What Was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk?
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March 1918 in the German-occupied city of Brest-Litovsk (now Brest in Belarus), ending the war between Soviet Russia and the four Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. The treaty was the most extensive territorial surrender in modern Russian history: Russia lost Poland, the Baltic provinces (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland, Ukraine, and parts of the Caucasus — about a third of the population of the former Russian Empire and most of its most economically developed regions. The treaty was repudiated by the armistice of 11 November 1918, but the territorial settlement was largely confirmed by the treaties of 1919-1921 and it shaped the Soviet western frontier until 1939-1945 (see Wheeler-Bennett, The Forgotten Peace, 1939).
The Russian revolution and the Decree on Peace
The negotiations began in November 1917, immediately after the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks had called for an end to the war in the Decree on Peace of 26 October 1917 (8 November new style), and they had hoped for a quick settlement on the basis of “no annexations, no indemnities.” The Central Powers, however, had been preparing for a Russian collapse since at least 1917, and they were not willing to negotiate on the Bolshevik terms. The German high command, in particular, had prepared a list of demands that included the cession of Poland, the Baltic provinces, and parts of Ukraine.
The Soviet delegation, led initially by Adolph Joffe and then by Leon Trotsky, met the Central Powers delegation, led by the German foreign minister Richard von Kühlmann, at Brest-Litovsk on 20 November 1917. The negotiations were conducted against the background of the Russian civil war, the German advance into the Russian interior, and the food and fuel crises in Petrograd and Moscow. By January 1918, the Central Powers had presented a set of demands that the Bolsheviks could not accept (Wheeler-Bennett, 1939).
”Neither war nor peace”
The Soviet delegation, unable to accept the Central Powers’ terms and unwilling to sign a peace, declared on 28 January 1918 that Russia was “neither at war nor in a state of peace” with the Central Powers. The strategy, devised by Trotsky, was based on the hope that the imminent revolution in Germany would change the situation; the strategy failed. On 18 February 1918, the Central Powers launched a general offensive on the Eastern Front, and the German army, advancing with overwhelming force, occupied Dvinsk, Minsk, and much of the rest of the western Russian territory within ten days. The Russian army, in a state of complete collapse, was unable to offer any effective resistance.
The new situation forced the Soviet government to reconsider. Lenin, who had been the leading advocate of immediate peace, prevailed over the advocates of revolutionary war, and the Soviet government accepted the German terms. The new negotiations were conducted at Brest-Litovsk in February 1918, and the treaty was signed on 3 March 1918 (Wheeler-Bennett, 1939).
The terms
The treaty of 3 March 1918 was, in essence, a Russian capitulation. The terms included:
- The cession to Germany of the Polish provinces, the Baltic provinces (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), and parts of Belarus.
- The cession of Ukraine, in the form of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Central Powers and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, signed on 9 February 1918.
- The cession to the Ottoman Empire of the Kars, Ardahan, and Batum oblasts.
- The demobilisation of the Russian army and the Russian navy.
- The payment of an indemnity of 6 billion marks, in addition to the recognition of the existing Russian debts to Germany.
The Soviet government signed the treaty on 3 March 1918, with the explicit understanding that the terms were imposed by force. The Russian delegation, led by Grigory Sokolnikov, refused to sign the indemnity provision, but the German government insisted. The treaty was ratified by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on 15 March 1918 (Wheeler-Bennett, 1939).
The end of the treaty
The treaty was abrogated by the armistice of 11 November 1918. The German defeat in the First World War and the collapse of the Central Powers made the Soviet government able to repudiate the treaty, and the Soviet government moved quickly to reassert control over the former Russian territories. The Soviet-Polish War of 1920, in which the Soviets attempted to extend the revolution into Poland, ended with the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which partitioned the borderlands, ceding western Ukraine and western Belarus to Poland. The Finnish, Baltic, and Bessarabian borders were largely confirmed by the Soviet peace treaties of 1920-1921.
The territorial settlement of Brest-Litovsk was, in this sense, the basis of the Soviet western frontier until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, and the post-1945 settlement was the basis of the post-war Soviet border with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was, accordingly, a turning point in modern European history: the first major treaty to be imposed on a defeated power in the twentieth century, and a model that would be followed in the treaties of Versailles and Potsdam (Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).