Throughout the first ten days of February, 1918, the world waited impatiently and anxiously for a final conclusion to the peace conference between the representatives of Russia and the Central Powers, at Brest-Litovsk. Trotzky was still the central figure. Meanwhile the Bolsheviki leaders were straining every effort to spread their propaganda throughout the civilian populations of the Central Powers, as well as among the soldiers on the eastern front. Rumors of strikes in Germany inclined even those who had previously been skeptical to believe that the Bolsheviki method might yet gain a great victory for the cause of the democratic nations. Ukrainia, as already noted, had declared itself an independent nation, with a republican form of government, professedly socialistic in tendency, with Vinitchenko as President. As a matter of fact, however, the Rada, or Ukrainian legislative assembly, was almost completely in the hands of the landowners who, naturally, were bitterly opposed to Bolshevikism and its program of land nationalization. Against them had risen the Bolsheviki elements of Ukrainia, supported by the Petrograd Bolsheviki. The conflict between the two factions had created a state of civil war. The landowners' Rada had sent delegates to the peace conference, and at first the Petrograd delegation, under the chairmanship of Trotzky, had raised no objection against the Teutons recognizing them as the proper representatives of Ukrainia. But during the last days of January, 1918, came reports of the military success of the Ukrainian Bolsheviki, even that they had captured Odessa and Kiev, and then Trotzky contended that the Ukrainians at Brest-Litovsk no longer truly represented their constituency. The Germans, however, had forestalled him by quickly recognizing Ukrainian independence under the Rada. The German policy was obvious. By recognizing the conservative Rada, they created a split among the Russian delegates as a whole. Furthermore, they realized that the Ukrainian landowners feared the Bolsheviki domestic program far more than they feared German domination, and in whatever treaty they entered into would offer large concessions in return for German military aid against Bolsheviki domination. Thus the Central Powers suddenly found an ally in the Ukrainian Republic. It also gave them a moral pretext for their attitude toward the provinces under dispute: Courland and Lithuania, and parts of Livonia and Esthonia and what had formerly been Russian Poland, whose populations, the Germans contended, had already declared themselves for German suzerainty. The session of the Brest-Litovsk peace conference which was held on February 9, 1918, was the one at which both sides concluded their arguments and worked up to the climax of the following day. That same day the Teutonic delegates had signed a treaty of peace with the Ukrainian delegates.