Alex Levine’s Reviews > The Fortress: The Siege of Przemyśl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands > Status Update

Other soldiers consciously played up national stereotypes to try to get out of dangerous postings, like a Czech officer saying he was Czech and therefore less competent for leading a patrol.

Weapons of the Weak: soldiers and officers sought to circumvent dangerous postings and restrictions against desertion by catching venereal diseases, which landed them spots in hospitals away from the front line. Among 58 officers being treated by one doctor, only one was wounded; half were being treated for venereal disease.

Very interesting point about East Central Europe as a space of proselytizing and religious contestation exacerbated by incipient national movements in the decades before WW1, especially between Catholic Poles, Greek Orthodox Ruthenian Ukrainians, and Russian Orthodox Russians.

Very important argument: Tsarist visions of “refashion[ing] Galicia in Russia’s own image” entailed a “decapitation strategy” that, though less extensive and deadly, paralleled the Nazi and Soviet occupations post-Molotov Ribbentrop pact - the aim being to eliminate the intelligentsia.

“The fortress…stood as a haven and barrier against a frighteningly modern and radical program of ethnic reorganization intended to change the face of Eastern Europe.”

The several million conscripts cycled through the Tsarist military in the decade before World War I went through an “overtly nationalist training program.” Very important for understanding conceptions of Russianess that become entrained in the Soviet project. Why do (especially American-trained) academic historians give such short shrift to military history, not least given its enormous scale?

“…ethnic prejudice influenced senior Habsburg officers handling of their troops.”

Already by early September 1914, throughout eastern Galicia “political loyalty was being equated with ethnicity,” resulting in mass ethnic cleansing of Ruthenians, conflated with Russophiles. Perhaps a seeing like a state-driven process of envisioning nationality and thus creating it, even if it proved of little interest to many Ukrainian speaking Galician peasants (a la Brubaker in Nationalism Reframed).

Some officers who knew only German relied on bilingual Jews (zB Polish and Yiddish speakers from Krakow) to translate for them because Yiddish functioned close enough to German.

Interesting point that while in peace the Habsburg armies are able to manage their ethnic diversity quite well (commanders required to learn the languages of their units, ie command in German or Hungarian but also know Czech for a primarily Moravian unit), during early wartime mass mobilization and in semi-irregular Landsturm units composed of peasants and urban professionals, it was essentially a “pipe-dream.”