By what right could the Bolsheviks, who were violently consolidating their coup in Petrograd, claim the territories conquered by the Tsar? By Lenin’s own estimates more than half the populations of eastern Europe were oppressed nationalities.5 As draconian as the final treaty was from a Russian point of view, only a very small portion of the territory removed from Russia was directly annexed by Germany. Instead, Brest gave birth to the precursors to the Baltic states in their modern form, an independent Ukraine and a Transcaucasian Republic.
