Brest-Litovsk: The Gamble in the East Pays

CHAPTER 9 · WINTER 1917–18 · The Great War, 1914–1918

Look how the tan floods east. At the armistice talks in the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky tried a revolutionary’s gambit — “no war, no peace”: refuse to sign, dare Germany to keep attacking a country that had stopped fighting. Germany kept attacking. Operation Faustschlag (the three arrows) advanced farther in eleven days than any offensive of the war — against no resistance, by rail and sled — until Lenin, over his party’s outrage, ordered the treaty signed on 3 March 1918. Its terms preview what a German victory in the west would have looked like: Russia loses Poland, Lithuania, Courlan

The turn: The treaty signed, 3 March 1918.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.