Editing Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (section)

==Lasting effects==
[[Image:Poland & The New Baltic States.jpg|thumb|left|"Poland & The New Baltic States": a map from a 1920 British [[atlas]], showing borders left undefined between the treaties of Brest-Litovsk, [[Treaty of Versailles|Versailles]] and [[Peace of Riga|Riga]]]]
The treaty freed up a million German soldiers for the Western Front<ref>{{cite book |chapter=Chapter 5. The United States and the peace of Versailles |title=The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895 |page=97 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MGamBgAAQBAJ |via=[[Google Books]] |edition=4th |isbn=978-1317456414 |first=Jerald A. |last=Combs |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MGamBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA97 |publisher=[[Routledge]] |year=2012 |publication-place=New York }}</ref> and allowed Germany to use "much of Russia's food supply, industrial base, fuel supplies, and communications with Western Europe".<ref>{{cite book|author=Todd Chretien |title=Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oG4kDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT129 |year=2017|page=129|publisher=Haymarket Books |isbn=978-1608468805 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author=Michael Senior|title=Victory on the Western Front: The Development of the British Army 1914–1918 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YE-uDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA176 |year=2016|page=176|publisher=Pen and Sword |isbn=978-1526709578 }}</ref> According to historian Spencer Tucker, the Allied Powers felt that<blockquote>The treaty was the ultimate betrayal of the Allied cause and sowed the seeds for the Cold War. With Brest-Litovsk, the spectre of German domination in Eastern Europe threatened to become reality, and the Allies now began to think seriously about military intervention [in Russia].<ref>{{cite book |title=The European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia |editor1-first=Spencer C. |editor1-last=Tucker |editor1-link=Spencer C. Tucker |orig-year=1996 |year=2014 |edition=4th |publisher=[[Routledge]] |publication-place=New York |editor2-first=Laura Matysek |editor2-last=Wood |editor3-first=Justin D. |editor3-last=Murphy |via=[[Google Books]] |chapter=Russia, Allied Intervention in |page=608 |first=John W. |last=Bohon |isbn=978-1135506940 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mkFdAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA608 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mkFdAgAAQBAJ }}</ref></blockquote>For the Western Allied Powers, the terms that Germany had imposed on Russia were interpreted as a warning of what to expect if the Central Powers won the war. Between Brest-Litovsk and the point when the situation in the Western Front became dire, some officials in the German government and the high command began to favour offering more lenient terms to the Allied Powers in exchange for their recognition of German gains in the east.<ref>{{Citation
| last = Milton Cooper Jr
| first = John 
| contribution = 
| date = 2013
| title = Wilson, Woodrow
| editor-last = Lynch
| editor-first = Timothy J. 
| encyclopedia = The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| isbn= 978-0199759262 }}</ref>

The treaty marked a significant contraction of the territory controlled by the Bolsheviks or that they could lay claim to as effective successors of the Russian Empire. While the independence of Poland was already accepted by them in principle, and Lenin had signed a document accepting the Finnish independence, the loss of Ukraine and the Baltics created, from the Bolshevik perspective, dangerous bases of anti-Bolshevik military activity in the subsequent [[Russian Civil War]] (1917–1923). However, Bolshevik control of Ukraine and Transcaucasia was, at the time, fragile or non-existent.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The First World War|last=Keegan|first=John|publisher=Pimlico|year=1999|isbn=0712666451|location=London|pages=410|orig-year=1998}}</ref>

Many Russian nationalists and some revolutionaries were furious at the Bolsheviks' acceptance of the treaty and joined forces to fight them. Non-Russians who inhabited the lands lost by Bolshevik Russia in the treaty saw the changes as an opportunity to set up independent states.

Immediately after the signing of the treaty, Lenin moved the Soviet government from Petrograd to Moscow to prevent Germany from capturing the Russian capital in the event of an invasion.<ref>{{cite news |title=Lennie's migration a queer scene: Premier in Moscow, Capitalism's stronghold, serene amid his tattered baggage |first=Arthur |last=Ransome |date=16 March 1918 |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |publication-place=New York|location=[[Moscow]], Russia |url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/03/16/98260776.pdf |issn=0362-4331 |oclc=1645522 |editor-first=Adolph |editor-last=Ochs |editor-link=Adolph Ochs }}</ref><ref name=":0" /> Trotsky blamed the peace treaty on the bourgeoisie, the social revolutionaries,<ref>[http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch07.htm The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky Volume 1, 1918 Two Roads] "We have not forgotten, in the first place, that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk meant the noose that was flung about our neck by the bourgeoisie and the SRs who were responsible for the offensive of June 18."</ref> Tsarist diplomats, Tsarist bureaucrats, "the Kerenskys, Tseretelis and Chernovs",<ref>[http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch06.htm The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, Volume 1, 1918 The Internal and External Tasks of the Soviet Power] "Those who bear the guilt of the Brest-Litovsk peace are the Tsarist bureaucrats and diplomats who involved us in the dreadful war, squandering what the people had accumulated, robbing the people – they who kept the working masses in ignorance and slavery. On the other hand, no less guilt rests with the compromisers, the Kerenskys, Tseretelis and Chernovs"</ref> the Tsarist regime, and the "petty-bourgeois compromisers".<ref>[http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch03.htm The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky Volume 1, 1918 We Need an Army] "the entire burden of recent events, above all, the Brest peace, has fallen tragically upon us only through the previous management of affairs by the Tsarist regime and, following it, by the regime of the petty-bourgeois compromisers".</ref>

The treaty opened a permanent rift between the [[Bolsheviks]] and [[Left Socialist Revolutionaries]]. In July 1918 the Left SRs assassinated German Ambassador [[Wilhelm von Mirbach]] in the hopes that it would induce Germany to annul the treaty, leading to the [[Left SR Uprising]].<ref name = "PIPES">'' [[Richard Pipes]] ''. Bolsheviks in the struggle for power.</ref>
[[File:Europe in 1923.jpg|thumb|400px|A map of Europe in 1923 after the [[Russian Civil War]], among other [[Revolutions of 1917-1923|revolutions]].]]
Relations between Russia and the Central Powers did not go smoothly. The [[Ottoman Empire]] broke the treaty by invading the newly created [[First Republic of Armenia]] in May 1918. [[Adolph Joffe|Joffe]] became the Russian ambassador to Germany. His priority was distributing propaganda to trigger the German revolution. On 4 November 1918, "the Soviet courier's packing-case had 'come to pieces{{'"}} in a Berlin railway station;<ref>Wheeller-Bennett, 1938, p. 359.</ref> it was filled with insurrectionary documents. Joffe and his staff were ejected from Germany in a sealed train on 5 November 1918. In the [[Armistice of 11 November 1918]] that ended World War I, one clause abrogated the Brest-Litovsk treaty.<ref>[https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/armistice11-11-1918.pdf Article 15]</ref> Next, the Bolshevik legislature ([[VTsIK]]) annulled the treaty on 13 November 1918, and the text of the VTsIK Decision was printed in the newspaper ''[[Pravda]]'' the next day.

In the year after the armistice following a timetable set by the victors, the German Army withdrew its occupying forces from the lands gained in Brest-Litovsk. However, relations between Russia and the Allied Powers were also bad due to the [[Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War|Allied Powers' intervention in the Russian Civil War]] against the Soviet government of Russia and its allies. The fate of the region, and the location of the eventual western border of the [[Soviet Union]], was settled in violent and chaotic struggles over the course of the next three and a half years. The [[Polish–Soviet War]] was particularly bitter; it ended with the [[Treaty of Riga]] in 1921. Although most of Ukraine and Belarus fell under Bolshevik control and eventually became two of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, Poland and the Baltic states re-emerged as independent nations. In the [[Treaty of Rapallo, 1922|Treaty of Rapallo]], concluded in April 1922, Germany accepted the Treaty's nullification, and the two powers agreed to abandon all war-related territorial and financial claims against each other.

This state of affairs lasted until 1939, when after signing the secret protocol to the [[Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact|Nazi-Soviet pact]], the Soviet Union was able to advance its borders westward by [[Soviet invasion of Poland|invading Poland]] in September 1939, by conquering parts of eastern Finland in the 1939–1940 [[Winter War]], and by [[Occupation of the Baltic states|invading and occupying Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania]], and [[Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina|parts of Romania (Bessarabia and northern Bukovina)]] in 1940. During [[World War II]] the Soviet leadership was thus able to overturn the majority of the territorial losses incurred at Brest-Litovsk, except for the larger part of Finland, western [[Congress Poland]], and [[Western Armenia]].