Even in the short term, the treaty was a greater misfortune for Germany than for Russia. The Bolsheviks gave away little—what they surrendered was beyond their power to hold. The Germans got a liability of enormous dimensions. At a time when they needed every available man and gun and locomotive in the west, they took on a new, ramshackle, unmanageable, and doomed eastern empire, the occupation of which would require one and a half million troops.
