Surprisingly, for a treaty that is generally remembered as an act of imperial rapacity of Hitlerite proportions, the negotiations were prolonged and substantive, and the language they were couched in was the language of self-determination.3 From the Bolsheviks this was to be expected. Lenin and Trotsky, the commissar for foreign affairs, were after all famous exponents of the new principles of international relations. But in fact at Brest it was the Germans as much as the Soviets who sought to craft a modern peace in the East, based on the new standards of legitimacy, or at least it was the
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