Page "Treaty of Brest-Litovsk" Paragraph 41

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk marked a significant contraction of the territory which the Bolsheviks controlled or could lay claim to as effective successors of the Russian Empire.

While the independence of Finland and Poland was already accepted by them in principle, the loss of Ukraine and the Baltics created, from the Bolshevik perspective, dangerous bases of anti-Bolshevik military activity in the subsequent Russian Civil War ( 1917 – 1922 ).

Indeed, many Russian nationalists and some revolutionaries were furious at the Bolsheviks ' acceptance of the treaty and joined forces to fight them.

Non-Russians who inhabited the lands lost by Bolshevik Russia in the treaty saw the changes as an opportunity to set up independent states not under Bolshevik rule.

Immediately after the signing of the treaty, Lenin moved the Soviet Russian government from Petrograd to Moscow.