Page - 703 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Peace without Annexations and Contributions 703 peace via a preliminary separate peace with Russia, and if the German Empire did not want to participate, then Austria-Hungary would seek a separate peace.1606 Bethmann Hollweg had namely rejected Czernin’s proposal that the Central Powers accept the Russian peace formula. This appeared to him to be entirely inappropriate, since if there was one standpoint that had begun to assert itself, above all within the German im- perial government and the Supreme Army Command, then it was that the revolution in Russia was to be used for prying out an opponent without this changing anything about Germany’s policy of peace with victory. On the part of the German Empire, therefore, the revolutionisation of Russia was systematically pursued. Several people with military and political authority in Aus- tria-Hungary argued the case for emphatically promoting the internal disintegration process in Russia from outside. Major General Alfred Krauß, for example, regarded it as a mistake and as a characteristic lack of understanding on the part of his superior command that he was initially not supposed to commence with propaganda in the area of his corps. His opinion was shared by many Imperial and Royal commanders. Emperor Karl was once more rather isolated with his stance. ‘He feared’, Glaise-Hor- stenau then wrote, ‘that the work of disintegration that we looked for in the case of the Russians could turn into a boomerang that rebounds on us’.1607 Contrary to some intentions, Austria,therefore,did nothing that would have been comparable to the Ger- man psychological warfare, and was ultimately not even sufficiently well informed to be able to influence German measures in any way worth mentioning. Since the Army High Command had been relocated away from Cieszyn (Teschen) and the German Supreme Army Leadership had moved for its part from Pszczyna (Pleß) to Bad Kreuznach, information had become scarce. The south-west of Russia had in any case long since ceased to be an Austro-Hungarian theatre of war. The Aus- tro-Hungarian troops deployed there were dependent primarily on the German East- ern Army and on the German Supreme Army Command. Both advocated that sepa- rate ceasefire negotiations be conducted directly at the front, section for section. In this way, the line to be taken was fixed for the time being. The consequences of the bourgeois revolution in Russia naturally did not set in over- night, but the slogans gradually took hold, were varied and adapted, and also placed in relation to something that took place parallel to this process, namely the entry of the USA into the war. And with that we are once more back with our observation of the global change in 1917. The war had now entered a phase in which decisions were in the offing that lay beyond the traditional politics of the European cabinets. But the reaction to this was actually the same everywhere : cluelessness. The toppling of a monarch and the revo- lutionisation of an empire that was admittedly ripe for revolution but only possessed a relatively small revolutionary potential, had to result in an enormous redistribution