Tsar's service since he was 15 years old. The Whites were also offered help by a German Expeditionary Corps led by German General Goltz. Though Mannerheim never accepted the offer, the German corps landed in Finland in April 1918. Formation of the Red Army After the disintegration of the Russian imperial army and navy in 1917, the Council of People's Commissars headed by Leon Trotsky set about creating a new army. By a decree on 28 January 1918, the council created the Workers' and Peoples' Red Army; it began recruitment on a voluntary basis, but on 22 April, the Soviet government made serving in the army compulsory for anyone who did not employ hired labor. Several officers who had served in the Russian Imperial Army defected to the Red Army in support of the Bolshevik cause. Many of them were of an aristocratic background but became disillusioned with imperialism and monarchism, although the Red Army still mostly consisted of ordinary workers and peasants. Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) With the German Army just from the Russian capital Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on 3 March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed and the Eastern Front ceased to be a war zone. While the treaty was practically obsolete before the end of the year, it did provide some relief to the Bolsheviks, who were embroiled in a civil war, and affirmed the independence of Ukraine. However, Estonia and Latvia were intended to become a United Baltic Duchy to be ruled by German princes and German nobility as fiefdoms under the German Kaiser. A rump Polish state was also foreseen on the formerly Russian territories. Finland's sovereignty had already been declared in December 1917, and accepted by most nations, including France and Russia, but not by the United Kingdom and the United States. In October it also turned into a German puppet state. Armistice With the end of major combat on the Eastern Front, the Germans were able to transfer substantial forces to the west in order to mount an offensive in France in the spring of 1918. This offensive on the Western Front failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough, and the arrival of more and more American units in Europe was sufficient to offset the German advantage. Even after the Russian collapse, about a million German soldiers remained tied up in the east until the end of the war, attempting to run