Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is the peace treaty signed on March 3, 1918, by Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Soviet Russia. After the October Revolution, the fact that the Bolsheviks had included a call for an immediate end to the war in their October Manifesto introduced the prospect of concluding a separate peace with the Central Powers. Already on November 8, 1917, one day after the fall of the Provi…

Kerensky, Alexander Fyodorvich (May 4, 1881, Simbirsk [Ulyanovsk] – June 11, 1970, New York), Russian politician (prime minister of the Provisional Government). The son of a headmaster, Kerensky studied law in St. Petersburg, and initially worked as a legal counsel before becoming politically active. Elected to the Fourth State Duma in 1912 as a repres…

Russian Revolution Neither the Russian army, nor their economy, nor their political system was equal to the demands of the World War, contributing to the end of the Russian Tsarist Empire. Another major reason was the rapid loss of trust, at all levels of society, which the regime had endured during the war years. As the situation at the military front continued to worsen, an even deeper conflict developed between Tsar Nicholas II and the State Duma. The subsistence crisis engendered by the wartim…

Trotsky, Leon (October 28, 1879, Yanovka [Kherson Province] – August 21, 1940, Coyoacán [near Mexico City – assassinated]; born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein), Russian politician. Already toward the end of his school years in Kherson Province, Trotsky became involved in revolutionary Marxist circles. Banished for the first time in 1899, in 1902 he succeeded in fleeing to Western Europe. In 1903, at the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, he led a fierce attack against Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his model for the party’s structure. Trotsky was chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet during the Revolution of 1905. He was banished again in 1906, fled abroad in 1907, and returned to Russia in May 1917. There he joined the Bolsheviks, quickly rising to become “second man” in the Party after Lenin, and was chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which made the key preparations for the Bolshevist seizure of power. As People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and leader of the Soviet delegation to the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, he declared himself in favor of a provisional tactic, described by the phrase “neither war nor peace,” in expectation of the imminent advent of “world revolution.” In March 1918 the brilliant orator and organizer took over as head of the Military Commissariat. He organized the formation of the Red Army, and played a decisive role in the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War. After Lenin’s death, Trotsky’s criticism of the party apparatus ruled over by Stalin, and of Soviet economic policy, brought him into increasing conflict with the party leadership. He was excluded from the Politburo in 1926, and from the Communist Party in 1927. In 1929 he was finally exiled. After several attempts on his life instigated by Stalin, Trotsky was assassinated by an agent of the Sov…

Brusilov, Aleksei Alekseevich (August 31, 1853, Tiflis, modern Tbilisi – March 17, 1926, Moscow), Russian general and commander in chief of the Russian Army. Brusilov was born into an ancient Russian no…