The Soviet delegation was initially headed by Adolph Joffe, and key figures from the Central Powers included Max Hoffmann and Richard von Kühlmann of Germany, Ottokar Czernin of Austria-Hungary, and Talaat Pasha of the Ottoman Empire.

A renewed Central Powers offensive launched on February 18 captured large territories in the Baltic region, Belarus, and Ukraine and forced the Soviet side to sue for peace.

Under the terms of the treaty, Russia lost control of Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and its Caucasus provinces of Kars and Batum.

The large numbers of war casualties and persistent food shortages in the major urban centers brought about civil unrest, known as the February Revolution, that forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate.

Therefore, in April 1917, Germany transported Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin and thirty-one supporters in a sealed train from exile in Switzerland to Finland Station, Petrograd.

[5] Upon his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin proclaimed his April Theses, which included a call for turning all political power over to workers' and soldiers' soviets (councils) and an immediate withdrawal of Russia from the war.

On 8 November 1917 (26 October 1917 O.S) Vladimir Lenin signed the Decree on Peace, which was approved by the Second Congress of the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies.

Arrangements for the conference were the responsibility of General Max Hoffmann, the chief of staff of the Central Powers' forces on the Eastern Front (Oberkommando-Ostfront, Ober Ost).

Again, the negotiators met in the fortress in Brest-Litovsk, and the delegates were housed in temporary wooden structures in its courtyards because the city had been burnt to the ground in 1915 by the retreating Russian army.

They were cordially welcomed by the German commander of the Eastern Front, Prince Leopold of Bavaria, who sat with Joffe on the head table at the opening banquet with one hundred guests.

Thanks to informal chatting in the mess, one of Hoffmann's aides, Colonel Friedrich Brinckmann, realized that the Russians had optimistically misinterpreted the Central Powers' meaning.

[10] It fell to Hoffmann to set matters straight at dinner on 27 December: Poland, Lithuania and Courland, already occupied by the Central Powers, were determined to separate from Russia on the principle of self-determination that the Bolsheviks themselves espoused.

Czernin was beside himself that this hitch that was slowing the negotiations; self-determination was anathema to his government and they urgently needed grain from the east because Vienna was on the verge of starvation.

The food crisis in Vienna was eventually eased by "forced drafts of grain from Hungary, Poland, and Romania and by a last moment contribution from Germany of 450 truck-loads of flour".

When they reconvened, Trotsky declined the invitation to meet Prince Leopold and terminated shared meals and other sociable interactions with the representatives of the Central Powers.

"[21] Privately, in correspondence with Count Otto von Czernin, Trotsky had expressed his willingness to relent to peace terms upon the resumption of a German offensive although with moral dissent.

The "Left Communists", led by Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek, were sure that Germany, Austria, Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria were all on the verge of revolution.

When Sokolnikov arrived at Brest-Litovsk, he declared "we are going to sign immediately the treaty presented to us as an ultimatum but at the same time refuse to enter into any discussion of its terms".

"[32] The occupation of the western part of the former Russian Empire ultimately proved a costly blunder for Berlin, as over one million German troops lay sprawled out from Poland nearly to the Caspian Sea, all idle and depriving Germany of badly needed manpower in France.

Germany transferred hundreds of thousands of veteran troops to the Western Front for the 1918 Spring Offensive, which shocked the Allied Powers but ultimately failed.

The Germans began slowly but steadily withdrawing personnel from the occupied territories from east to west as the troop transfers to the Western Front continued throughout 1918.

Local independence movements, particularly those based in what is now Belarus and Ukraine, moved in to fill the void the Germans left behind and established themselves in the newly freed territories.

[33] At the insistence of Talaat Pasha, the treaty declared that the territory Russia took from the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), specifically Ardahan, Kars, and Batumi, were to be returned.

Paragraph 3 of Article IV of the treaty stated that: The districts of Ardahan, Kars, and Batum will likewise and without delay be cleared of Russian troops.

Three secret clauses provided for German military action against Entente forces on Russian soil, as well as the expulsion of British troops from Baku.

The treaty freed up a million German soldiers for the Western Front[36] and allowed Germany to use "much of Russia's food supply, industrial base, fuel supplies, and communications with Western Europe" [37][38] According to historian Spencer Tucker, the Allied Powers felt thatThe treaty was the ultimate betrayal of the Allied cause and sowed the seeds for the Cold War.

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.

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.

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.

This state of affairs lasted until 1939, when after signing the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Soviet Union was able to advance its borders westward by invading Poland in September 1939, by conquering parts of eastern Finland in the 1939–1940 Winter War, and by invading and occupying Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania (Bessarabia and northern Bukovina) in 1940.