The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and its intepretations

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which took Bolshevik Russia out of WWI, was signed on 3 March 1918 between Russia and the Central Powers (mainly Germany, but also Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria). 

The peace process had begun in November 1917, when the All-Russia Congress of Soviets (ie Lenin) issued the Decree on Peace, calling for an end to WWI on behalf of “the working people of all the belligerent countries, exhausted, tormented and racked by the war”. 

Negotiations began in December 1917, but the Soviets strung out the talks, hoping for communist revolutions in central Europe.  When this failed to happen, in February 1918 Trotsky – who was conducting the talks for the Bolsheviks – walked out declaring: “neither war nor peace”, believing that Germany was too exhausted to do anything.  He was wrong, in the face of a Red Army that did not exist, Germany mounted Operation Faustschlag and in 11 days conquered large areas of Estonia, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine, and the Bolsheviks were forced to sign the German ultimatum. 

By the Treaty, Russia lost a third of its land, more than half its industry, nine-tenths of its coalfields, and a quarter of its railways.  It also recognised the independence of Finland and Ukraine. 

A supplementary protocol (August 1918) required Russia to pay reparations of 6 billion marks. 

Results

In Russia the Treaty:

1. greatly weakened the USSR until the 1950s. 

2. caused fury.  The Petrogradskoe Ekho reported that workers at the Tula armament factory considered the treaty an act of treason.  An underground opposition of Kadets and SRs – the ‘Union of Regeneration’ – was formed to undermine the Bolsheviks.  Anger at a wasted war lay behind much of the support for the Whites in the Civil War.  And, even in the Bolshevik Party, a group that came to be known as the ‘Left Communists’ said that Lenin had “sold out the international proletariat” and betrayed world revolution. 

3. caused subsequent wars, as the USSR tried (and failed) to reconquer Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, but succeeded regaining Ukraine, Belarus, and Armenia, Azerbaijan & Georgia in the Caucasus. 

4. Trotsky blamed the peace treaty on the bourgeoisie, the social revolutionaries, Tsarists, ‘the Kerenskys’, and the ‘petty-bourgeois compromisers’ … and used it as an excuse for the Terror. 

5. gave the Bolshevik eight months’ “breathing space” to establish their state, and survive. 

In the wider world, the Treaty:

1. freed up 1 million German soldiers to go fight on the Western Front, and offered them all the industrial and agricultural resources of the Ukraine, plus the oil of the Caucasus. 

2. the harsh terms of the Treaty stiffened Allied resolve against Germany, particularly causing the US to increase its involvement in the war

3. was cited by the Allies after WWI to justify the harsh terms of the ToV. 

Interpretations

1. In the years after WWI, Winston Churchill, and many other western writers, regarded Russia’s withdrawal as an act of betrayal which had helped the Germans continue the war and cost untold casualties.  Despite the harsh terms of the war, French diplomats saw it as an alliance between German supremacism and Russian expansionism. 

2. By contrast, when the Germans were defeated and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk revoked, Lenin was proved right and hugely praised: “Nothing he had done contributed more to his reputation for infallibility” (Pipes, 1990).  Even so, during the 1930s, Stalinist historians looked back on the Treaty as a betrayal of Russia, and declared almost all the Bolshevik leadership of 1918 (including, amazingly, Bukharin, who had opposed signing the Treaty!) to be traitors. 

3. By the end of the 1930s, when people’s attention was drawn away from western Europe to what Hitler was up to in eastern Europe, historians began to ascribe much more importance to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.  In 1937, a writer calling themself Pragmaticus (1937), saw the Treaty as an example of the aspiration for a ‘Greater Germany’ which he traced back to the mid-19th century – an aspiration which had become “a burden upon the German mentality” and helped explain the popularity of Hitler. 

4. Next year, 1938, John Wheeler-Bennett, published Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace.  He presented Brest-Litovsk as a ‘Carthaginian peace’, a diktat, imposed by a ruthless German military on their defeated Russian enemy. 

              For Wheeler-Bennett: “The course of world history was changed on March 3, 1918” – the treaty, he argued:

   • gave Lenin his "breathing spell” and meant the Bolsheviks survived – “Ludendorff was the involuntary saviour of Bolshevism for Europe”;

   • revived German hopes and prompted them to attempt their disastrous 1918 Spring Offensive … which in turn led to the socialist rebellions which toppled the Kaiser;

   • warned the Allied powers of what to expect from a German victory, leading them to sanction the Japanese invasion of eastern Asia;

   • was used by Stalin to eliminate the ‘old Bosheviks’;

   • and led Hitler to look to Russia for Lebensraum: “Hitler … is the offspring of the Peace of Breast-Litovsk”. 

5. In 1966, David Shub – who had escaped from the Soviet GULAG to America – suggested a subsidiary reason for the Treaty: “The power of German arms was perhaps conclusive in any case.  Yet it has only been in the last decade that historians have been able to understand the powerful non-military influences which Germany was able to exert on Lenin in 1917-18” – ie German subsidies and assistance to the Bolsheviks. 

6. In 1977, the socialist writer Guy Sabatier argued that the Treaty was the abandonment of world revolution and the start of the process which would see the Soviet Union transform into an imperialist power itself.  For Sabatier, Brest-Litovsk was a disaster for the USSR: “after Brest-Litovsk it was separated from the Entente and the negotiations leading to the founding of the League of Nations.  In this regard it was like Germany, the principle victim of Versailles”. 

In this British cartoon of 1917, a Bolshevik, bought with German gold, is dragging an unwilling Russia into Germany's power.

7. The historian Richard Pipes (1990) followed the traditional interpretation of the Soviets trying to prolong negotiations in the hope of world revolution, but ultimately betraying the Allies by signing the Treaty.  He drew a sharp contrast between the negotiators – “On one side sat the bland and alert representatives of the Central Powers, black-coated or much beribboned and bestarred, exquisitely polite….  Opposite sat the Russians, mostly dirty and ill-clad, who smoked their large pipes placidly through the debates.  Much of the discussion seemed not to interest them, and they intervened in monosyllables”. 

8. In 2014 Dr Alexander Sagomonyan (2014) of Moscow University DENIED the myth that Lenin had betrayed the Alllies.  Having signed the Treaty – but BEFORE the All-Russia Congress of Soviets had ratified it, Sagomonyan recounts, Lenin approached Raymond Robins, the US representative in Moscow, and Bruce Lockhart, the British Commissioner, offering to refuse to ratify the Treaty if Britain and the US would guarantee aid … both of whom urged their governments to comply.  Only when, ten days later, Robins’s & Lockhart’s appeals had been ignored, did Lenin shrug and sign. 

              Sagomonyan goes on to argue that possession of Ukraine was not the benefit that Germany had hoped.  Attempts to requisition food there sparked large-scale uprisings, and the Makhno guerrilla army in Ukraine was formed at that time primarily to fight against the German occupiers, forcing Germany to send armies east, not west. 

9. Writing in the magazine History Today, Richard Cavendish (2008) followed the traditional themes of an “extremely harsh” peace and a “breathing space”, commenting: “Trotsky skilfully contrived to spin the discussions out in the hope of a Communist revolution in Germany and Austria which would save Russia’s bacon”. 

10. A recent historian of Brest-Litovsk, Borislav Chernev (2017) has attempted a revisionist interpretation of the Treaty.  Although he agrees that it was harsh to the Russian Empire, it was not vindictive.  Chernev argues that, to understand the Treaty, you need to appreciate the vastly different world views of the negotiators – on the one hand ideological revolutionaries, on the other, pragmatist diplomats.  The Soviet representatives, he tells us, utterly failed to negotiate in good faith, preferring theatrics to serious negotiation, leading to the German ultimatum in February 1918. 

               Looking in detail at the negotiations, Chernev – like Wheeler-Bennett almost a century earlier – regarded the Treaty as the start of a new era in politics, seeing in it the beginnings of self-determination, decolonisation and nation-state creation … the beginnings of 20th diplomacy. 

11. Randall Lesaffer (2018), writing for the Treaty’s centenary, noted the Decree on Peace, but admitted that “it was dire need that drove Lenin and the new government to sue for peace”.  He also drew attention to a less-harsh aspect of the Treaty:

“Contrary to what would be the case with the peace treaties that came out of the Paris peace conference in 1919, the Peace of Brest-Litovsk was a traditional peace treaty as it did not assign responsibility for the war and encompassed a general waiver for all claims for compensation for the costs and damages of the war (Article 9)”