Habersack, Sabine - Puşcaş, Vasile - Ciubotă, Viorel (szerk.): Democraţia in Europa centrală şi de Sud-Est - Aspiraţie şi realitate (Secolele XIX-XX) (Satu Mare, 2001)
Teodor Pavel: Wold War I and Revolutionary Options in Central-Eastern Europe: the Project of the "Insurrection" of Romania at the End of the Year 1917
desperate and so frightening for us that Nando says he seen the end approaching with giant steps. I try to encourage him... . I truly believe that our situation is totally frightful. The Russians decided to ask for peace and they try to force us to do the same; and if we don't want to do it, they say that they will take the royal family as prisoners together with the government”17. As the government of the Soviets started the negotiations in Brest- Litovsk, the Russian-Romanian troops from the Moldavian front received the order to do the same. So that in November 20th/December 3rd, the general Dimitri Grigorievici Scerbacev, the commander of about a million of Russian soldiers and officers from the Romanian front, sent a telegram from Iassy to the feldmarschal Mackensen and to the archduke Iosif in which he proposed them to start the negotiations in Focşani in order to “conclude an armistice with the Russian and Romanian troops from the Romanian front”18. The Romanians had the feeling that they were “the victims of a treacherous act unprecedented in history” as the king Ferdinand considered it and expressed it in the Council of Ministries meeting the following day19. In the limit situation in which she has been brought, Romania concludes a provisional armistice with the Central Powers in Focşani in 1917, November 26th. During the négociations from Brest-Litovsk, to which Romania has not been invited, the bolshevised Russian soldiers started again their actions against the Romanian state authorities. They organized new street manifestations, attacked the food warehouses and opened the gates of Iassy prison20. Their disarming by the unities of the Romanian-army in the dawn of the December 9th/22nd 1917 was justified both by the necessity of safeguarding of the Romanian state sovereignty and by the imperative of the counteracting the diversion planned by Berlin and carried out with the Soviet's power from Petrograd at whose orders the Soviets of the Russian soldiers on the Romanian front acted. If these facts are generally known in our historiography, the unpublished archivistic sources bring forth the role played by Rakovski in the carrying out of the German-Bolshevic plan of “insurrection” of Romania at the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918. 17 Queen Maria, Povestea vieţii mele (The story of My Life), vol. II, Ed. Moldavia, Iaşi, 1991, p. 308. 18 România în anii primului război mondial ( Romania in the First Years of the I WW), vol. II, p. 15. 19 I.G. Duca, op. cit. ,voI. II, p. 15 20 I. Scurtu, op. cit., p. 45. World War I and Revolutionary Options 93
