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On March 3, 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litvsk was signed between the Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia. The First World War had ended on the Eastern Front. We analyze below just in its centenary the consequences of this treaty for Austria-Hungary.
INTRODUCTION.
The war effort of the Central Powers was revived when, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a coup in Russia and a few weeks later called for an armistice.
For German political and military leaders, it was a triumph. The Reich had gone to war largely out of fear of Russian rearmament and aggressiveness. The Septemberprogramm whose war objectives date back to 1914, had proposed to give a protected autonomy to Poland and expressed the wish that the Russian giant should be removed as much as possible from the borders of the Reich. The turmoil inside Russia and the dissolution of his army after his last failed offensive in Galicia in the summer of 1917 made it possible to achieve this almost utopian goal.
For Austria-Hungary, the Bolsheviks’ request for peace was a lifeline. Emperor Karl and his foreign minister, Ottokar von Czernin, hoped that the cessation of hostilities in the east might lead to general peace. At the very least, they thought that the resumption of trade could alleviate the Dual Monarchy’s catastrophic food shortages and allow their regime to survive. However, the peace they brokered effectively hastened the demise of their Empire.
The Russians were not the only ones interested in securing peace. Germany had staked everything on a single card with the submarine campaign to bring Britain to its knees, and by the end of 1917 it was clear that it had failed. Nor would it be possible for the submarine weapon to delay the arrival of hundreds of thousands of new American troops in 1918. So their situation was complex.
Germany had to achieve victory before the advent of the United States armies. A forceful offensive would have to be launched in the west in the first months of the year, as Ludendorff later recalled: The idea of attacking France in 1918 had been in his mind since November, and many commanders in the west thought similarly. Therefore, I eagerly awaited the day when the Russians asked us for a ceasefire..
Another bad winter could unleash in Germany and Austria-Hungary the kind of unrest that had brought down the Tsar. There were riots, strikes and food shortages continued. Peace with Russia could be a lifeline by providing access to Ukraine’s agricultural wealth, as well as freeing up enough troops to allow for an offensive in the west. Much was at stake in Brest-Litovsk.
The Brest-Litovsk treaty with Ukraine and Russia created political animosity and social disaster in Galicia. It paved the way for revolutionary propaganda, which ended up undermining the battered morale of the Habsburg army and unleashed the specter of nationalism within Austria-Hungary.
When the Germans occupied Brest-Litovsk in 1915, the Russians, continuing their traditional scorched earth policy, set fire to much of Brest-Litovsk. Large parts of the city remained in ruins except for the German headquarters in the old citadel. Although Prince Leopold commanded the Ober Ost, the Central Powers negotiating team was led by Hoffmann, as chief of staff, accompanied by Oberstleutnant Hermann Pokorny from the kuk, Adjutant General Tsekki Pasha from Turkey, and Colonel Peter Gantchev from the state. bulgarian major.
The start of talks between began on December 3 with Joffe as the head of the communist delegation and Hoffmann as the representative of the Central Powers, discussing whether the conference was meant to address the entire war or just the Eastern Front. It was agreed that in the absence of Entente representatives, any agreement would apply only to the war in the east. The Bolsheviks hoped to extract an agreement that would extend to encompass all belligerent nations.
Joffe shrewdly laid out Russia’s position. There should be an armistice for six months, with the provision that either side would have to give three days’ notice before a resumption of hostilities; the Germans must evacuate the Estonian archipelago which they had seized immediately before the October Revolution; and they should commit not to move troops from the eastern front.
Hoffmann’s response was immediate. He answered in the affirmative by not moving troops from the Eastern Front, but he argued, but there was no logistical possibility of evacuating the territory they had recently occupied. Regarding the armistice, he was willing to accept only a 28-day ceasefire. They also agreed that the notice period for the resumption of hostilities would be one week.
The Bolsheviks were anxious to include all the belligerent forces. Hoffmann pointed out that it was not possible to agree on anything involving the other powers of the Entente, since they were not present. Joffe argued that he needed additional instructions from his superiors and the conference was suspended for a week. At the same time, a ceasefire was declared.
During this period, Trotsky again tried, in vain, to secure the cooperation of Germany’s other enemies in the peace talks, but when the conference resumed in Brest-Litovsk on December 12, without the symbolic presence of soldiers, sailors , workers and peasants there was still no response from the Entente. Regardless of how disappointed Britain and France were to see that Russia was trying to get out of the war at almost any cost. The Entente diplomatic corps noted that it was unrealistic to expect Russia to continue fighting.
POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
The armistice on the eastern front began on December 15, 1917, and a week later a peace conference between the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, and the Bolsheviks opened in the city of Brest-Hungary. Litovsk (today in Belarus), at the headquarters of the German East Army.
Ottokar von Czernin left Vienna for Brest-Litovsk on December 19 accompanied by a delegation that included Feldmarschallleutnant Maximilian Csicserics von Bacsány. They arrived in Brest-Litovsk the next day where they met their fellow German diplomats, now led by Richard von Kühlmann, Germany’s foreign secretary.
By the end of 1917, Czernin was deeply disillusioned about the future. His relationship with Emperor Karl had deteriorated, and feeling that his position was in jeopardy, he desperately wanted to secure peace for the dual monarchy before internal ethnic tensions tore him apart. However, he was also aware that peace with Russia would accomplish little if the Entente remained determined to dismember the empire. He had promised himself extensions of the Empire to Italy and Romania, and there was a clear intention to force Vienna to grant the Czech, Polish and Balkan regions independence. He also thought that if Germany watched its ally founder, the Germans would occupy Austria and turn it into a satellite state. However, if peace with Russia was followed by a successful German offensive in the west, it might be possible to bring the war-weary nations of the Entente to the negotiating table.
When the talks resumed on December 22, Joffe once again outlined Russia’s main points at the negotiating table:
- Forced annexations could not take place
- Populations that have been deprived of their independence during the war should be restored
- Nationalities that had no rights of self-determination before the war can count on them
- Minority rights must be guaranteed
- There would be no compensation and colonial issues must be resolved in accordance with these
Reich Foreign Minister Richard von Kühlmann and his Habsburg counterpart Czernin accepted the Bolshevik peace proposals without annexations and indemnities. Kühlmann was being diplomatically very astute. He planned to subvert the right to national self-determination, as he later explained, “obtaining… any absolutely necessary territorial concessions”.
The Germans had established national councils in Poland, Courland, Lithuania, and parts of Estonia. These councils issued declarations by which they seceded from Russia and began a close connection with the Reich. With this ingenious veneer of legitimacy, they cut these territories off from Russia and managed to draw them into the German orbit, but the strategy was extremely subtle and required time, which the Central Powers lacked.
The OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung The German General Headquarters), led by Ludendorff and Hindenburg, was outraged, because by conditionally accepting the Bolshevik proposals, Kühlmann had renounced the possibility of dictating peace. The Bolsheviks thought they had won a diplomatic victory until General Max Hoffmann, OHL’s representative at the conference, under pressure from the ineffable Ludendorff, explained to the Bolshevik delegates that they were about to lose much more territory if they were reluctant to accept peace proposals. What Kühlmann regarded as “Absolutely necessary» filled out a very long list of requests. He himself wrote aboutseparate large areas of present-day Russia and build those districts into effective strongholds on our border«. The OHL was not going to allow him to come out of the talks with anything less than fairly well-defined objectives, due to Ludendorff’s ambitious initiative.
In December 1917, Ludendorff requested Lithuania, Courland, Riga and nearby islands for the Reich. “so we can feed our people«. Poland was to be linked to the Central Powers. Russia was to evacuate Finland, Estonia, Livonia, Bessarabia, Armenia and the extreme east of Galicia that is still under its control. It would open its economy to Reich influence, pay compensation for prisoners held in Germany, and deliver grain, oil, and other materials at favorable prices.
The Germans through their demands broke off the negotiations. These were resumed, after an interval of eleven days, the conference resumed on January 9, 1918, the Western Allies, as Kühlmann had foreseen, did not respond, so you could argue that their conditional agreement in December…