![]() In mid-February, the talks broke down when an angry Trotsky deemed the Central Powers’ terms too harsh and their demands for territory unacceptable. Leading their respective delegations were foreign ministers Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) of Russia, Richard von Kuhlmann of Germany and Count Ottokar Czernin of Austria. Negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk on December 22. Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: March 3, 1918Īn armistice was reached in early December 1917 and a formal cease-fire was declared December 15, but determining the terms of peace between Russia and the Central Powers proved to be far more complicated. One of Lenin’s first actions as leader was to call a halt to Russian participation in the war. In early November, aided by the Russian military, they were successful. After Lenin’s return from exile (aided by the Germans) in mid-April, he and his fellow Bolsheviks worked quickly to seize power from the provisional government, led by Alexander Kerensky, Russia’s minister of war. The February Revolution broke out in early March 1917 (or February, according to the Julian calendar, which the Russians used at the time) Nicholas abdicated later that month. Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by a Spanish-born Soviet agent. This discontent strengthened the cause of the Bolsheviks, a radical socialist group led by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) that was working to harness opposition to the czar and turn it into a sweeping revolution that would begin in Russia and later, he hoped, spread to the rest of the world.ĭid you know? Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in the late 1920s after losing a power struggle with Joseph Stalin. Defeat on the battlefield fed the growing discontent among the bulk of Russia’s population, especially the poverty-stricken workers and peasants, and its hostility toward the imperial regime, led by the ineffectual Czar Nicholas II (1868-1918). Russia’s involvement in World War I alongside its allies, France and Britain, had resulted in a number of heavy losses against Germany, offset only partially by consistent victories against Austria-Hungary.
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