffmann and the German command, securing occupied territory and releasing troops for the Western Front came first.

Russian soldiers were going home; the Soviet government could not restore the front. The ceasefire bought time without restoring military balance. Nor did recognition of selected local councils under German occupation amount to a free choice by all inhabitants. The disagreement over self-determination concerned who could speak for the population and under what conditions.

Three timetables inside the party

Nikolai Bukharin and the Left Communists hoped revolutionary war would ignite revolt in Europe. Lenin argued that fighting without an army would destroy Soviet power and demanded immediate peace. Trotsky tried a middle course: stop fighting without signing an annexationist settlement. All invoked international revolution; they differed over how long Russia could survive while waiting for it.

Trotsky broke off negotiations on 10 February 1918. Germany resumed its offensive on 18 February, and the rapid advance of Operation Faustschlag exposed the failure of that strategy. Threatening resignation, Lenin secured acceptance of harsher terms. A delegation led by Grigory Sokolnikov signed on 3 March, followed by party and Soviet congress ratification. Later commemorations of a Red Army victory at Narva on 23 February should not be confused with this military collapse.

Two Brest treaties and the occupation of Ukraine

The Ukrainian Central Rada negotiated separately and signed with the Central Powers on 9 February, exchanging food commitments for support. Bolsheviks and the Rada were then contesting Kyiv. German and Austro-Hungarian intervention restored the Rada, but occupying forces' grain demands soon collided with its capacity to govern.

On 29 April Pavlo Skoropadskyi established the Hetmanate. Backed by Germany, efforts to restore landowners' property and administrative order clashed with peasant land seizures. Occupation changed who controlled land and took grain, as well as the political map. The sequence from the Rada through the Hetmanate to the Directory, and the response of peasant armies, continues in Ukraine's revolution and wars.

Russia's treaty of 3 March relinquished authority over western territories and required peace with Ukraine and the withdrawal of Russian forces from Finland and the Baltic region. It did not fix every subsequent national frontier at once. Both German control and the territory emerging states would actually hold remained unsettled. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries left the Soviet government in protest; the July assassination of German ambassador Mirbach sought to restart war with Germany.

Ober Ost and Finland's civil war

Germany had established the Ober Ost military administration in Lithuania, Courland and adjoining occupied areas, then extended its reach in 1918. Baltic German plans for a United Baltic Duchy and Lithuania's invitation to a German prince represented different projects under German protection. They conflicted with other claims to statehood and collapsed with Germany's defeat.

Finland had declared independence in December 1917 and obtained Soviet recognition. Nevertheless, civil war broke out in late January 1918. The Red government, including Kullervo Manner and Otto Kuusinen, faced the Senate led by Pehr Evind Svinhufvud and Mannerheim's White army. After the White government's appeal, Rüdiger von der Goltz's German Baltic Sea Division landed at Hanko in April and captured Helsinki. Finnish White military operations and German intervention combined to secure victory.

Red and White terror was followed by hunger and disease in prison camps, devastating defeated Reds and their families. Domestic class conflict and the collapse of state authority made this more than a German-Russian proxy war. Germany's defeat also ended Finland's pro-German monarchy project. Finnish aid to Estonia and the 1920 Treaty of Tartu belong to the subsequent Baltic wars of independence.

November annulment and the occupation's afterlife

The armistice of 11 November 1918 required Germany to abandon Brest-Litovsk; Soviet Russia annulled it on 13 November. Yet Article XII allowed German troops in former Russian territory to remain until the Allies considered withdrawal appropriate. They did not all disappear immediately. Continued deployment and anti-Bolshevik policy helped create the setting for the Baltic Freikorps campaigns of 1919.

Brest left a brief opportunity for Soviet survival and a new arena of war. Red armies, national governments, Whites and German formations sought incompatible settlements as occupation receded. Annulment did not automatically restore the former empire. The wider struggle continues in the Russian Civil War, and the northwestern wars and treaties in the Baltic wars of independence.