The Great War - WW1
The Collapse of Russia
By early 1917 Russia's disintegrating war machine, and the huge losses it had incurred supporting it's allies, had brought it to the brink of collapse. To war-weariness was added starvation in Russian Cities.
In March food riots in Petrograd (St Petersburg) coalesced into a widespread uprising which forced the Tsar to abdicate. In July a charismatic socialist, Alexander Kerensky, became head of a Provisional government committed to continuing the war. However, effective power in Russia's cities lay with the Councils of Worker's and Soldiers Deputies - the Soviet's.
The capture of Riga by the Germans on the 1st of September brought the Russian giant to its knees. Thousands of troops threw down their arms and walked home. They had 'voted with their feet', as it was put by the Bolshevik leader Lenin, who in April had returned to Russia with German connivance, in a sealed train.
Unlike the embattled Kerensky, Lenin had no interest in defeating Germany or making the world safe for democracy. When the vacillating Kerensky finally moved against the Bolsheviks at the beginning of November, their Red Guards seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd and arrested the Provisional Government. Now in power, the Bolsheviks opened peace talks with Germany in December in the bleak Polish fortress town of Brest Litovsk. German forces were within 100 miles of Petrograd when, on the 3rd of March, the Russian delegates signed a peace treaty, giving up Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, the Baltic provinces and Transcaucasia. Germany then moved 40 divisions to reinforce the Western Front.