March 3, 1918

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Soviet Russia and the Central Powers Sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

The Soviet signatories refused even to debate the final document. Sokolnikov announced that Russia was signing an ultimatum imposed by a stronger power.

Signed under protest

On 3 March 1918 at Brest-Litovsk, a Soviet delegation led by Grigory Sokolnikov signed a separate peace with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.

Sokolnikov told the final plenary session that Russia was signing an ultimatum imposed by the stronger party, and refused to negotiate its contents further. Leon Trotsky, who had run the previous phase of talks on a policy summarised as neither war nor peace, did not sign.

Trotsky had broken off negotiations on 10 February; Germany then launched Operation Faustschlag on 18 February and advanced rapidly, and Lenin secured Bolshevik acceptance of the harsher terms.

Fourteen articles, five originals

Article 1 declared that the state of war between Russia and the four Central Powers had ceased, but Article 14 made the treaty legally effective only upon ratification. The Fourth Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified it on 15 March.

Russia relinquished sovereignty over territories west of an agreed line, promised to demobilise its army, and had to withdraw its forces from Ukraine, Estonia, Livonia, Finland and the Åland Islands. It also agreed to evacuate Ardahan, Kars and Batum and not to interfere in their reorganisation.

The treaty ran to 14 articles and was executed in quintuplicate.

Numbers and names that get misattributed

The listing's tidy roll-call of ceded countries does not match the text. Poland was not named in the treaty, only part of present-day Belarus lay west of the agreed line, and Ukraine was addressed through recognition and evacuation clauses.

A contemporary Russian statistical account reported the loss of 930,000 square kilometres and more than 56 million people — 32 percent of the then-current population — along with 89 percent of coal production. Baselines differ, and a modern scholarly summary gives nearly 30 percent of the prewar population.

The six-billion-mark obligation came from the separate supplementary financial agreement of 27 August 1918, not from this treaty, whose Article 9 renounced compensation for war expenses and losses.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The signing date is certain. The common statement that Russia left the war on March 3 is serviceable shorthand, but the treaty itself stipulated that it entered into force upon ratification.
Loss percentages vary according to whether the baseline is the prewar empire, the contemporary Russian state, industrial territory, enterprises, or output. The contemporary figures reproduced by the U.S. State Department report 32% of the population, while a modern scholarly summary gives nearly 30% of the prewar population.