March 3, 1918 - Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Pictured - What Russia gave up.

The Central Powers have knocked Russia out of the war. Where once in 1914 French civilians smugly imagined how the “Russian steamroller” would roll over the Germans, now the Entente is in its most dire straights of the war. In the afternoon of March 3, the Bolshevik government of Russia accepted the inevitably and made peace with the Quadruple Alliance. Lenin and his collaborators had bowed to reality as the Germans neared Petrograd. The peace was harsh and humiliating: The Russias gave up all their claims to the Baltic lands, Poland, Belarus, Finland, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, the last of which was reclaimed by Turkey, after having been lost in 1870.

A third of Russia’s arable land and a third of its population had been handed over. It almost included nine-tenths of her coalfields. Perhaps most gratingly in terms of pride, if not economy, was that Russia had lost almost all the land it had gained since the reign of Peter the Great in 1700. The Kaiser celebrated with champagne, and with good reason. Germany’s great Slavic foe had been defeated. In Odessa and Nikolayev, the Russians turned over their warships, and all naval bases in the Baltic surrendered to the Germans with the exception of Kronstadt island outside Petrograd.

For the Allies, this was all a nightmare. Not only would Russia no longer contribute to the war, but it also agreed to hand over more than half a million Austrian and German prisoners of war. The Central Powers also claimed, along with 63,000 Russian prisoners, 2,600 artillery pieces and 5,000 machine guns. All of these would soon be turned on the British and French on the Western Front. And of course, so would the German troops currently fighting in Russia. On March 3, 1918, things looked bleak for Britain and France.