Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

248 mark baker

feature was the long-ruling emperor, Franz Joseph (1848–1916). Over the course of

the nineteenth century many of his subjects came to identify primarily with one or

another national group, from Poles, Czechs, and Magyars, to Ukrainians, Romanians,

and Croats. Rising national movements then clashed with the empire’s very structure.

Having agreed to the creation of a dual Austro-Hungarian state in 1867, Franz

Joseph, along with most Germans and Hungarians, refused to make any serious

concessions to the other nationalities. The late nineteenth-century advent of

mass politics hamstrung the government with endless obstructionism from various

political parties (at least nine different ethnic groups were represented in the parlia-

ment, divided into as many as 35 parties).

The arbitrariness of the hulking, inefﬁ-

cient bureaucracy, often ruling by default, greatly exacerbated these problems, making

the empire increasingly precarious before 1914.

The war only accelerated the

empire’s ﬁnal fall.

More recent research into the relations between state and society has challenged

this roundly negative interpretation, revealing that there was far more going on than

decline in late imperial Austria-Hungary. The arrival of mass politics certainly led to

considerable party bickering, but this period also saw the appearance of various useful

public services, such as education, sanitation, agricultural assistance, public health,

and welfare. And the state had to use civic organizations to make these services work.

A lively civil society emerged across the empire, including numerous mass parties and

broadly based interest groups. These largely grassroots organizations initiated and

pursued a variety of political and social activities, penetrating into state institutions,

especially at the local, district, and provincial levels. Even imperial ministers at times

felt compelled to accommodate them. These studies have revealed that the late

Habsburg Empire was more ﬂexible, democratic, and responsive than had earlier been

thought.

Indeed, Alan Sked has argued that the empire did not fall because of its

unwillingness to reform or provide sufﬁcient concessions to its many nationalities.

“It fell because it lost a major war.”

The more recent historiography, presenting a more positive view of the late empire,

in fact makes the war’s role in its destruction more decisive. Whether collapse was

inevitable or not before 1914, it is certainly true that the ruling elite provoked the

war at least in part because it feared collapse. The chief of the Austro-Hungarian

general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, the most insistent advocate of a war

against Serbia, confessed to his lover immediately after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s

assassination that “it will be a hopeless ﬁght; nevertheless it must be waged, since an

old monarchy and a glorious army must not perish without glory.”

Robert Kann

poignantly called this committing “suicide from fear of death.”

The outbreak of the war was met by most of the empire’s national groups with

an initial expression of unity, which dissipated quickly following news of the loss of

Galicia to Russia’s massive, rumbling, peasant army. Conrad’s long-desired campaign

went from bad to worse. After a confused and bungled mobilization, the army

managed to lose almost half of its regular soldiers by the end of 1914. Most humili-

ating to the formerly great Imperial Army, little Serbia successfully repulsed the ﬁrst

three attacks. By the end of 1915 Conrad estimated that more than 2 million of his

troops had been killed or irreparably disabled. Because these losses fell dispropor-

tionately on certain nationalities (Germans, Magyars, Slovenes, and Croats), which

the commanders had deemed “reliable” enough to lead engagements, they greatly

the war and revolution 249

exacerbated national antagonisms. In April 1915 Italy entered the war on the Entente’s

side and opened up a third front against Austria, whose army now became virtually

dependent on Germany.

On the home front matters went from bad, to better, to worse. After the initial

shock, the empire’s economy recovered somewhat in 1915, but by 1916 the strains

of the war – the Entente’s blockade, decreasing food production (because many

peasants were mobilized), and poor distribution – were producing great shortages of

food and clothing. By January 1915 the empire already had an overall grain shortage

of 26 million quintals (2.6 billion kilograms). The per capita potato ration, 493 grams

before 1914, dropped to 118 in 1916. In 1917 the average meat ration was decreased

from 82 to 17 grams per day (to 35 in Hungary). In January 1918 the government

further reduced the ﬂour ration from 220 to 165, and to 82 in June. While rations

to the troops were larger, they decreased at a similar pace.

Adding to the almost deadly atmosphere of people, especially children, going

hungry, in October 1916 left-wing socialist Friedrich Adler assassinated the ultra-

conservative Austrian Prime Minister Stürgkh. More important, in November 1916,

the old emperor Franz Joseph ﬁnally, quietly, passed away. He was replaced by his

29-year-old grandnephew, Karl, a devout Catholic full of good intentions, who pro-

claimed that he would recall the Reichsrat (Austrian parliament), strive to secure an

early peace, and to create a constitutional regime despite the opposition of Austro-

German, Magyar, and military elites. Karl’s promise of peace and the recalled Reichsrat

did much to force a relaxation of wartime censorship. In the Reichsrat, South Slav

and Czech deputies, while expressing loyalty to the monarchy, called for autonomy

and federalism. Meeting determined resistance from Austro-German deputies and

the government, they made increasingly radical demands, moving rapidly away from

compromise; their speeches were quite freely published uncensored. Rather than

carrying out a vigorous pro-monarchy propaganda campaign, the authorities

responded with uneven and arbitrary repression, heavily censoring some newspapers,

while allowing others to print; they presented no viable or appealing alternative to

the nationalists’ calls for independence. While Karl expressed concern about his sub-

jects’ lack of patriotism, he scorned to take part in the propaganda war, asserting that

thoughts and ideas “could not be recommended like laxatives, tooth-paste and food-

stuffs.”

Hence, the empire lost the war of ideas largely by default.

At the same time the Entente leaders encouraged discord within the monarchy by

supporting (to varying degrees) the autonomy or independence of its nationalities.

President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech in January 1918 suggested autonomy

for the empire’s diverse peoples within some sort of federal Habsburg structure, but

also called for an independent Poland, cutting away the Polish-populated part of

Galicia, and the turnover of Italian-populated lands to Italy. In April the Entente

approved the resolutions of the Congress of Oppressed Peoples in Rome, calling for

the creation of a south Slav state. Over the summer of 1918, impressed by the efforts

of the Czech legion (composed of Czech POWs) to ﬁght pro-Bolshevik forces in

Russia, the Entente recognized the Czech National Council in Paris as the “basis”

of a new government of Czechoslovakia, implying that Bohemia, Moravia, and

Slovakia would also no longer be part of a future Austria. On October 2, ﬁnally real-

izing that defeat was inevitable, Austria-Hungary sent President Wilson a plea for

armistice on the basis of his Fourteen Points, that is, a federation of autonomous

250 mark baker

national states. This was too little too late. Wilson replied that he had already recog-

nized Czechoslovakia as a co-belligerent and had agreed to the south Slavs’ national

uniﬁcation.

Emboldened by these declarations, the non-dominant peoples of the empire took

more decisive steps. The Czech National Committee in Prague plainly proclaimed

its approval of an Allied victory and Czech deputies soon walked out of the Reichsrat.

After lengthy negotiation, the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes formed a National Council

in Zagreb in early October. Rapidly losing both his authority and the war, Karl, on

October 16, issued a manifesto for the federalization of the empire. In response,

Hungarian Premier Wekerle, insisting that Hungary could not make any serious

concessions to its many Slavic peoples, proclaimed that the kingdom no longer felt

bound by the constitutional compromise of 1867. No other national group even

bothered to reply.

While it was the non-German nationalities of the empire that most undermined

its continued existence, the German-Austrians themselves hammered the ﬁnal nail in

the cofﬁn. On October 21, the German members of the Reichsrat proclaimed them-

selves the “Provisional National Assembly of independent German-Austria,” electing

an executive committee that assumed governmental authority. The assembly soon

issued a proclamation claiming for their state “territorial power within the entire area

settled by Germans, especially the Sudeten lands,” warning all other nations (espe-

cially the Czechs) against annexing these territories. On October 29 the National

Committee in Prague proclaimed the founding of a new Czechoslovak republic,

conﬁrmed the following day by the Slovak National Council. The next day the

working people of Vienna carried out mass demonstrations calling for the declaration

of a republic; that evening large crowds, including many soldiers, tore the imperial

eagles from government buildings and the black and yellow imperial colors from their

uniforms, and those of their ofﬁcers. The National Assembly then created a State

Council as the state’s new executive (assuming the emperor’s rights without consult-

ing him). Noting that “the authorities of the former Austrian state do not render

any resistance to the taking over of the administration by the new people’s govern-

ment,” the council called for peace and quiet.

The Czechs and Germans were not the only ones headed for confrontation. In

Galicia, Ukrainian deputies and party and church leaders gathered to form the

Ukrainian National Council (Rada), proclaiming its intention to unite all of the

empire’s Ukrainian-populated lands in a Ukrainian state. On October 24 Galician

Poles established the so-called Liquidation Commission in Lviv to sever relations

between “Austrian Poland” and the monarchy. A surprise to the Poles, on the night

of October 31 a squadron of young, impulsive Ukrainian ofﬁcers disarmed imperial

troops and took control of the provincial capital, Lviv. The next morning yellow-

and-blue Ukrainian ﬂags ﬂew over city hall, government ofﬁces were in Ukrainian

hands, and everywhere posters proclaimed the creation of a Ukrainian state. Shocked

at these bold actions, Galician Poles soon resisted. After some negotiations, both

sides resorted to violence, leading to the Polish–Ukrainian war, a particularly bloody

conﬂict between erstwhile neighbors lasting until July 1919.

Strangely, despite all the demands and actions of his subjects, emperor Karl refused

to abdicate. By November 4, when the armistice was signed at Padua, only some

sections of the army still recognized his authority. Finally, on November 11, two days

the war and revolution 251

after Wilhelm II abdicated, Karl renounced participation in the public affairs of

Austria; on November 13, in those of Hungary. He never abdicated, but Austria and

Hungary immediately declared themselves to be republics.

Clearly, the break-up of Austria-Hungary was provoked mostly by national revolu-

tions among the empire’s subject peoples, though its defeat in the war was also

crucial. In contrast to these national revolutions, the goal of which was basically

accomplished with independence, in the new republics of the previously dominant

peoples – Hungary and Austria – class struggle soon became the issue. Military defeat,

economic collapse, and the dismemberment of a former great power brought great

disillusionment to the citizens of the new German-Austrian republic. Almost from

the start the republic’s Social Democratic leaders, Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, and

Friedrich Adler, realized that matters stood quite differently in Austria than in Russia,

especially concerning the peasants. Radical socialist revolution was impossible. They

rejected both Bolshevism and a return to the old order. Because they had the support

of the working class, these leaders were able to implement this decision, while avoid-

ing both violent social revolution and reaction. Austrian workers and soldiers did

establish councils on the Soviet model in some cities, but the Social Democrats

managed to keep them under control. They organized a People’s Guard, composed

mostly of workers, which two times stopped communists’ attempts to stage a coup.

In the February 1919 elections to the constituent assembly, the Social Democrats

won 69 seats, the Christian Socialists 63, and the German Nationalists 26; as a result,

the socialists formed a coalition government and made large concessions to the

republic’s regions. The Social Democrats gradually lost support outside of Vienna,

but turned the latter, which ended up containing about one third of the republic’s

population, into a sort of socialist experiment of working-class housing, healthcare,

and adult education, soon dubbed “Red Vienna.”

While independence from the Habsburgs was popular in Hungary, the social

repercussions of falling on the losing side of the war were catastrophic. The victorious

Allies had great sympathy for the Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Romanians,

all of whom made territorial claims on the former kingdom, and no sympathy for

the latter. This indifference turned to hostility, when, on the evening of March 21,

1919, the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of Budapest proclaimed a dictatorship of

the proletariat. The new Revolutionary Governing Council, led by the communist

Béla Kun, promised Hungary the Red Army’s support against the invading armies

of Romania and Czechoslovakia, but the Red Army never made it across the Carpathian

mountains. Kun proceeded to nationalize the entire economy with one crucial excep-

tion: land redistribution, thereby losing the peasants’ support. He hoped that the

Hungarian revolution would spark a greater central European communist revolution,

one that never really materialized, which was a grave disappointment not only to him,

but also to Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Moscow. The majority of socialists across the

region preferred national consolidation to world revolution. But the main factor in

the fall of Kun’s government was its defeat by the Romanian army. On August 1 the

communists stepped down in favor of a more moderate trade unionist government.

A few days later the Romanians entered Budapest, helped to remove the socialists,

and installed a more conservative regime. In November Admiral Miklós Horthy,

with the Allies’ approval, led an army into Budapest and soon installed a right-wing

regency. The revolution was over.

252 mark baker

Revolution in the German Empire

In contrast to the historiographies on the collapse of the Romanov and Habsburg

empires, there is not a great deal of debate about war’s role in the collapse of the

Hohenzollern empire: the war, especially Germany’s quite sudden and unexpected

defeat, was the crucial and decisive cause. Certainly, prewar German society was not

without class conﬂict. As Sean Dobson has recently shown, workers were for the most

part not integrated into the social order and were greatly displeased with their lot in

life, resenting especially the authoritarian political system and the owner–worker wage

relationship. In this environment the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD),

which strongly encouraged the working class to act for democratic change, ﬂourished.

While in 1890 only 35 members of the SPD were elected to the Reichstag (German

parliament), in 1912, 110 SPD candidates won seats, making it the Reichstag’s largest

single party (about 35 percent of all seats). By 1913 SPD-dominated trade unions

had about 2.5 million members. Indeed, many pre-World War I Marxists believed

(at least until February 1917) that the revolution was most likely to break out in

Germany. And yet even Dobson admits that this thriving working-class movement

was not at all a sufﬁcient cause for revolution, that the elite’s “political dominance

was insecure but not in crisis,” and that only the Great War removed the main

obstacles to revolutionary action.

Hence, it is not surprising that the central debate

of the German revolution has not focused on its causes, but rather on whether it

failed or succeeded.

In many ways the war’s effects on Germany were similar to those on Russia and

Austria, though at the time the disruption was less obvious. Indeed, it was the appear-

ance of success until the spring of 1918 that made the shock of defeat so devastating

to both soldiers and civilians. The supreme army command (Oberste Heeresleitung,

OHL), headed by Erich von Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, strove vigorously

to the bitter end to put a positive spin on all military successes and failures; it is only

in hindsight that we can see that the army and empire were beginning to fall apart

long before the actual defeat.

The home front was harshly affected by the prolonged war effort. The crucial

question for most civilians was again food supply. Almost from the beginning of the

war most internal political controversies revolved around the production and distribu-

tion of food. Not all layers of German society were hit equally hard. Much of the

German middle and upper classes could still afford sufﬁcient food. Buoyed up in the

fall of 1917 by the Bolsheviks’ call for an immediate peace, they continued to support

the war effort and believed that Germany could obtain a “victorious peace.” German

workers, on the other hand, became increasingly radical and politically mobilized by

the war’s exactions. While some workers, especially in the armament industry, received

wage increases, even these did not keep up with food prices. By 1918 the ofﬁcial

food ration per individual provided only about 60 percent of that needed for light

work, less for those who did heavier labor. Consequently, workers increasingly went

on strike. While in 1915 there were only 137 strikes, in 1917 there were 561. Workers

became more frustrated because the organizations that claimed to represent them,

the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), refused to encourage and

sometimes even opposed strike actions, stubbornly sticking to their wartime pro-unity

position.

In January 1918 a massive strike wave broke across much of Germany,

the war and revolution 253

alarming the police and military authorities. In Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, and else-

where, hundreds of thousands of workers quit their work in a protest against the

terrible food situation. Workers began forming their own councils (called räte in

German). To some extent following their Russian counterparts, German workers and

some of their more radical leaders in the councils and the Independent Social

Democratic Party (USPD, which broke with the SPD in April 1917) demanded an

end to the war, calling for an immediate peace without annexations or indemnities.

In the army, shirking of military duty became widespread already in the fall of

1917 as the OHL moved many troops from other fronts to the west in preparation

for the last great offensive beginning in March 1918. The soldiers who did ﬁght in

this last desperate effort were motivated by the desire to end their suffering sooner

and by the great opportunity for plunder, a more than reasonable response to their

meager rations.

Ludendorff’s last great offensive made some important advances,

but was accompanied by massive losses of men, contributing greatly to “the slow but

steady deterioration of discipline,” as a May 1918 order to the Sixth Army noted.

According to one contemporary military analyst, Erich-Otto Volkmann, there were

between 750,000 and 1 million “shirkers’ on the western front in the last few months

of the war. Deist has argued that the spring 1918 offensive’s failure provoked a

massive, though covert, refusal of soldiers to follow orders. Ludendorff was shocked

to overhear on August 8 that an attack division heading for the front was greeted by

retreating guard troops with shouts of “strike-breakers” and “war-prolongers.” The

soldiers’ refusals, a “covert strike,” contributed much to Ludendorff’s decision to

admit defeat.

On September 29, Ludendorff suddenly declared that the war was lost and the

government now had to negotiate an immediate armistice. The German government

believed that President Wilson (based on their reading of his Fourteen Points) was

amenable to creating a just and equitable peace, but to deal with Wilson, they soon

realized, they would have to make serious constitutional changes. A new government

was formed under the leadership of the liberal Prince Max von Baden, supported by

a parliamentary majority of Catholics, Progressives, and the Majority Social Democrats.

After a lengthy period of indecision, the Kaiser issued a proclamation making the

government responsible to the Reichstag, placing foreign and military policy under

its control, and democratizing the franchise. The hope was that a truly constitutional

monarchy, with responsible government, would sufﬁce. It did not. Wilson’s note of

October 23 recognized the constitutional changes made thus far, but made it clear

that the Allies were not interested in negotiating with the Hohenzollern dynasty.

At the same time, the German peace offering and change of government greatly

transformed the public mood and further radicalized the masses, especially those who

had been ﬁghting for Kaiser and Vaterland for more than four long years.

On October 29, the very day on which Kaiser Wilhelm signed the new constitu-

tional laws, sailors at Wilhelmshaven revolted in response to rumors that the Supreme

Navy Command was about to order a suicidal attack – a death sortie or “Admirals’

Rebellion” – on the British Grand Fleet.

The navy’s commanding ofﬁcers (without

informing the Kaiser or government) were attempting, or so they thought, to save

the navy’s future and to die with honor – motivations that did not interest rank-and-

ﬁle sailors in the least. As ship after ship mutinied, the commanders began to panic.

On November 1, the commander of the high seas ﬂeet, Admiral Franz Hipper,

254 mark baker

ordered the squadrons, then assembled at Wilhelmshaven, to disperse to other ports,

thereby unwittingly spreading the revolt. On November 3, a full-blown rebellion

broke out at Kiel, sparked by the most mutinous Third Squadron, and transferring

rapidly to the city’s workers. Sailors,’ soldiers,’ and workers’ councils were spontane-

ously created and began to claim authority. On November 7, the King of Bavaria was

forced to abdicate in favor of a soldiers’ and workers’ council. The next day many

key German cities fell to the revolutionary masses. Almost to the very last moment

the Kaiser refused to abdicate, threatening to gather those troops loyal to him and

march on Berlin. On November 9, von Baden decided on his own to issue a declara-

tion that Kaiser Wilhelm had abdicated and then, stepping down, asked MSPD leader

Friedrich Ebert to form a new government. A few hours later, to Ebert’s annoyance,

another MSPD leader, Philipp Scheidemann, fearing the further radicalization of the

revolution, proclaimed Germany a republic from a balcony of the Reichstag. He had

no authority to do so, but that proved to be the end of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

Wilhelm ﬂed to Holland early the following morning, cursing von Baden for his

“treachery” and retaining hopes of returning some day.

He never did.

On November 10, a new government was created, the Council of People’s

Representatives, composed of three members each of the MSPD and USPD and led

by Ebert and Hugo Haase (of the USPD). The same day delegates from Berlin’s

workers’ and soldiers’ councils gathered at the Circus Busch and conﬁrmed the new

government; the delegates also expressed admiration for and sent their “fraternal

greetings” to the Russian workers and soldiers, “who took the lead on the path of

revolution”; they even called for “the speedy and thorough socialization of the

capitalist means of production.”

The new leaders, however, strove to ignore such

enthusiasms. Indeed, Ebert, Scheidemann, and the other MSPD leaders fell into a

sort of fetish of moderation in the face of mounting chaos. Viewing themselves as

the realists, “they made a virtue of hardheaded realism, of taking the tough decisions

left-wing dreamers refused to face.”

Ebert’s government soon issued its program,

which demanded a maximum eight-hour day, unemployment legislation, improved

social insurance, better housing, democratic elections, sexual equality, the removal

of wartime restrictions on civil liberties, and the calling of a constitutional assembly.

This was a strong democratic program, sympathetic to the working class, but it

disappointed those demanding the socialization of production and other radical

economic changes.

The German revolution then turned into a struggle between the MSPD leaders’

consistent efforts to preserve the achievements of the revolution, as they viewed their

actions, and the attempts of the more radical left (the USPD,

Spartacists, and

Communists) to advance the revolution (from their perspective). The council move-

ment was caught in the middle, not always agreeing with the radical left, but demand-

ing more than the moderate republican government was willing to give. Ebert’s

government won out, basically by gaining the support of the political center, the

army’s ofﬁcer corps, and new military organizations, called Freikorps. Always a reluc-

tant revolutionary, Ebert agreed to utilize the Freikorps in order to suppress the

council movement, whose radical demands he feared. In January 1919 the Freikorps

put down an attempted communist coup against the government in Berlin, killing

about 100 insurgents and the leaders of the newly founded Communist Party – Rosa

Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. At the elections to the national (constituent)

the war and revolution 255

assembly, held on January 19, the MSPD took almost 38 percent of the vote, com-

pared to 7.6 percent for the USPD; the MSPD allied with the Democrats and

Catholic Center to obtain a parliamentary, republican majority.

Although a number

of localized disturbances followed, this was basically the end of the German

revolution.

Debate on this revolution has focused more on whether it succeeded than on its

causes. With the exception of a few early writers such as Arthur Rosenberg, interwar

German historians generally deﬁned the revolution as a choice between the imposi-

tion of “Russian Bolshevism,” represented by the councils and communists, and some

moderate form of republicanism, an alliance of the MSPD with conservative elements

in the bureaucracy and army. In effect, these historians argued that Ebert had no

choice but to side with the forces of order, no matter how conservative, or face the

horrors of Bolshevik Russia. After World War II, and especially in the 1960s, histori-

ans of the revolution came to support the idea, ﬁrst proposed by Rosenberg, that

there was in fact a third choice open to Ebert: the councils.

These historians un-

covered considerable potential in the council movement for compromise with the

governing MSPD. The councils were not at all the communists’ tools, but rather

democratic, grassroots organizations that sprang up spontaneously as the imperial

authorities disappeared. Ebert’s government missed a rare opportunity to cooperate

with the councils to democratize German society thoroughly and create a much

stronger Weimar republic, one more resistant to the radical right. More recently,

however, some historians such as Mommsen and Bernbach have questioned the via-

bility of the councils as a democratic alternative. The councils were not really that

interested in democratizing society, but rather only in defending workers’ and

soldiers’ interests; they rarely attempted to claim political leadership.

Because this

debate is linked to the weakness of the Weimar republic and therefore the rise of

National Socialism, it is unlikely that it will be resolved any time soon.

Conclusion

Clearly, World War I played a crucial role in the collapse of the empires of eastern

Europe and the outbreak of both national and class-based revolutions. In the Russian

empire participation, not defeat, led to the February upheaval, which spawned

numerous other revolutions, including that of October, a crucial issue of which was

getting out of the war. In the Habsburg and Hohenzollern empires, defeat after four

long years of struggle was the catalyst to collapse and insurrection; these revolutions

were, overall, more moderate in tone, less violent, and less radical, partly in reaction

against the Russian example. While historians attribute to the war varying degrees

of responsibility for these revolutions, its great contribution to their outbreak is

unquestionable.

NOTES

1 Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917,”

Slavic

Review (part 1) 23/4 (1964): 618–42; and (part 2) 24/1 (1965): 1–22; quotation is

from part 2, p. 17.

256 mark baker

2 This literature is massive; for useful surveys see Ronald G. Suny, “Revision and Retreat

in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics,” Russian Review 53 (1994):

165–82; and “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,” American Historical

Review 88 (1983): 31–52.

3 See Allan K. Wildman,

The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the

Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.

95.

4 See Lewis H. Siegelbaum,

The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–17: A

Study of the War-Industries Committees (London: Macmillan, 1983).

5 P. N. Miliukov,

Vospominaniia, Tom vtoroi (1859–1917) (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1990),

p. 237.

6 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa,

The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 1981).

7 See Orlando Figes,

A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 (London:

Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 364.

8 Ibid, pp. 773–5. Another 5 million starved to death in the famine crises of 1921–2, which

resulted in part from the ruthless food requisitioning of the civil war’s various occupying

armies. For comparison, about 1.7 million soldiers of the Russian Imperial Army died in

the world war.

9 Lothar Höbelt, “Parliamentary Politics in a Multinational Setting: Late Imperial Austria,”

Working Paper 92–6, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota, 1992, p. 8.

10 Only 50 deputies were needed to force a roll-call, which would last several hours; only

20 were needed to force an emergency debate; all of which greatly facilitated minority

parties’ obstructing the passing of bills. See Höbelt, “Parliamentary Politics,” p. 6.

11 The best of the classic works are C. A. Macartney,

The Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918 (New

York: Macmillan, 1969); and Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–

1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

12 For a thorough and insightful discussion of the older and more recent historiography,

see Gary B. Cohen, “Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and

Government in Late Imperial Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 29 (1998): 37–61.

13 Alan Sked,

The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815–1918, 2nd edn (London:

Longman, 2001), p. 269.

14 Samuel R. Williamson Jr. and Russel Van Wyk,

July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen, and the

Coming of the Great War: A Brief Documentary History (Boston MA: Bedford/St Martin’s

Press, 2003), p. 57.

15 Kann,

History of the Habsburg Empire, p. 519.

16 See Horst Haselsteiner, “The Habsburg Empire in World War I: Mobilization of Food

Supplies,” in East Central European Society in World War I, Béla K. Király and Nándor

F. Dreisziger, eds (Boulder CO: East European Monographs, 1985), pp. 89–90.

17 Mark Cornwall, “News, Rumour and the Control of Information in Austria-Hungary,

1914–1918,” History 77/249 (1992): 50–64; quotation from p. 64.

18 See John C. Swanson,

The Remnants of the Habsburg Monarchy: The Shaping of Modern

Austria and Hungary, 1918–1922 (Boulder CO: East European Monographs, 2001),

pp. 8–9.

19 Francis L. Carsten,

Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1972), pp. 21–3.

20 Sean Dobson,

Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920: The Story of a Relationship

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 290.

21 See Jürgen Kocka,

Facing Total War: German Society 1914–1918, Barbara Weinberger,

trans. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 61–7; statistics from

pp. 25, 61.

the war and revolution 257

22 See Wilhelm Deist, “The Military Collapse of the German Empire: The Reality Behind

the Stab-in-the-Back Myth,” E. J. Feuchtwanger, trans., War in History 3/2 (1996):

199–201.

23 Ralph. H. Lutz, ed.,

Fall of the German Empire, 1914–1918, vol. 1 (Palo Alto CA:

Stanford University Press, 1932), doc. 215, p. 652.

24 Deist, “The Military Collapse,” pp. 202–5.

25 See Klaus Schwabe,

Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–

1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power, Rita and Robert Kimber, trans.

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 59.

26 See Daniel Horn,

The German Naval Mutinies of World War I (New Brunswick NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 1969), p. 212; and see pp. 198–233.

27 Giles MacDonogh,

The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II (New York: St. Martin’s Press,

2000), pp. 412–15.

28 F. L. Carsten,

War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First

World War (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1982), p. 227.

29 Geoff Eley,

Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 166.

30 The USPD leaders left the government on December 31, 1918, after the MSPD leaders

ordered (without consulting the USPD) Freikorps to crush the revolt of some mutinous

sailors in Berlin, killing about a dozen sailors.

31 Eley,

Forging Democracy, p. 168.

32 Arthur Rosenberg,

A History of the German Republic, Ian F. D. Morrow and L. Marie

Sieveking, trans. (London: Methuen, 1936), pp. 23–4.

33 See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “The German Revolution 1918–1920: Political Revolution

and Social Protest Movement,” J. Williams, trans., in Social Change and Political

Development in Weimar Germany, R. Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger, eds (London:

Croom Helm, 1981), p. 31.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Francis L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1972). The only serious attempt (in English) to study the revolutions in both Austria-

Hungary and Germany.

Gary B. Cohen, “Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and Government

in Late Imperial Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 29 (1998): 37–61. A comprehensive

discussion of the historiography on the late Habsburg period.

Mark Cornwall, ed., The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early

Twentieth-Century Europe, revd edn (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002). A stimulat-

ing set of essays on the main nationalities.

Wilhelm Deist, “The Military Collapse of the German Empire: The Reality Behind the Stab-

in-the-Back Myth,” trans. E. J. Feuchtwanger, War in History 3/2 (1996): 186–207. A

wonderful study of the collapse of the army and the covert German soldiers’ strike of

1918.

Sean Dobson, Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920: The Story of a Relationship (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2001). A refreshing local study that takes a longer period

and argues that the seeds of revolution were present before World War I.

Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan

Cape, 1996). A compelling, inclusive history of the entire revolutionary period.