ABSTRACT
Austrian attitudes towards the Russian Revolution were characterized by an obvious ambivalence. The Habsburg monarchy’s elites of course disapproved of revolutions, but in the midst of the Great War they could not help but welcome the disaster overtaking their most dangerous rival. In turn, both Russia and Austria-Hungary were going to be compensated by a partitioning of Romania that had been overrun by the Central Powers in late 1916. The Russian Revolution immediately brought the latent differences between the Central Powers into the open, once again. As far as Russia and the Bolsheviks were concerned, in a certain sense, they had ceased to matter for the Austrians. The Austrians could only watch from the sidelines the way conservative Germans and revolutionary Russians played a coquettish game of hide-and-seek. Charles sanctioned the use of force by the Austro-Hungarian troops in the Ukraine to lay hands on whatever supplies they could find.
