"The Future Depends on Brest-Litovsk": War, Peace, and Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe, 1917-1918

This dissertation re-examines the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference between the Central Powers, Bolshevik Russia, and Ukraine towards the end of the Great War and its implications in three distinct regions of Europe - the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. It argues that the peace negotiations were more important and less straightforward than previously believed, and that they had a profound impact on the course of revolution in Central Europe and on the development of national statehood in different parts of Eastern Europe. This impact outlasted the immediate collapse of the territorial and political-economic framework the two peace treaties established in the wake of the defeat of the Central Powers in the autumn of 1918. In light of this importance, the dissertation aims to reintegrate the "forgotten peace" into the separate but interrelated historiographies of the Great War in the east, the peacemaking process at the end of the war, and twentieth-century Eastern European history through an emphasis on the transformative processes of imperial competition and collapse, nation-state creation and consolidation, and revolution. The dissertation asks how the negotiated formal end of inter-state hostilities affected domestic politics and how Brest-Litovsk became part of a transmutation of the Great War into national and social revolution and the violent civil war conflicts that pulsed through the vast region affected by the treaty in the years that followed.