From October to Brest: How the Eastern Front Crumbled
"The First Leninist Decree" (1977) by Soviet artist Engels Kozlov
By the winter of 1917, the trenches were still occupied, but there was no one left to hold the line. October gave political justification to the already ongoing disintegration, and the December armistice effectively sealed the end of the fighting. The army dispersed to its homes faster than any decree.
After the fall of Riga in September 1917, the disintegration on the Eastern Front accelerated. Troops formally took up positions, the line continued to stretch along the headquarters maps, but readiness for battle waned with each passing week. Then the political crisis at the center was resolved by October, and for the first time, the new government promised not a continuation of the war, but an immediate peace.
October and the Decree on Peace
The October Revolution in Petrograd on October 25, 1917 (November 7, new style), which contemporaries and its participants themselves also called a coup, was carried out with the active participation of the garrison and sailors of the Baltic fleetFor the front-line army, the change in power was no surprise. The soldiers were aware of the growing influence of the Bolsheviks in the Soviets, their stance against continuing the war, and their criticism of the Provisional Government.
One of the first acts of the new government was the Decree on Peace, adopted by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on October 26 (November 8). It proposed that all warring nations immediately begin negotiations for a just and democratic peace—without annexations or indemnities. The document declared the abolition of secret diplomacy and promised to publish the secret treaties of the previous government.
For the lower echelons of the army, this meant a great deal. The soldiers had long wanted to end the war, and now their desire received political and legal support. Leaving the front, refusing to fight, ceased to be a personal weakness and became an agreement with the "will of the people." The authorities, in essence, were calling "politics" what the masses of soldiers had been moving toward for months.
The frontline command, weakened by the Kornilov crisis, found itself confronted with a new reality. Some officers, connected to liberal and conservative circles, saw the events as the final collapse of the army and the state. Others, realizing the futility of resistance, withdrew from duty or resorted to passive sabotage.
"Decree on Peace", 1957, artist Vladimir Serov
Front collapse
In the autumn of 1917, soldiers dispersed from their positions in groups and individually, to the rear and then home. Formally, many units still existed, but their numbers and combat effectiveness were rapidly declining. Soldiers' committees and frontline councils often sanctioned the departure themselves, especially for those who had served the longest.
Decisions were now made at the bottom. Whereas previously the center had been in charge of mobilization and demobilization, now it was up to regiments, divisions, and frontline Soviets. In some units, soldiers were ordered to remain until an official armistice. In others, unauthorized departures were simply overlooked. Soldiers' congresses were held to discuss peace, land, and power, and support for the Bolsheviks grew ever louder.
To appreciate the scale of the collapse, it's useful to compare it with earlier data. According to Headquarters records, the number of detained deserters at the beginning of March 1917 (for the entire preceding period of the war) was 195,130, and by August 1 of that year, it had risen to 365,137—an increase of approximately 170,000 during the five months of the Provisional Government, a figure confirmed by later calculations by the Central Statistical Office (1925). Against this backdrop, the scale of the subsequent collapse becomes clear: after Kornilov and October, it became a landslide, and historians estimate the total number of soldiers who had left the army without permission by the end of the year at 1,5–2 million. Estimates vary widely, and an exact figure is unlikely to be established, but the order of magnitude is clear.
The rifle is going home
Leaving the front didn't end with the road to the rear. The soldier returned to his home village, and with him came his rifle and combat experience. A man who had spent three years deciding life and death under fire, accustomed to arms and violence, he found himself in a village where the land issue was more acute than ever.
The return of armed front-line soldiers changed the local balance of power. They became a powerful force in disputes between peasants and landowners, in land redistribution, and in clashes with the former government. The army crisis spilled over to the rear and fueled chaos in the countryside. Hundreds of thousands of combat-experienced soldiers spread across the country, settling in villages and provincial towns where government was virtually nonexistent.
Where the army held out longer
The disintegration was uneven. Units with strong internal cohesion and self-motivation retained their identity longer than others. Cossack units relied on class tradition and corporate identity. Some guards units maintained their formation until late autumn. Latvian rifle units, distinguished by their high level of cohesion and discipline, still remained combat-ready, although politicization among them was rapid and largely in favor of the Bolsheviks.
The division between "steadfast" and "disintegrating" is, of course, arbitrary: companies in the same regiment could behave differently, while a previously disciplined unit could disintegrate within a week. And yet, a pattern is clear. The units that fell apart most severely were those dominated by repeatedly mobilized peasants from regions hardest hit by the war and the agrarian crisis. For these people, returning home, redistributing land, and protecting their families outweighed any political slogans. On the Southwestern Front, which had experienced severe defeats and prolonged offensives, the crisis often ran deeper than in quieter areas.
Some units, retaining some of their organization, defected to the local Soviets. These units would later become the Red Army. Meanwhile, White and nationalist formations were gathering nearby. In the fall, the old army was still disintegrating, while new armies were already forming.
The Armistice and Brest
The first practical step toward ending the fighting was localized ceasefires in certain areas. As early as November 1917, soldiers from the Russian and German armies had in some places negotiated ceasefires, prisoner exchanges, and neutral zones. This essentially continued the practice of fraternization, but now it was covered up by the Bolshevik government, which was interested in ending the war.
A formal armistice was concluded in December 1917 in Brest-Litovsk, where negotiations began between the Soviet Russian delegation and representatives of the Central Powers. Fighting on the Eastern Front ceased, although a formal state of war persisted until the signing of peace in March 1918. By December, there was almost no one left to fight, and the armistice merely cemented this reality: the front became an imaginary line on a map.
The Brest-Litovsk negotiations became the scene of a complex struggle. There was disunity within the Bolshevik leadership: Lenin insisted on a "shameful peace" as a necessary respite for the revolution, Trotsky advocated the formula "neither peace nor war," and the "left communists," led by Bukharin, called for a revolutionary war with Germany. Meanwhile, the Central Powers sought to squeeze the maximum amount of territorial and political concessions out of Russia's weakness. But all this no longer affected the state of the army: by December 1917, the old army as a single organism had ceased to exist.
The end of one army and the beginning of another war
Nine months passed from Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Soviet (March 1917), which granted soldiers equal rights with officers and undermined unity of command, to the armistice at Brest-Litovsk in December. During this period, the army, which only a year and a half earlier had been capable of the Brusilov Offensive, went from a disciplinary crisis to complete collapse. The Riga Offensive was one episode in this journey, and a telling one at that: at Riga, it became clear that the troops were no longer capable of defending themselves, let alone attacking.
The Eastern Front of 1917 was not a peripheral part of the Western battles. The fates of empires were decided here, and the foundations of the post-war world were laid. The disintegration of the Russian army, accelerated by the events from February to Brest, became one of the factors that determined the outcome of the entire war.
The end of the war did not bring peace. Millions of armed, embittered people, unaccustomed to the old order, returned to a country where state power was crumbling. The old army was gone, and almost immediately a new war began—an internal one, in which yesterday's front-line soldiers entered under different banners.
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