Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The politicians of the Empire’s various nationalities were wary of associating themselves with the Habsburg regime by 1917, but how alienated were the peoples? The Czech case is the most interesting. The Czechs, well educated, industrialized, with energetic, nationalist politicians both at home and in exile, had often been accused of treason and scapegoated for military debacles during the war, yet they were essential for the continued existence of the Habsburg state. Ominously, their intelligentsia was well along the road to divorcing that state. Thanks to the playwright and director of the Prague National Theatre, Jaroslav Kvapil, it took a lead part in emboldening Czech politicians to issue their forceful declaration at the opening of the Reichsrat. Kvapil was in cahoots with the exiles working in the west to promote support for the Czech national cause and bring down the Monarchy, and, with an actor’s timing, he sensed that Russia’s revolution and America’s entry into war had created a moment ripe for dramatic gesture. He thus organized a ‘Manifesto of Czech Authors’, ultimately acquiring the signatures of 222 prominent men of letters, the first of whom was the immensely popular historical novelist Alois Jirásek. The military authorities completely missed the significance of the move and, to the amazement of all involved, permitted its publication in the Agrarian paper Večer on 17 May. It instantly caused a stir. Warning that ‘a democratic Europe, consisting of autonomous and free states, is the Europe of the future’, it urged the deputies to demand an end to the government’s repressive policies and admonished them to advance ‘Czech rights and Czech desiderata ’ at a time when the ‘Czech fate was being sealed for centuries’.76

  The loyalties of the wider Czech-speaking population in the nation’s Bohemian heartlands are more difficult to pin down. Private correspondence collected by the Empire’s censors testifies to a high state of national consciousness within the community at the start of 1917. Ideas of Czech autonomy were popular but only a small minority, mostly from the middle class or intelligentsia, actively pursued full-scale independence.77 Nonetheless, anger and bitterness were widespread and rising. Bohemia was in tumult in the spring of 1917. There was not enough food or, partly in consequence, coal. Miners in the north-west of the Crownland were so underfed and exhausted by March that production had dropped to just 75 per cent of the norm and some pits had to close. Inhabitants responded with riots and strikes. In Prague, these began as early as February, but soon other cities were also rocked by demonstrations, especially once potatoes disappeared from the market and the bread ration was cut in mid-April.78 Dissidents did their best to channel the anger from mundane concerns about survival into political demands. Police reported graffiti demanding an independent Bohemian state.79 Treasonous posters were put up in towns. One placard that appeared in working-class Uhříněves, on the outskirts of Prague, offered readers the following detailed instructions:

  To the Czech people! One of the main tasks of the Entente states is the liberation of the Czechs and Slovaks from foreign rule. Nine-tenths of Czechs long for this. After the victory of the Entente states the Bohemian lands will leave the union of Austria and from them a Czech state will be formed . . . Thus, keep in mind: 1. Not a single heller for the war loan or other imperial collections. 2. Do not support the war. 3. Don’t believe the newspapers; they lie . . . 4. Call out ‘Up the Entente states’ and ‘Down with Austria’.80

  This sort of propaganda by disaffected individuals made little difference. Nonetheless, in the context of the Russian revolution, the American entry into the war and the Reichsrat’s recall, the demonstrations did quickly acquire overtly political goals. On 30 May, the day parliament reopened, a strike was staged by 6,000 industrial workers in Prague. The authorities referred to it as a ‘peace demonstration’, but the younger workers in particular had other aims. Their first demand was for the release of the treasonous chairman of the Czech National Socialists, Václav Klofáč. In peace, the National Socialists had attracted barely 7 per cent of the Czech vote, but this mass of workers acted in ways that left little doubt they shared the party’s rabidly anti-Habsburg stance. Many loudly denounced the monarchy and cheered both the most prominent wartime Czech exile, the Realist Party’s Tomáŝ Masaryk, and Czech independence. Other workers sung the pan-Slavic anthem ‘Hej Slované’ with an altered line: ‘The Russians are with us and France helps us.’81

  Hungry and angry Czech industrial workers had no monopoly on contempt for the Habsburg government. Extreme deprivation and total lack of faith in the leadership were in fact pretty universal not just in Bohemia but throughout the Empire. At its centre, Vienna, a wry joke playing on the weather vane of the city’s famous cathedral captured the disenchanted mood:

  A German soldier walking around St Stephen’s Cathedral asks a policeman ‘Is that a Catholic Church?’ On receiving an affirmative answer, he expresses surprise that on the tower instead of a cross there is a cockerel. The policeman replies: ‘That’s how it is with us. We always have a dumb animal at the top, and that is our cross’!82

  Demands for independence did not inevitably follow from disgust with rulers, however. Even in the Czech lands, wistful rumours that the Emperor would soon come to Prague and let himself be crowned King of Bohemia, a long-standing Czech demand, or that he would reside in Prague Castle until his wife gave birth to a son, testify to a latent affection for the dynasty.83 Some Czechs may have embraced a belief popular among Austrian Germans that Karl was unaware of the abuses in his realm. More significantly, hatred of the Reich Germans deflected some vitriol from the Habsburgs. The Germans’ aggression seemed unbounded. They were blamed for preventing peace and some Czechs were convinced that they were planning an invasion of Bohemia. Kaiser Wilhelm was considered a madman. One of the more bizarre stories that circulated around Prague in the summer of 1917 was that worker unrest had forced the Kaiser to flee the Reich and he was now hiding in a Bohemian lunatic asylum, where his post was delivered to him by Zeppelin.84

  The material hardship continued over the summer and autumn. At the start of August, the food supply in Bohemia completely collapsed. Not only was there not enough bread or meat but there were also no potatoes, fruit or vegetables for sale. The gathering-in of the harvest brought temporary relief, but in October the supply fell back into crisis. Ironically, the cause was the Habsburg army’s greatest victory of the war, the Caporetto offensive, in which over 250,000 Italian soldiers were captured. The logistics of this Austro-German operation required over half of the Empire’s rolling stock, leaving insufficient wagons to supply its cities with food.85 As morale reports confirmed, nobody cared about the victory; the difficulty of surviving was much more pressing. Large strikes took place. The authorities’ attempt to impose discipline on the arms factories by placing their workers under military law at first worsened the upheaval, as 30,000 workers in the important Ŝkoda arms factory in Plzeň (known also by its German name Pilsen) downed tools at the end of June. Order was restored but the Czech population had become irretrievably alienated. The Czech Social Democrat leader Bohumír Ŝmeral, one of the few who still believed in reform within the Empire, knew he had lost the argument by August. The people, he observed, had embraced a ‘religious-mystical enthusiasm for independence’. Some 95 per cent approved of Masaryk’s efforts to persuade the Entente to support openly the creation of a Czechoslovak state.86 Habsburg security services agreed. By December, the Military Command in Prague was reporting anxiously that ‘national antagonism . . . has climbed alarmingly, the greater Austrian allegiance has sunk to minimum and the mood is correspondingly miserable’.87

  Other nationalities in the Empire were similarly separating from the Habsburg state. A survey of letters by soldiers and civilians at the end of 1917 found in them a revolutionary mood and deep alienation. Among those writers who discussed nationality issues, a minority of 40 per cent, or just 28 per cent if Hungarians and Austrian Germans were excluded, still expressed loyalty to the monarchy.88 However, it was Czech popular opinion that most clearly and quickly translated into politic
al actions. The people’s representatives in the Czech Union felt the rebellious mood on the streets and, in stark contrast to the start of the year when at Czernin’s insistence they had denounced Entente pretensions to be liberators of ‘Tscheco Slovaques’, they now distanced themselves from the Habsburg regime. The declaration at the opening of the Reichsrat in May was only the first step. Over the summer, power within the Union shifted towards radical Czech nationalists, who with the aid of Masaryk’s conspiratorial Maffie were able to prevent the group from participating in the Reichsrat subcommittee formed to advise on constitutional reform. Finally, a new level of defiance, and an important move in the struggle to win Entente recognition of Czech national aspirations, was reached with the Union’s Epiphany Declaration of 6 January 1918. Unlike the statement of May 1917 in the Reichsrat, this made no mention of a future under the Habsburgs. Instead, the Czech deputies even more explicitly echoed President Wilson’s language. Numbering themselves among the ‘democratic nations of the world’, they asserted their people’s ‘right of a free national life and of the self-determination of nations’. These ideals, they emphasized, ‘must be the basis of future international law’. When the Austrian Minister President heard of the proclamation, he angrily dismissed it as ‘war psychosis’. In reality, these dangerous ideas were already shaping central Europe’s future.89

  In Germany, the public mood in the first half of 1917 was a little less depressed than in Austria. The shortages were catastrophic but never so severe as across the border. The Western Front remained solid. In the spring, a British operation at Arras had been halted after a bloody struggle, and on the Chemin des Dames a supposedly decisive offensive by a new French commander, General Robert Nivelle, had been quashed in short order. The U-boats still seemed to offer the promise of a quick victory. Nonetheless, the German people were burdened with sacrifice. The army had lost 1.6 million men killed or missing and another 2.8 million had been wounded.90 At home, the food supply reached its nadir in the summer, with an official ration of just 1,100 calories. Any material of value, from rags to lubricating grease, was being requisitioned for Hindenburg’s rearmament drive. From the middle of the year, this would even extend to the removal of church bells, a measure that caused sadness everywhere and some violent resistance in the Reich’s pious eastern borderlands.91 The majority of Germans may still not have been willing to end the war at any price, but morale was very fragile and the atmosphere fractious. The home district commanders warned ‘that the longing for peace is widespread in general and in all classes of the population’.92 The Third OHL ignored public opinion at its peril. The people, explained another military report astutely, had ‘no desire to continue the war in order to achieve exaggerated war aims. The lower classes right up to deep into the bourgeoisie especially reject such war aims.’93

  Discontent about material hardship, controversy over political reform and disputes about war aims, all inflamed by the Russian revolution, fuelled leftist opposition and radicalism. The SPD leadership’s policy of support for the war and cooperation with the government had already faced growing internal challenge in 1916. The minority who were prepared to defy it were made even angrier by the attempts to suppress their voice. The leadership, or Socialists close to it, had connived with the military to have its anti-war opponents drafted and had wrested control of party newspapers, including the leading Berlin title Vorwärts, from the minority’s control. At the start of 1917, after bitter mutual recrimination, the minority was expelled and in April founded its own party, pointedly named the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). Hugo Haase and Georg Ledebour became its chairmen. The new organization took with it 17 Socialist Reichstag representatives and 57 of the majority SPD’s 357 local election district organizations. Its members were highly diverse, united only by opposition to the war and to the government. The central management was dominated by men such as Haase, who opposed the war, were committed to international Socialism and thought the SPD had sold out. There were old Socialists like Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky who would have preferred to have remained as oppositional voices within the main party. Then, on the USPD’s far left were the Spartakists, genuine revolutionaries who took their name from the slave who led the famous revolt against the Romans. Their best-known leaders, Karl Liebknecht (the first Socialist deputy to vote against war credits) and Rosa Luxemburg, were in jail. They were only a very small group, but they had been almost alone in their readiness to oppose the war and government openly, and consequently they had acquired a notoriety that belied their weakness.94

  Many in Germany’s proletariat were excited by the Russian revolution. Wartime changes to the national economy had hastened the process of alienation. The Hindenburg Programme had closed many smaller firms in the name of efficiency, leaving large, impersonal enterprises with distant or adversarial employee–management relations. An influx of male youth, who became highly skilled workers, accentuated the shift towards militancy. These new labourers were often employed far from the stabilizing influence of their families and like the mass of unskilled workers who entered the armaments factories, they lacked their older peers’ ingrained discipline and respect for the SPD and its unions. In Berlin’s metal industry, a new power, Richard Müller’s revolutionary shop stewards, had risen. These informally organized radicals with influence over thousands of highly skilled and, for the war economy, indispensable lathe operators and other metalworkers stood on the far left wing of the USPD. While the new party attracted only a minority of its parent party’s parliamentary deputies, thanks to these structural changes its membership was nearly equal: 120,000 members, as against the SPD’s 150,000 by the autumn of 1917. Along with the continued deprivation after the ‘turnip winter’ and the impact of the Russian revolution, the new labour force’s more militant composition and leaders also accounts for the growth of strikes in the last two years of war. The two largest and most politicized were those in Berlin and Leipzig in April 1917 and the January 1918 peace strikes, which rocked Austria and Germany.95

  The April 1917 strikes, in which 300,000 workers participated, were sparked by the reduction in the bread ration. In Berlin, the orderly demonstrations that took place on 16 April under union oversight were solely about food, although the release of Richard Müller, arrested a few days earlier, was also successfully demanded. However, in the stoppage that broke out simultaneously in Leipzig the strikers advanced overtly political demands, which over the following days disgruntled workers in Berlin also adopted. They wanted not just higher rations but also the introduction of equal and universal suffrage, a government undertaking that it was ready to seal a non-annexationist peace, and annulment of the Law of Siege, the Auxiliary Service Law and all restrictions on gatherings and the press. Political prisoners were also to be released. The inspiration taken from the uprising to the east was clear from the revolutionary leaflets circulating:

  Workers! Our brothers, the Russian proletariat were in the same situation 4 weeks ago. We know what occurred in Russia: the working people rose there and did not just force the regulation of the food question. It also at the same time – much more importantly – won freedom for itself; something of which the German worker does not yet dare to dream.

  Should we patiently continue to put up with the old misery, the exploitation, the hunger and the mass murder – the cause of all our agony and suffering? No! A thousand times no! Leave the workshops and factories! . . . And recognize your power! . . . Down with the war! Down with the government! Peace! Freedom! Bread!96

  The appearance in Leipzig of a workers’ council to manage the strike was also inspired by the Russian example. The scale of the strikes was menacing, as was the role of USPD deputies in persuading the Berliners to adopt the politicized demands of their Saxon comrades. Nonetheless, the revolutionary potential of the strikes should not be overstated. They were of brief duration, lasting just three days in Leipzig and a week in Berlin. For most participants, the primary grievances were economic. In Leip
zig, where the strike at first appeared most radical, workers were easily pacified by a cut in the working week to fifty-two hours and a wage hike.97

  Even so, General Groener at the Supreme War Office was livid. He was determined not to permit military authority to be challenged and wanted to draft 4,000 strikers as punishment, but he was thwarted by factory owners who feared losing their skilled workforce. The general recognized the need to maintain good relations with the SPD and unions, who were crucial in restraining worker unrest.98 He built on the reputation he had won among them as fair-minded and criticized industrialists who disregarded the aspects of the Auxiliary Service Law that they disliked, as well as striking workers. Wisely, he advised the generals in charge of the home military districts to make a sharp distinction between the majority SPD and the independent Socialists, whom he blamed for the politicization. In Berlin, some factories whose workforce had been particularly recalcitrant were militarized and workers were warned that if they did not return to their jobs, they would be drafted, placed under military discipline and forced to work for much lower soldiers’ pay. A private discussion with Haase, in which Groener threatened to suppress demonstrations on the coming May Day with troops, ended with the Independent Socialist agreeing to restrain the more radical members of his party. Along with coercion, the authorities also tried to touch workers’ patriotism and social conscience. An appeal by Hindenburg warned them that any drop in the production of war materiel through strikes was ‘an irresponsible weakening of our defensive strength and . . . an unforgivable sin against the army and particularly against the man in the trenches, who would have to bleed for it’.99