On 2 December 1917 in a gloomy barracks complex in western Russia, representatives of the Bolshevik regime and the Central Powers – the Germans, Austrians, Turks and Bulgarians – sat down to negotiate a peace. Four months later they concluded the notorious Brest-Litovsk Treaty that stripped Russia of territories inhabited by 55 million people, a third of the empire’s pre-war population, a third of its agricultural land, more than half its industrial undertakings and mines that had produced almost 90 per cent of its coal.
