other republics throughout the Soviet Union. He pursued a moderate program for decentralizing the Soviet system, attempting to loosen Moscow’s control of Lithuania step by step. In this he had to strike a balance between party leaders in Moscow who demanded tighter controls in Lithuania and rival Lithuanians who demanded a sharp
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break with Moscow. He experienced sharp criticism from both sides for being too lenient toward the other, yet he remained a popular figure within Lithuania.
Brazauskas presided over the dismantling of the Soviet system in Lithuania. In 1988 and 1989, as First Secretary of the LCP, he held the highest reins of political power in the republic, although he held no post in the republic’s government. In December 1989, the Lithuanian parliament ended the Com munist Party’s supraconstitutional authority in the republic. Then the LCP separated itself from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In January 1990 Brazauskas took the post of president of the Lithuanian Supreme Council, Lithuania’s parlia ment. After new elections in February and March 1990 returned a noncommunist majority, Vytautas Landsbergis became the president of the parlia ment, and Brazauskas lost the reins of power, although he still led the LCP and became deputy prime minister. The Lithuanian government had replaced the party as the seat of power in the re public. During the Soviet blockade of Lithuania in 1990, Brazauskas headed a special commission that planned the most efficient use of Lithuania’s lim ited energy resources. In January 1991 he resigned as deputy prime minister and remained in the op position until the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (LDLP), the successor to the LCP in indepen dent Lithuania, won the parliamentary elections in the fall of 1992. After serving briefly as president of the parliament, in February 1993, he was elected president of the Republic. As president he could have no party affiliation, and he accordingly withdrew from the LDLP. At the conclusion of his five-year presidential term in 1998, he retired from politics, but in 2000, still a popular figure, he returned, or ganizing a coalition of leftist parties that won a plurality of seats in parliamentary elections. In 2001 he assumed the post of Lithuanian prime minister. See also: LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Senn, Alfred Erich. (1995). Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithuania. New York: St. Martin’s. Vardys, V. Stanley, and Sedaitis, Judith B. (1997). Lithuania: The Rebel Nation. Boulder, CO: Westview.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Soviet Russian and Imperial Russia, signed in March of 1918, ended Russia’s involvement in World War I.
In the brief eight months of its existence, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was labeled an obscene, shameful, and dictated peace by various members of the Soviet government that signed it. Since then, it has been condemned by Western and Soviet historians alike. Under threat of a renewed German military advance, Russia agreed to give up 780,000 square kilometers of territory, fifty-six million people, one-third of its railway network, 73 percent of its iron ore production, and 89 percent of its coal supply. What remained of the former Russian empire now approximated the boundaries of sixteenth-century Muscovy.
An onerous separate peace with an imperialist power was far from what the Soviet regime had hoped to achieve by promulgating Vladimir Lenin’s Decree on Peace within hours of the October Revolution. This decree, which appealed to all the peoples and governments at war to lay down their arms in an immediate general peace without annexations or indemnities, was to the Bolsheviks both a political and a practical necessity. Not only had Bolshevik promises of peace to war-weary workers, peasants, and soldiers enabled the party to come to power-but the Russian army was on the verge of collapse after years of defeat by Germany. The Allies’ refusal to acknowledge this appeal for a general peace forced the Bolsheviks and their partners in the new Soviet government, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), to begin negotiations with the Central Powers.
The German-Soviet armistice signed at German divisional headquarters in Brest-Litovsk in mid-December was only a short-term triumph for the Bolshevik-Left SR government. When negotiations for a formal treaty commenced at the end of the month, the German representatives shocked the inexperienced Russians by demanding the cession of areas already occupied by the German army: Poland, Lithuania, and western Latvia. Debates raged within the Bolshevik Party and the government over a suitable response. Many Left SRs and a minority of Bolsheviks (the Left Communists) argued that Russia should reject these terms and fight a revolutionary war against German imperialism. Leon Trotsky proposed a solution of “neither war nor peace,” whereas Lenin insisted that the government accept the German terms to gain a “breathing space” for
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exhausted Russia. Trotsky’s formula prevailed in Petrograd, but after Trotsky announced it at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans resumed the war and advanced toward Petrograd. With Lenin threatening to resign, the Soviet government reluctantly bowed to Germany’s demands, which now became even more punitive, adding the cession of Ukraine, Finland, and all of the Baltic provinces. Soviet representatives signed the treaty while demonstratively refusing to read it; the fourth Soviet Congress of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies ratified it, signifying the immense popular opposition to continuing the war. The Left SRs, however, withdrew from the government in protest.
The Brest-Litovsk peace exacerbated the civil war that had begun when the Bolshevik Party came to power in Petrograd in October 1917. The SRs, the dominant party in the Constituent Assembly dissolved by the Soviet government in December 1917, declared an armed struggle against Germany and the Bolsheviks in May 1918. In July 1918 the Left SRs attempted to break the treaty and reignite the war with Germany by assassinating the German ambassador. Various Russian liberal, conservative, and militarist groups received Allied support for their ongoing war against the Bolshevik regime. Thus the effects of the Brest-Litovsk peace continued long past its abrogation by the Soviet government when Germany surrendered to the Allies in November 1918. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH; WORLD WAR I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Debo, Richard K. (1979). Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917-18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mawdsley, Evan. (1996). The Russian Civil War. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Swain, Geoffrey. (1996) The Origins of the Russian Civil War. London: Longman.
BREZHNEV CONSTITUTION See CONSTITUTION OF 1977.
Although in its immediate sense a riposte to the international condemnation of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the “Brezhnev Doctrine” was the culmination of the long evolution of a conception of sovereignty in Soviet ideology. At its core was the restatement of a long-standing insistence on the right of the USSR to intervene in a satellite’s internal political developments should there be any reason to fear for the future of communist rule in that state.
Linked to the name of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Leonid Brezhnev, because of its encapsulation in a speech he read in Warsaw on November 13, 1968, the doctrine had already been expounded by ideologue Sergei Kovalev in Pravda on September 26, 1968, and, before the invasion, by Soviet commentators critical of the Czechoslovak reforms. It resembled in most respects the defense of the invasion of Hungary in 1956, and included aspects of earlier justifications of hegemony dating to the immediate postwar period and the 1930s.
Sovereignty continued to be interpreted in two regards: first, as the right to demand that the non-communist world, including organizations such as the United Nations, respect Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and second, as permitting the USSR’s satellites to determine domestic policy only within the narrow bounds of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. Any breach of those parameters would justify military intervention by members of the Warsaw Pact and the removal even of leaders who had come to power in the ways that the Soviet political model would consider legitimate.
The elements of the Brezhnev Doctrine reflecting the exigencies of the late 1960s were the intensified
