The first diplomatic treaty whose signing process was filmed was the one signed in the early hours of February 9, 1918, in Brest-Litovsk, Belarus. The negotiations that preceded it were somewhat surreal. At one end of the large house that once served as a club for Russian officers sat the representatives of Germany and its allies: Prince Leopold of Bavaria, son-in-law of the Emperor of Austria, wearing a field marshal's uniform, aristocrats from Central Europe dressed formally and with a protective demeanor, a Turkish pasha, and a Bulgarian colonel.

Opposite them sat the representatives of a new state that would soon be named the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic: some Jewish intellectuals and various others, among them a certain Mrs. Bitchenko, who had recently been released from a Siberian prison where she was held for the murder of a general director. There was also a "representative of the peasants," naturally drunk, who had been gathered at the last moment as a necessary addition from the streets of the Russian capital, as well as some Russians from the old regime, an admiral, and several staff officers, whom they had "brought along" because they knew the technical details required to end a war and withdraw troops from the front line.