The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk enabled the Bolsheviks to secure their position and power in Russia as their decision to leave the war prevented them from being overthrown by German forces and allowed the new Bolshevik government to show it was different from the failing state authorities before it, as it delivered peace to Russia. Previously, the continuation of the war had been a huge factor in the unpopularity of the Provisional Government who the Bolsheviks had overthrown (Service, op.cit). The Treaty caused a dilemma within the Bolshevik Party as they were forced to decide between signing the Treaty or dragging out the peace negotiations in the hope that the revolution described by Marx would materialise across…show more content… As the Bolsheviks had already issued orders for the demobilisation of the Russian army, an invasion of Russia would have been catastrophic for the new Bolshevik government, as Lenin remarked ‘If war should break out again, our government would be wiped out and peace would be made by some other government. We must become strongly entrenched in power, and for that we need time’ (Robottom, op.cit). The Bolsheviks were able to consolidate power by signing the treaty as it gave them time and prevented an invasion that would have deposed the Bolsheviks from power. Ideologically, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk split opinions within the Bolshevik party as the international revolution was the primary objective for the Left Communists (Williams, op.cit). The idea of the international revolution followed Marxist ideology, and by choosing to sign the treaty rather than dragging out the peace negotiations in order to create time in which the war could breakdown and trigger into a chain of civil wars across Europe, the Bolsheviks chose to consolidate the revolution in Russia rather then to wait in hope for the international revolution (Figes,