Page - 850 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

850 Peace Feelers in the Shadow of Brest-Litovsk sion was that this would mean that there would be no parliamentary, and still less a ‘So- cialist’ peace. To a far greater extent, armistice and subsequent peace negotiations would need to be conducted in the areas of contact at the fronts.2019 However, then the formal Russian application for the initiation of armistice negotiations was delayed, since the Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces, General Nikolai N. Duchonin, refused to convey such an application. Following his refusal, he was dismissed, and immediately afterwards, was murdered. He was replaced by one of his murderers, En- sign Nikolai Krylenko, to whom the command of the Russian troops was transferred. Krylenko then sent peace envoys on the march in order to agree the time and place for armistice negotiations. On 29 November, it finally became clear that armistice negoti- ations would take place. It was agreed that the Russian commission would arrive on 2 December at midday on the Vilnius–Daugavpils railway line, and that the negotiations should be conducted in Brest-Litovsk. The Soviets again invited the western powers to participate, but they failed to respond to the corresponding request from the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Leon Trotsky, just as they did to a note from Lenin. Despite the four weeks that had passed between the proclamation of the Second All-Russian Congress and the beginning of the formal armistice negotiations, Berlin and Vienna had been unable to overcome their fundamental differences in opinion regarding the appropriate policy to be pursued, since Czernin wished to reach a general peace through negotiations with Russia, and again took the forfeit of annexation as a basis for general peace negotiations with the Entente powers. However, the German Empire wanted something entirely different here, again asserting its war aims and be- having more cautiously only in relation to Russia  – and even that only subject to a series of conditions  – while refusing all concessions when it came to the western powers. The governments in Berlin and Vienna finally decided that first of all, an armistice agreement should be concluded. This was a matter for the military. For this reason, all issues requiring regulation through peace treaties were to be excluded from the nego- tiations, and the relevant discussions held at a later date by diplomats and politicians. On 3 December, talks began regarding a formal armistice. By 13 December, they had been completed. The armistice was to last from 17 December to 14 January 1918, with an automatic extension with a seven-day notice period. According to this agreement, the Central Powers were not permitted to relocate troops to other fronts, except for those relocation operations that had already been underway at the time the armistice was concluded. This applied to around a third of the German Eastern Army, which had already begun transportation westwards as a precautionary measure.2020 The Brest negotiations did not apply to the Russian-Romanian front. The Roma- nians therefore initially continued with hostilities, although they were certainly aware of the hopelessness of their situation. To the south of the Dniester River, Romanian troops took up positions that had been left by the Russians. On 2 December, the com-