From October to Brest-Litovsk

Leon Trotsky wrote this account in 1919, still bleeding from the political wounds it describes. As the Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs who negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he offers the definitive insider's defense of the most controversial decision of the early Soviet period: signing a punitive peace with Imperial Germany that ceded vast territories and humiliated revolutionary Russia. The book traces the arc from the October Revolution through the desperate winter of 1917-18, when the new workers' state faced annihilation from German armies while internal enemies sabotaged from within. Trotsky illuminates the impossible calculus facing the Bolsheviks: continue a war that would destroy the revolution, or accept terms that betrayed revolutionary principles but bought survival. This is not neutral history but passionate advocacy, and it remains indispensable for understanding how revolutionaries govern when ideology collides with military reality.