Austria-Hungary accepts the offer of negotiations

On 30 November 1917 a radio telegram was sent from Vienna “to the government of the Russian Republic”. In it the foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, Count Ottokar Czernin, acknowledged receipt of the circular of the Council of People’s Commissars of 28 November, in which the Russian government announced its readiness for talks on an armistice and a general peace. The principles the Russians had put forward constituted, in the Austro-Hungarian government’s view, a “suitable basis” for such negotiations. Austria-Hungary declared that it would enter into talks on an armistice and a general peace and would send representatives to the negotiations, which were to begin on 2 December. The telegram was received in Petrograd on 1 December. The British chronology of the war records under 30 November that the Austro-Hungarian government accepted the Bolshevik offer of negotiations. Some historians write that the governments in Berlin and Vienna announced their position as early as 29 November, when the new chancellor, Georg von Hertling, spoke in the Reichstag. The text of Czernin’s telegram itself, however, is dated 30 November.

The reply from Vienna was a political step that complemented the military agreement. A few days earlier Russian envoys had crossed the German lines near Dvinsk and returned with the German command’s consent to armistice talks. Lenin’s government, which on 21 November had ordered the supreme command to propose an armistice and had not heard a word from the Allies, could now announce that the government of one of the Central Powers also agreed to talk to it, and on the basis of its own programme. The Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Leon Trotsky, replied to Czernin that the telegram announcing readiness for negotiations “on the basis of the peace programme of the Russian revolution”, that is, without annexations or indemnities and with a guarantee of the right of nations to self-determination, would immediately be made known to the Russian people and to the peoples and governments of the Allied states.

Czernin had from the start been among the advocates of a swift agreement with the Bolsheviks. Austria-Hungary was more exhausted than Germany: food and raw materials were short, and discontent was growing among the population and the nations of the monarchy. Ever since he took office in December 1916, the minister had been seeking a way to peace without breaking the alliance with Germany. On 17 November he wrote in a private letter that in his ministry some did not take Lenin seriously, others did not want to negotiate with a revolutionary, while he himself, as he believed the only one, intended to talk to him: “The shorter Lenin’s period in power is likely to be, the more we must act quickly, for no subsequent Russian government will resume the war.” The calculation was simple. “Peace in the shortest possible time is necessary for our salvation,” he wrote, “and we shall not achieve peace until the Germans reach Paris, and they will not reach Paris until their eastern front is freed.” He complained at the same time that the Germans were dragging their feet, although it was their military men who had worked for Kerensky’s fall.

The Entente regarded the talks with the Central Powers as a betrayal of Russia’s obligations as an ally, and the Allied governments still did not reply to Trotsky’s proposals. The armistice negotiations, in which Austria-Hungary was represented by military men with the diplomat Kajetan von Mérey accompanying them unofficially, began on 3 December at Brest-Litovsk and ended on 15 December with the signing of the armistice. To the peace negotiations, which opened at Brest-Litovsk a week later, Czernin came in person.