Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a separate peace treaty signed on 3 March 1918 in the city of Brest-Litovsk, then in German-occupied territory and now Brest in Belarus, between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, ending Russia's participation in the First World War. Negotiated after months of talks in which the Bolshevik delegate Leon Trotsky initially pursued a policy of neither war nor peace before Germany renewed its offensive, the treaty was ultimately signed for Soviet Russia by Grigori Sokolnikov under instruction from Lenin, who judged that the new Bolshevik government could not survive continued fighting. Its terms were extraordinarily harsh: Russia renounced sovereignty over Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic territories of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poland, and parts of the Caucasus including Kars and Batum, surrendering roughly a third of its former population, more than half its industrial capacity and the great majority of its coalfields, and a supplementary agreement that August obliged Russia to pay Germany six billion gold marks in reparations. The settlement provoked fierce opposition within Russia, including from within the Bolshevik party itself, and contributed to the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, but Germany's own defeat and the armistice of November 1918 rendered the treaty void within months; it nonetheless left a lasting imprint on the borders and national movements of Eastern Europe.