Page - 874 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

874 The Inner Front By 19 January, around 600,000 workers had downed tools in Austria alone. Most shops closed, whilst the newspapers  – with the exception of the Arbeiter-Zeitung  – had to suspend their publication. In Budapest, tram lines were torn out during the night of 17/18 January. The German Consulate General there reported : ‘[The] movement be- gins to exhibit revolutionary traits.’2076 The strikers protested loudly against the slow progress of the Brest negotiations, whilst the abrasiveness and the Germans’ obsession with conquest were castigated. The Arbeiter-Zeitung wrote on 16 January that Russia was prepared to vacate Poland, Lithuania and Courland if the respective local popula- tions wanted this. It added that the people had borne the sacrifices of the war so far in the belief that they had been fighting a defensive war. The continuation of the war for annexationist purposes, however, contradicted the will of the peoples of Austria.2077 A further radicalisation threatened and one had to ask whether the Russian Revolution might not perhaps expand to become an Austrian one. How was it to be countered, though ? As in most comparable situations, the call rang out for the most significant instru- ment of power in any state, the military. A military government was prepared. General Prince Alois Schönburg-Hartenstein was to become its head. The Emperor was not yet completely decided and his undertaking also met with resistance from the Chief of the General Staff, Arz, and the Joint War Minister, Stöger-Steiner. Nonetheless, preparations were pressed ahead. Schönburg and another general who was regarded as particularly strong, Baron Karl von Bardolff, until 1914 Chief of the Military Chan- cellery of Franz Ferdinand, were brought into positions that were supposed to enable them at any time to bring about a change of government. Schönburg became Inspec- tor General of Mobile Troops on the Home Front. These included meanwhile not only the replacement formations, above all the march battalions, but also gradually the formations of the field army sent to strengthen the hinterland, temporarily over fifty battalions.2078 Bardolff, who was envisaged as Interior Minister, became Schönburg’s deputy. Further generals were appointed commanders of mobile troops on the home front. No consideration was given to the possibility, however, that these troops might themselves mutiny. Instead, they were to be deployed in the event of a continuation of the strike movement and a general revolutionisation of the Dual Monarchy. In this case, Schönburg-Hartenstein would have acquired a position comparable to that of Kerensky. The settlement of the January strikes and Emperor Karl’s abhorrence of any kind of military dictatorship, however, derailed the project. The Inspectorate General was dissolved again.2079 On 19 January, Seidler received Viktor Adler, Karl Seitz, Karl Renner, Franz Domes and Ferdinand Hanusch as representatives of the Austrian Social Democrats. They presented him with the aforementioned four points, the fulfilment of which they made as a condition for the ending of the strike : renunciation of territorial demands at the