When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in the Revolution of 1917, the country was still engaged in the First World War, allied with England, France and the United States against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary with their Ottoman allies. The Russian army was disintegrating and the Germans had pushed far into the country and now occupied Russian Poland and Lithuania. An urgent priority for the new regime was to get out of the war. A truce was hastily agreed, to be followed by a peace conference, and Russian participation in the war in effect came to an end. Lenin was far more interested in putting down internal opposition than in fighting Germans. He had, after all, been infiltrated back into Russia by the German government in the hope of hampering the Russian war effort and the tactic would now pay off.
Held in the town of Brest-Litovsk in Poland (now in Belarus), where the German army had its headquarters, the conference opened in December. Trotsky, the foreign minister, led the Russian delegation. The German and Austrian delegations were headed by their foreign secretaries, Richard von Kühlmann and Ottakar Czernin, but an influential figure for the Germans was General Max Hoffman, Chief of Staff of the German armies on the eastern front. Talat Pasha represented the Ottoman Empire.
