The New Europe/Volume 6/Number 70/Trotski and Czernin

Trotski and Czernin

The contrast between two such negotiators as Mr. Trotski and Count Czernin has acquired an added piquancy from a speech delivered on 17 January by the Austrian Minister of the Interior, Count Toggenburg (of whom the correspondent of the Vossische Zeitung wrote on 22 January that “he of all ministers has played the most unfavourable rôle in these days, and that “the contempt which greeted his speech shows that in so great a struggle of principle nothing can be attained by weak-kneedness and Jesuitical allures”).

“You may think,” he said, “that there is a certain difficulty in the fact that at the peace negotiations at Brest an Excellency, who happens to be a Count, is opposed to a man of the people of the type of Trotski. Unfortunately, I have not the honour to know Trotski. I only know him by the accounts of the Social Democrats and descriptions in the press. On the other hand, I know Count Czernin fairly well, and though it may perhaps seem a paradox, I can tell you with full conviction that there are many resemblances between Count Czernin and Trotski, and that this very accident, that two similar men confronted each other at Brest, offers a guarantee that the negotiations will go well. It is said that Trotski would not hesitate a moment to go out into the world again as a cabin boy or to end as a convict, or perhaps even worse. Exactly the same is true of Count Czernin. He is a man who does not yield one step from his convictions, even if it should cost him all his position and make a beggar of him. That he does not care about: he follows his straight course, and is one of the stiffest and most logical natures that I have ever met. He is so little attached to traditional or feudal ideas or the like, that he stands in a quite vital conflict with many Excellencies and Counts. And so I believe that Czernin really has no aim save to attain a peace acceptable to Austria, and that he is just the man for our time, the man upon whom you can all rely. He will not on any account allow the peace negotiations to break down, unless quite impossible demands are made of him. . .”

On 25 January, in the Austrian Delegation, Count Czernin himself made the following witty comment:—” Dr. Stransky, in his speech, expressed regret and sympathy for me at the comparison between me and Trotski. Now, I am convinced that Mr. Trotski, when he reads Mr. Stransky’s speech, will be very disagreeably impressed, and I do not complain of this at all, because I am not so conceited as to think that any one must needs be pleased at being compared to me. I confess, however, that it is also not my ambition to resemble Mr. Trotski, and in one point there is certainly a difference between him and me. We both of us—and that is a remarkable coincidence—went back to our representative homes in order to obtain a vote of confidence from our respective constitutional bodies. Mr. Trotski failed to obtain this, and as a necessary result he collected machine guns and broke up the Constituent Assembly. If you do the same to me I shall not fetch any sailors, I shall resign. I leave it to you to decide which course is more consistent with freedom and democracy.”

No one with any democratic feeling will deny that Mr. Trotski richly merited this rebuke: but we cannot leave the subject without reminding our readers that Count Czernin knows better than most men how effectually the sham constitutional arrangements of Hungary, and to a lesser degree of Austria, prevent all possibility of self-determination on the part of the non-German and non-Magyar races.

We note that the Nation (9 February) quotes the former extract without the latter.