The Eleven Days' War was a railway-based offensive that dismantled the Russian Empire.
In 1918, the Central Powers launched Operation Faustschlag, a lightning offensive against a collapsing Russia. With the Russian Army demobilized and in chaos, German forces simply loaded troops onto trains and seized territory with ease, forcing the Bolsheviks to sign a treaty that surrendered vast swathes of the former empire.
Operation Faustschlag, or the Eleven Days' War, began on 18 February 1918, following the breakdown of peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The Central Powers deployed 53 divisions in a three-pronged assault, targeting the Baltic, Belarus, and Ukraine. Because the Russian Army had been effectively dismantled by Bolshevik policies of democratization and demobilization, the German advance faced minimal organized resistance. General Max Hoffmann famously described the campaign as a comical affair, where small groups of infantry would seize railway stations and capture prisoners with little more than a machine gun and a train.
The speed of the advance was staggering. Within a week, German forces had pushed over 150 miles, forcing the Soviet government to relocate its capital from Petrograd to Moscow on 12 March 1918. By 3 March, the Bolsheviks were compelled to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, formally ceding control over Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. While the initial offensive ended there, Central Powers forces continued to push hundreds of miles further into the south over the following months to secure food supplies and protect the Ukrainian People's Republic from Bolshevik encroachment.
The treaty was deeply divisive within the Bolshevik leadership. Lenin faced intense opposition from colleagues like Trotsky, who initially advocated for a 'neither war nor peace' policy. Ultimately, Lenin threatened to resign to force the acceptance of the harsh German terms, securing a narrow victory in his ruling council. Although the Central Powers intended to transform these captured territories into satellite states, their own defeat a year later rendered these plans moot, leading to a complex period of shifting borders and renewed conflict as the Soviets attempted to reclaim lost ground.
Source: Operation Faustschlag
