Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Why did a revolutionary government sign a humiliating peace?

The Soviet government of the months after October had no army to fight with: the old army was dissolving and the soldiers were going home. Trotsky, leading the negotiation, played for time with the unprecedented formula of neither war nor peace, waiting for the German workers' revolution; when the German offensive resumed in February 1918 the front collapsed in days.

The party split. The Left Communists led by Bukharin held that peace with imperialism was the revolution betrayed and demanded revolutionary war. Lenin's answer was cold: a country without an army cannot choose war, and the survival of Soviet power was the greatest possible contribution to revolution in Europe. He staked his resignation on the vote, and only after Germany's new terms had grown harsher was the peace carried.

What was lost, and what was kept?

By the treaty Russia renounced Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic lands and Finland: about a third of the old empire's population and a great share of its farmland and industry, with an August supplement adding an indemnity. The capital moved from Petrograd to Moscow, out of the German army's reach. The Left SRs quit the coalition government in protest and rose in revolt in July.

What was kept, at that price, was Soviet power itself. And when Germany capitulated in the West in November 1918, the Soviet government declared the treaty void at once. As Lenin had calculated, the humiliation lasted eight months.

What did it leave behind?

Brest-Litovsk became the primal scene of Soviet diplomacy: the place where a state founded on the imminence of world revolution first learned, before revolution's delay, to put state survival first. From Rapallo to the pact of 1939, the precedent was summoned whenever ideology and state interest collided. Historians treat it as the most dramatic display of Lenin's realism; to oppositionists within the party it was remembered ever after as the first breach of principle.