By mid-August 1914 the original Austro-Serbian war had been engulfed by the larger conflict between the Entente powers and the 'Central Powers', Germany and Austria-Hungary. Italy, a member of the Triple Alliance, and Romania, an ally of the Habsburg Monarchy, stayed neutral on the legitimate ground that these defensive alliances did not justify entry; each in any case harboured designs on Habsburg territory. For the Entente the conclusion, on 2 August, of an alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire, and the latter's entry into the war in October, were a major blow, isolating Russia from its allies by closing the Straits. Yet the Ottoman government was motivated by a fear of Russia fully equal to Russia's fear of Germany.
The fighting in 1914 set the pattern for much of the next three years both in its savagery and its inconclusiveness. Compared with the massive clashes of the great powers with each other, the Balkans was a sideshow. Landlocked Serbia was cut off from any external help, unless Greece could be involved in the war. Nevertheless, the Serbian army managed to repel not just one but two Austro-Hungarian attacks before Christmas and even conducted a raid into Habsburg territory. The incompetence of the Habsburg supreme commander, General Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, in allowing troops to be soaked up on the Serbian front meant that his forces paid a terrible price in Galicia. Russia, which to everyone's surprise put its forces in the field faster than was assumed possible, not only overran much of Galicia, inflicting about 1 million casualties on the Habsburg armies between September and December, but also launched an invasion of East Prussia, where German strategy relied on simply holding the line while the main offensive was under way against France. The division of Russian forces, however, and mediocre Russian generalship, enabled the Germans to surround and annihilate them at Tannenberg in late August, with an overall Russian loss of 242,000 men.4
Notoriously, deadlock and trench warfare became the norm on the western front, but on the eastern front matters remained more fluid, though no less sanguinary. Germany and Austria-Hungary squandered further lives in a series of winter offensives against Russia, as a result of which the Austro-Hungarian army suffered catastrophically high losses, especially of officers. German forces, and German strategy, increasingly took the lead. It was largely to avert a total Habsburg collapse that the German commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, resolved on a major new offensive centred on Gorlice in May 1915, which against all expectations rolled the Russians back hundreds of miles, across the whole of Russian Poland and well into Belorussia and the Baltic provinces by September. This was in part offset by Italy's declaration of war against the Monarchy in May, although the subsequent Italian offensive was so inept that even the debilitated Austro-Hungarian army was able to contain it. Finally, the British and French attack on the Dardanelles in the spring, undertaken to gain access to their Russian ally, highlighted the Central Powers' inability to assist the Ottomans and spurred their invasion of Serbia. Facing overwhelming odds, including a vengeful Bulgaria, Serbia succumbed in the autumn of 1915, although the Serbian government and a remnant of its army survived a nightmare retreat across Albania to the coast and found refuge on Corfu. They were able to do so because Britain and France, in an attempt to bring the Serbs aid, had already violated Greek neutrality by landing troops at Salonica; this split Greece between the nationalist and interventionist prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos and the pro-German King Constantine, a division bridged only in July 1917 when the Allies expelled Constantine. In the meantime, however, the Gallipoli campaign failed and Russia remained cut off from the West, a circumstance which contributed to its breakdown.
Massive casualties were not the only factor weakening all combatants, but especially Austria-Hungary and Russia, by the end of 1915. Although the multiple nationalities of the two sides' armies showed remarkable loyalty and courage for years, there were also numerous signs of disaffection and lack of enthusiasm for the war, as well as a steady trickle of desertions from Habsburg forces. Equally damaging were the economic dislocation and privation caused by the war. Harvests had already been affected by the call-up in 1914. Large areas of Galicia, East Prussia and the Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian borderlands were physically devastated. Serbia was a wasteland, its population decimated by typhoid as well as war. Economic life generally was disrupted by the interruption of normal commerce and the gradual harnessing of industry to the 'war economy'. The Entente's blockade started causing serious food shortages for the Central Powers by 1916-17, but Russia, too, a former grain exporter, was facing comparable hardship due to the closure of the Straits. Food shortages brought malnutrition and increased vulnerability to disease. It was this slow death by blockade which drove the German government, in January 1917, to return to a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, whereby even neutral ships trading with the Entente would be targeted. The momentous consequence was that in April the United States entered the war against Germany, a development which in the long term sealed the Central Powers' fate.
In these circumstances, continuing the war was suicidal for the multinational empires. Russia's General Brusilov undertook another successful offensive in the summer of 1916, which pushed the front westward again some 50 miles in places and completed the demoralisation of its main target, the Austro-Hungarian army.5 The latter by this stage had lost over half its men, either killed, wounded or taken prisoner, and henceforth Austro-Hungarian units were increasingly of use only when mingled with German ones, and in many cases under German command. Matters were only alleviated for the Central Powers, paradoxically, by the declaration of war on them, in August, by Romania, emboldened by Brusilov's successes to attempt its own conquest of Transylvania. A German-led offensive swiftly defeated the phenomenally ill-commanded Romanian army and occupied Bucharest by December.
If Austria-Hungary was struggling by the end of 1916, Russia too had shot its bolt. This was not a military failure so much as a collapse of the home front. The sheer incompetence of Nicholas Il's government and its conduct of the war, coupled with the huge casualties and food shortages, prompted increasingly bitter denunciations in the Duma, and when Nicholas attempted to dissolve it in March 1917 its refusal to accept this was supported by mass strikes, the formation of revolutionary councils or soviets and, crucially, disaffected military and naval units in the capital, Petrograd.6 This first Russian Revolution forced the tsar's abdication and installed a provisional government headed by a liberal aristocrat, Prince Georgii Lvov, and initially composed mainly of representatives of the liberal middle-class parties.
The provisional government, however, suffered from a fundamental contradiction: its liberal but patriotic leadership was determined to carry on the war by prosecuting it more efficiently; yet this very aim rapidly eroded what popular support it had. Russia's army disintegrated under the strain of a final summer offensive, which failed miserably, while the revolutionary socialist parties strengthened their grip on the soviets. In particular, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin were able to exploit the masses' desire for 'land, peace and bread'. The second, Bolshevik Revolution in November had the completely revolutionary aim of establishing a socialist system, but Lenin, on seizing power, while denouncing both sides in the war as 'imperialist' and issuing a call for world revolution, also immediately sought an armistice with the Central Powers.
Russia's collapse and withdrawal from the conflict raised in acute form the issue of war aims. The longer the war lasted, and the higher the 'butcher's bill', the greater the war aims governments came up with to justify these sacrifices. The Habsburg Monarchy never resolved what to do with occupied Serbia, but this was the least of its problems. Its leaders would have been glad of peace, had their German allies permitted it, but they still could neither contemplate the territorial cessions which might have bought peace nor accept any internal restructuring of the Monarchy to allay nationality discontents. The German government and political classes, by contrast, not to mention the military, had wide-ranging plans for territorial and economic conquests in both Western and Eastern Europe as well as overseas. In addition to establishing a Mitteleuropa or Central European customs union, dominated both politically and economically by Germany, the most extreme annexationist war aims, adopted by the government at the insistence of the high command in April 1917, envisaged carving a sort of economic hinterland out of western Russia. This would include the puppet 'Kingdom of Poland', which the
Central Powers, finding themselves in possession of all the Polish lands, had already proclaimed in November 1916, but it also involved detaching a whole swathe of territories, from Finland to the Caucasus, for annexation or otherwise subordinate status.
In March 1918, at the Treaty of Brest—Litovsk with Bolshevik Russia, Germany succeeded in imposing its maximalist aims in the East. Its task was facilitated by the Bolsheviks, who briefly withdrew from negotiations in protest at the extent of Germany's claims and thus encouraged the Germans to advance even further into an already disintegrating Russia before discussion was resumed. By the Treaty, Finland and the Ukraine were recognised as 'independent' states, although German forces were firmly in occupation of both. Poland, Lithuania and Courland were detached from Russia, earmarked for eventual incorporation in the Reich; by a separate agreement in August, Livonia and Estland were also detached, clearly intended to be maintained as protectorates controlled through the ethnic German element. The grain-and mineral-rich Ukraine was the centrepiece in this constellation of satellite states, but German influence in Eastern Europe generally was massively strengthened by Brest—Litovsk.
Germany and its allies never reaped the expected harvest of Brest—Litovsk. Before the year was out the Central Powers were brought down by their increasing debility and the overwhelming manpower and resources now available to the western powers through American participation in the war. The revolutionary chaos and disintegration which overtook Eastern Europe in the autumn of 1918 had its origins partly in war-weariness, hunger and a political radicalism quickened by the Bolshevik Revolution. It was also, however, a function of the region's multinational composition.
World History
