As the German radical Karl Liebknecht wrote from prison, from the point of view of the revolution the result of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was ‘not nil, even if it’ resulted in a ‘peace of forced capitulation’. Thanks to Trotsky ‘Brest-Litovsk has become a revolutionary tribunal whose decrees are heard far and wide . . . it has exposed German avidity, its cunning lies and hypocrisy’. But it had exposed not only General Hoffmann and Ludendorff. Even more important for Trotsky, as for Liebknecht, was ‘the annihilating verdict’ that the peace would pass on the reformist illusions of Germany’s
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