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Post by timothylane on Oct 11, 2019 14:14:21 GMT -8
This book, 272 pages available at The Emperors, is subtitled How Europe's Empires Were Destroyed by the First World War. Despite this, it only looks at the eastern empires of Hohenzollern Prussia/Germany, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, and Romanov Russia.
This is not a military study; many battles are barely mentioned and many others ignored. This is a study of the history of the 3 states (I won't say nations because both Austria-Hungary and Russia were multi-national and in fact had problems with their minorities) primarily through their imperial houses. It's also very informative and entertaining. Who knew that Austria continued using Latin in its bureaucracy until 1846. (Actually, in a polyglot realm that was mostly Catholic, this made a lot of sense, though Orthodox Ukrainians and Romanians in Bukovina and eastern Galicia may have disagreed.)
As that little tidbit shows, the history goes back a good way. The 1848 revolutions definitely come up, though not in detail. He doesn't cover the German revolts which ended with a large gathering in Frankfort offering a national crown to Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II (who rejected it), or the Austrian problems with a revolt in Hungary and a war in Italy. He does discuss the 1867 Ausgleich with Hungary that created the structure of the Dual Monarchy.
He also covers the Russian rioting in 1905 that finally led to Russia establishing a Duma with somewhat limited powers -- a consequence of losing to Japan. These events led to the fall of Sergei Witte, the chief minister and the man probably most responsible for the growing industrial development of Russia (which had consequences in 1914). His replacement, Peter Stolypin, was also an able administrator, but was assassinated by Socialist Revolutionaries before the war came.
Germany was very unfortunate in its ruler. Kaiser Wilhelm II was a blustery sort who tried really hard to get along with people (and as a result, he mostly didn't). He also was a lot less warlike than his rhetoric, as would become clear starting in 1914. But that blustery rhetoric contributed greatly to war coming. Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, was a devoted worker who made few waves.
All 3 emperors were conservative sorts who had no desire for war. They were probably capable of being allied, as many would have liked, but Russia (including Tsar Nicholas II) saw its interests better served by the Dual Alliance with France. The various foreign policy disputes, especially over Austria-Hungary's 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, didn't help. A lot of Russian nationalists were very unhappy over that, and over Russia's failure to act.
This eventually set things up for the assassination of Franz Josef's nephew and heir (his only son had committed suicide a quarter-century earlier), Franz Ferdinand. Visiting Sarajevo had its points, and much of the population supported the crown -- the Serbs mostly wanted to join Serbia, but the Croats and Bosnian Muslims disliked that idea and saw the Empire as their protector. (Bosnian troops would prove to be excellent mountain fighters on the Isonzo front). But including June 28 (St. Vitus's Day) was very offensive to Serbs, partly for the holiness of the day and partly because it was considered the anniversary of the crucial Battle of Kosovo against the Ottomans over 500 years earlier. General Potiorek, the local army commander, knew this was a bad idea, but he really wanted the visit.
It might have worked anyway, despite the presence of a great of Serb nationalist assassins out to murder Franz Ferdinand. The first effort, with a bomb failed (and the would-be assassin was captured and kept from committing suicide or being lynched), and Gavrilo Princip decided to go to a tavern and drown his sorrows. Meanwhile, after a lunch meeting the decision was made to change Franz Ferdinand's route back. Unfortunately, no one told the driver, and he started back on the originally planned route. Once they realized it, they had him change. He stopped the car to change directions, and it was pure bad luck that he did so outside the tavern that Princip had just come out of. He found himself just a short distance from his target, and unfortunately he didn't miss.
There are some indications that Franz Josef may not have been so unhappy at the events (not only Franz Ferdinand married down, but he supported giving the Slavs the same sort of rights the Hungarians had). But Austria-Hungary could hardly let Serbia (whose government had assisted the assassination) get away with its crime -- particularly after Kaiser Wilhem gave them a "blank check" to act.
Eventually, Austria-Hungary sent an ultimatum, and Serbia (more or less) agreed to most of the demands. Wilhelm thought this was enough to end the crisis, but the more militant Austrian leaders thought this wasn't enough, and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, a full month after the assassination. This led Russia to mobilize to defend Serbia, and Germany to mobilize to defend their ally. (One result is that every power saw itself as having been attacked, or acting on behalf of someone else who had been.)
In Germany, many in the Army and Navy wanted war, partly out of a fear that Russia's development would eventually leave them vulnerable. The Kaiser wasn't thrilled about it, but the Crown Prince (who would later turn against the war and play the pacifist) supported them. It was also unfortunate that Germany only had one mobilization plan at this stage (having dropped a plan for concentrating against Russia the previous year). That required invading Belgium, which brought Britain into the war.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 11, 2019 16:58:12 GMT -8
Continuing my review, I will note that many important people found themselves vacationing in the wrong nation when the war started. It's a reminder of why some thought war couldn't come -- there were too many ties between countries for that to happen. One Russell doesn't mention is that Serbia's army commander, Putnik, was in Austria-Hungary. They let him go home, to their later regret.
One who had more difficulty was Prince Youssopov, who needed a lot of intervention with Kaiser Wilhelm before he could go back to Russia. His name will come up again later.
War brought a lot of stresses on everyone. This included far more casualties than anyone likely had anticipated. Many women went into nursing, including royalty. In Russia, the Tsarina and her oldest daughters (Olga and Tatiana) helped out, although the Tsarina's own health made it difficult.
Meanwhile, the war everyone expected to be over "before the leaves fall" lasted a lot longer than that, whch required adjustments. Tsar Nicholas, after a series of disasters in 1915, went to the front to show leadership (with General Alexeev to make the military decisions). This probably did some good, but it also meant he had to leave someone to run the country. Trusting few people by now, he let Alexandra do the job, which was a bad idea. She was German-born (though she thought of herself as more English), and regarded as a foreigner (much as Marie Antoinette was sneered at as an Austrian during the early phases of the French Revolution). Then, too, there was the matter of her favorite priest, the grossly uncouth peasant Gregory Efimovitch Rasputin. Tsarevitch Alexei's hemophilia was a closely kept secret, so most people at court had no idea of his hold on her (which came from his apparent ability to save Alexei's life).
Meanwhile, Kaiser Wilhelm had his own problems. His heir and the military were harsher than he was, and supported the successful Eastern generals (von Hindenburg, von Mackensen, and Ludendorff -- note the absence of a "von" in his case, which may have something to do with his turn to Nazism later) over the westerners. The Kaiser named his Secretary of War, von Falkenhayn (who favored a war of attrition in the West against France), to replace von Moltke as Chief of the General Staff. But there would be disputes on this issue for 2 years.
There was also the matter of unrestricted submarine warfare, which the military favored and the Kaiser opposed. But with the British blockading Germany and preventing food imports (which traditionally were not considered contraband of war), the public in this case was on the harsher side. Wilhelm was able to cancel the policy after the sinking of the Lusitania threatened war with the US. (Wilhelm didn't like this sinking of passenger ships, even when they carried contraband arms.)
In Austria-Hungary, meanwhile, Franz Josef died in 1916 after 68 years on the throne -- the second-longest reign in European history to that point, after Louis XIV (who came to the throne at the age of 5 and thus didn't make any decisions for many years). The new emperor-king, Karl, was another sympathizer of Slavic rights and less than thrilled by the war. His beloved wife, Zita, was a French Bourbon and definitely wanted out. (She came from a large family. Her father's first wife died giving birth to her 12th child, 3 of whom died in childhood. His second wife had 12 more children, including Zita, all of whom reached adulthood.) He wanted to wait until reforms were instituted until he was formally crowned in Hungary because the oaths he would have to swear were incompatible with further reforms, but the Hungarians pressured (who probably knew what he wanted) him into an early formal coronation.
One source of the Tsar's unpopularity in Russia, particularly in royal and noble circles, was the peasant priest Rasputin. Many thought he had to go to save the throne, and finally a group led by (among others) Prince Youssopov decided to bite the bullet and assassinate him. Russell notes that there are many versions of exactly what happened, and makes no attempt to decide which version (if any) is accurate. At any rate, a few days later his body was pulled out of the Neva River, and the assassins were sent away from the capital, though they faced no worse punishment. They acted too late to save the monarchy, though its collapse wasn't inevitable yet, but their removal from the capital did probably save their lives later.
Meanwhile, von Hindenburg had finally managed to get named Chief of the German General Staff, with Ludendorff as his deputy. Although the Reichstag had a lot of legal authority in terms of passing laws, it had no control over the cabinet, and increasingly Hindenburg and Ludendorff were running things, with the support of the Crown Prince though not the Kaiser. (Ludendorff's fanaticism, however, soon began to disenchant the Crown Prince and started him on the way to opposing the war he did so much to start.) One result was the imposition, early in 1917, of unrestricted submarine warfare -- just before a revolt in Russia was about to make it arguably unnecessary.
But that's for next installment.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 12, 2019 12:25:39 GMT -8
Before getting to the baleful events of (and following) the February Revolution in Petrograd, I will start with an event that started earlier. There were many peace initiatives through the war which never went anywhere for various reasons. One, which Russell devotes a chapter to, was initiated by Zita, consort of the Habsburg monarch, Karl. A brother of hers was in the Belgian Army, and she managed to get in touch with him through Switzerland. There began an effort to broker, at the least, a peace between the Allies and Austria-Hungary.
The French had 4 basic demands: reacquisition of Alsace-Lorraine (no problem for the Habsburgs, though they did point out later that they could only promise to support it), restoration of Belgium and its colony in the Congo (actually, the latter was no problem; Germany never invaded, and by late 1916 was being driven from the borders of German East Africa -- its only remaining colony -- anyway), restoration of Serbia (the Habsburgs were willing -- they never wanted to conquer it, and add more hostile Slavs to the empire, anyway -- but were more hesitant at the idea that this might involve enlarging the country, thus rewarding the people most responsible for the war), and Russian acquisition of Constantinople (and, presumably, the Straits as a whole, since Constantinople meant little if Turkey controlled the Dardanelles and the rest of the Bosporus).
As discussions continued, it became evident that the French had no wish for peace with Germany, especially if they could detach Austria-Hungary. Later, too, after the Tsar's abdication, they dropped Constantinople (even though the revolutionary government tried to continue fighting). One problem is that Karl needed the approval of his Foreign Minister, Count von Czernin, who wanted out but didn't want to betray Germany. They simply lied about what was in the agreement to get him to go along.
In the end, nothing came of it, partly because (as usual with the Third Republic) French governments came and went. Eventually they ended up with Clemenceau, and that was the end of any prospect of peace short of total victory for one side or the other. Indeed, later when Clemenceau was angry at harsh comments by the Austrians, he published the documents of the effort, exposing how ready Vienna had been to betray Berlin. You can imagine how Hindenburg and Ludendorff responded.
Meanwhile, Russia's economy was sputtering, particularly transportation through the unreplaced breakdown of much of its rolling stock. Food was short in the cities (though not to the point of starvation), and a large number of factories closed down for lack of resources (such as coal for energy). This included nearly half of their blast furnaces in Ukraine and the Urals. Severe shortages in arms production didn't help the war effort at all.
Then trouble began in Petrograd in late February (by the Julian Calendar still in use in Russia at the time). There were a lot of radicals, and they began to consider firing on the demonstrations. Then the garrison troops refused to do so, leading to a conviction on the part of many that Tsar Nicholas had to go. He could have held on, his family being well outside of the capital at their estate at Tsarskoye Seloe (and he was at the army headquarters). But he was persuaded to abdicate, initially in the name of his son and heir, the hemophiliac Alexei. But he soon realized the problems with that, and decided instead to abdicate not only for himself but also for Alexei, naming his youngest brother (Grand Duke Michael) as heir.
This might have worked, but Michael was dealing with the increasingly hostile Duma, and finally agreed to step down until a Constituent Assembly could be elected by universal manhood vote and then decide whether to retain the monarchy or establish a republic. But the provisional government considered itself a republic and acted accordingly. Gradually, one of its ministers became dominant -- Alexander Kerensky, a decent man for a leftist, but also a fool.
The imperial family found their situation worsening, particularly given the hostility of their guards amid leftist propaganda that they were German spies. Kerensky went to Tsarskoye Seloe to meet them, and he decided that they didn't deserve such treatment. The situation improved for a while, but he couldn't find any other country for them. The British decided not to take them, partly because their own royal family was facing problems due to their own German connections. (On the other hand, Lloyd George was willing to take them in.)
One result of the criticism of the royals was that they anglicized their royal house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, and their family name from Battenberg to Mountbatten. This famously led to Kaiser Wilhelm joking about showing the Shakespeare play The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. (Russell makes no attempt to hide the Kaiser's flaws, but overall treats him quite well.)
Kerensky eventually decided to send the imperial family out of the way. They wanted to go to Livadia in the Crimea, where many of their relatives were going, but for whatever reason he instead chose to send them to the town of Tobolsk in Siberia (not too far east of the Urals). This wasn't too bad, though winter was going to be a problem. Even worse, in late October/early November (Kerensky hadn't junked the Julian calendar), the murderous Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky took over in a coup. (Russell definitely has no illusions about Lenin and his deliberate use of mass terror.)
Their situation took a definite turn to the worse at that point while the Bolsheviks discussed the disposition of the family among themselves. Trotsky thought about doing a show trial (which would no doubt have been as fair as his rival Stalin's later would be), but this was risky. A trial implied at least the theoretical possibility that the ex-Tsar was innocent, and might also be used to embarrass (as Charles I in 1649 and Marie Antoinette in 1793 had done). Finally, they take Nicholas, Alexandra, and one of their daughters (Maria, to help the declining Alexandra) away, eventually sending them to Yekaterinburg. The rest of their children later joined them there, which may have surprised them.
Murdering the Tsar was in the cards at this point, and the approach of White forces from the east made it necessary to act promptly. Much of the discussion was orchestrated by Sverdlov in the Moscow Soviet (which may be why Yekaterinburg was later renamed Sverdlovsk, though the original name came back after the fall of Communism). In the end, they were taken to be executed after an indictment of them -- in a mordant irony, they were denounced for the blood they had shed by a regime that was far bloodier in 9 months than Nicholas had been in 23 years.
Or, as the Rolling Stones had the devil sing in "Sympathy for the Devil": "Hung around St. Petersburg until I saw it was time for a change. Killed the Tsar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain."
And that's how far I've gotten so far. The next chapter will deal with the falls of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 13, 2019 15:38:44 GMT -8
One interesting thing about the Great War was how rapidly it switched. In early 1918, Germany began its desperate effort to break the Allies on the Western front, much as Italy had been nearly broken the year before at Caporetto (the 12th Battle of the Isonzo River), Romania the year before, and Serbia the year before that. (Romania, like Russia, had signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers in March 1918.) Only in the Levant was the war being fought on the territory of one of the Central Powers. (For that matter, even in East Africa the war was now being fought in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, though in that case German East Africa had been overrun and the Germans were basically wandering raiders by this time.)
Ludendorff's attempt inflicted heavy losses and gained a lot of territory (some of it ground they had chosen to abandon for strategic reasons in early 1917), but also resulted in losses Germany could no longer afford, especially with 10,000 American troops arriving in France per day. Finally, on August 8 -- which Ludendorff called the Black Day of the German Army (but then, he always was a rather mercurial officer) -- the British broke through at Amiens. For the next few months the Germans were steadily pushed back. Meanwhile, Allied forces in front of Thessaloniki broke the Bulgarians, forcing their surrender. This isolated the Ottoman Empire even as Allenby shattered them on the Palestinian front at Megiddo (aka Armagedon) and forced their surrender. An Allied offensive on the Piave River was almost halted by the decaying Austro-Hungarian forces until that great Italian commander, the Earl of Cavan, managed to broke through, at which point that front collapsed.
By then, Ludendorff (who had called for surrender, something he carefully forgot later when he and most other German generals talked about being stabbed in the back by the politicians and others at home) had been replaced by General Wilhelm Groener (who would be the only significant exception to that claim). As people began to talk about possible revolution, Kaiser Wilhelm went to the Western Front HQ at Spa (the same mistake Nicholas made in early 1917).
Isolation from information played a major role in the fall of the dynasties. There were troops willing to maintain Karl on his throne, but he knew little of this. In the end, he chose to renounce his throne rather than abdicate, hoping to resume it later when the revolutionary period passed. (He did try a few years later in Hungary, but "regent" Admiral Horthy, who had early proclaimed his loyalty, changed his mind once he held the authority.)
Germany had asked for terms before this, but Wilson arrogantly refused to deal with the people responsible for the war. (Was this the Kaiser or the Army? I suspect both, actually. This may be why the armistice was signed by politician Matthias Erzberger rather than army head Hindenburg. It made it much easier for the latter to lie that the Army hadn't really been bitten -- they were still on Belgian soil at the end, after all. It also led to Erzberger being assassinated by nationalists a few years later.) Russell considers this, at least in hindsight, a gross error.
There was some consideration of Wilhelm abdicated in favor of a child (much as with Nicholas, again). The crown prince was too tied to the war to be suitable (and he didn't get along with Wilhelm, or for that matter with the Reichstag), but his 12-year son could be crowned with a regent chosen by the Reichstag. But Wilhelm at Spa was a bit too isolated from Berlin to work out such a plan. Finally, Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert proclaimed a republic to forestall something worse from Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and their Spartacists. (They would later revolt anyway, but what remained of the Army was able to suppress them and kill the two leaders.)
In the end, only one of the Central Power monarchies survived. The Ottoman Sultan was overthrown by Kemal as he revived Turkey (to the regret, ultimately, of the country's Greek, Armenian, and Kurdish citizens). Bulgaria's Tsar had abdicated in favor of his son, who succeeded in holding on.
And the Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Habsburg dynasties were gone. Whatever their flaws (and there were many) had been, the replacements were often worse. Russia fell to a Bolshevik monster (Russell is quite blunt about the bloody nature of Lenin's rule from the very beginning), Germany after an attempt at a reformed civilian democratic republic (sabotaged by the Allies, especially the French), went to the Nazis, who were as bad as the Bolsheviks. And the Habsburgs were replaced by a collection of smaller states, many of them autocratic in rule (the only real exception was Czechoslovakia, which had severe minority problems), and unable to resist Nazis as the Habsburgs might have.
In the end, the displaced royal families didn't support the monstrous replacements. Wilhelm did sink to anti-Semitism after the war, but not as far as Hitler would take it -- he said that Kristallnacht made him ashamed to be a German for the very first time. (Evidently the Nuremberg Laws weren't so upsetting.) The Habsburgs were strongly anti-Nazi, and most of the Hohenzollerns eventually fell out with Hitler' (Sometimes by their choice, sometimes by his -- the Nazis were never very popular among people whose names included "von", and returned the hostility, though there were exceptions.)
Russell also discusses the Anna Anderson matter. Initially the thought was that she might be Grand Duchess Tatiana, but she was much too short. But she was the right size and perhaps the right age to be Anastasia, and there were many who persuaded themselves that she could be the Tsar's youngest daughter. Most of them hadn't seen Anastasia recently even at the time of the Yekaterinburg murders, much less when the mysterious amnesiac turned up in Berlin. DNA would eventually prove that she was no Romanov, more likely a Polish peasant woman.
But Russell does find himself wondering a bit about the way victimized woman can become so famous. Why is there so much about Lady Jane Grey, or Anastasia, or for that matter Anne Frank. He thinks it may be a matter of people becoming well known for whatever reason, and then standing in for all the victims we never hear of. As the author (later) of a biography of Catherine Howard, he certainly has played his own role in this little aspect of history.
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