Every week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.
Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be one of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.
This week's selection for the Gaggle Book Club is a book that was actually recommended by a Gaggler, @Mojo1982 : "Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918," by John W. Wheeler-Bennett. First published in 1939, the book recounts the negotiations between the Bolsheviks (who had seized power in Russia three months earlier) and the generals of the imperial German army.
Purporting to represent the Russian Empire, V. I. Lenin's Bolsheviks, had sued for peace and, as the war's losing party, they expected their German adversaries to impose savage peace terms on them. Once the war against Imperial Germany was concluded, Lenin argued, the Bolsheviks would be able to focus on defeating their political enemies and consolidating their power inside Russia. Lenin's critics among the Bolsheviks were loath to accept peace terms that effectively entailed the dismantlement of the Russian Empire. Lenin however was only concerned with holding on to power. There were no limits to the territorial concessions he was ready to make to secure that end.
Lenin's calculation was that the Western powers--now much strengthened with America's entry into the war on their side--would eventually defeat Imperial Germany. When that happened, the victorious Entente powers would not allow Germany to keep any of its winnings in the east, and would cancel whatever humiliating peace treaty it had forced Russia, a member of the Entente, to sign.
The Bolsheviks did indeed surrender vast areas of the Russian Empire at Brest-Litovsk: A Ukrainian state was carved out of Russia and came under German influence. A state of Poland was also carved out of Russia. Large portions of Belarus came under German control, as did Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Russia was forced to recognize the independence of Finland. In the Caucasus, territories such as Kars, Ardahan, and Batum were surrendered to the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Imperial Germany's.
The lands comprised 34% of the former empire's population, 54% of its industrial land, 89% of its coalfields, and 26% of its railways. The losses amounted to over 1 million square miles, stripping Russia of critical resources and populations.
However, Germany lost the war in the west, just as Lenin had predicted it would. With the signing of the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, came annulment of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Nonetheless, many of the concessions and surrenders of territory remained in place, until Stalin in 1939 began to rearrange the map of Eastern Europe and the USSR. The states created as a result of Brest-Litovsk have proved to be of dubious value to peace, security, indeed to European civilization as a whole. We are very much living with the consequences of that massive carve-up of the Russian Empire.
As it turned out, Brest-Litovsk proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for Germany. The Germans wasted precious manpower standing guard over their new territorial acquisitions--manpower they badly needed, first for their Easter 1918 offensive on the Western Front, and then to hold the line against the Western powers' eventually successful Fall 1918 offensive.
