indefinitely. At an August 23 session of the Russian parliament, members jeered at Gorbachev, then forced him to fire his entire cabinet. Yeltsin compelled a stunned Gorbachev to read aloud the minutes of an August 19 meeting of the coup plotters. Yeltsin then banned the Party from Russian territory. On August 24, Gorbachev resigned as Party general secretary, turned its assets over to parliament, and curbed its activities in the dwindling USSR. Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, and Latvia declared their independence, followed by Moldova.
Seven members of the Emergency Committee were arrested immediately following the coup’s collapse. Interior Minister Pugo committed suicide. In the immediate aftermath of the putsch, staff at the Central Committee headquarters destroyed thousands of documents. The Russian Duma amnestied the plotters in February 1994, and several were elected to that institution.
The degree of Gorbachev’s complicity in the putsch remains a source of controversy. The KGB placed him under arrest on Sunday evening, August 18, after he refused to resign. Gorbachev insists that he was isolated, betrayed, and fearful for his life. Lukyanov and Yanayev, however, insist that Gorbachev was in on the plans from the beginning and merely waiting to gauge popular reaction. History is still being written on this key event in Russian politics. See also: GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; KRYUCH-KOV, VLADIMIR ALEXANDROVICH; PUGO, BORIS KARLOVICH; UNION TREATY; YAZOV, DMITRY TIMO-FEYEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Billington, James. (1992). Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, Moscow, August 1991. New York: Free Press. Dunlop, John B. (1993). The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1991). The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons. New York: Harper Collins. Remnick, David. (1993). Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House. Yeltsin, Boris. (1994). The Struggle for Russia. New York: Random House.
The Battle of Austerlitz, which occurred on December 2, 1805, was the climactic battle of the War of the Third Coalition (August-December 1805). Having forced an Austrian army to surrender at Ulm in September, Napoleon then chased the Russian army of Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov from the Austrian border on the River Inn to Moravia. There Kutuzov’s army linked up with reinforcements from Russia and Tsar Alexander I joined his troops. Also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, because Napoleon, Emperor Franz of Austria, and Alexander I were all present on the field, Austerlitz was a crushing French victory that sealed the fate of the Third Coalition (Russia, Austria, Great Britain, Naples, and Sweden).
Napoleon’s forces were inferior to those of the coalition, so the French emperor developed a ruse. Having initially seized the dominant Pratzen Heights in the middle of the battlefield, he withdrew from that position, feigning weakness, in order to entice the allies to attack his right flank. When they did so, Napoleon’s forces retook the
AUSTRIA, RELATIONS WITH
Pratzen Heights, where Kutuzov and Alexander himself urged their troops to resist, and then surrounded the remnants of the allied army, inflicting approximately 30 percent casualties on the Russian and Austrian troops.
The victory was so one-sided that Alexander withdrew his army from the campaign altogether, retreating rapidly back to Russian Poland. His departure compelled Emperor Franz to sue for peace, resulting in the lopsided Treaty of Pressburg (1806), that formally ended the war and dissolved the coalition. Although little studied by Russians and Austrians (for reasons of national pride), Austerlitz elsewhere became the paradigm of decisive battles in the nineteenth century, and generals across the continent and even in the United States sought to emulate Napoleon’s accomplishment. See also: ALEXANDER I; KUTUZOV, MIKHAIL ILARIONOVICH; NAPOLEON I
Bowden, Scott. (1997). Napoleon and Austerlitz : An Un-precedentedly Detailed Combat Study of Napoleon’s Epic Ulm-Austerlitz campaigns of 1805. Chicago: Emperor’s Press. Duffy, Christopher. (1999). Austerlitz, 1805. London: Cassell.
FREDERICK W. KAGAN
As they gained control of the Russian lands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the princes of Moscow became a factor in international relations. An Austrian nobleman, Sigismund von Herber-stein, twice led embassies from the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor to Basil III (1505-1533) in Moscow. Herberstein’s Rerum moscoviticarum com-mentarii (Notes on Muscovite Affairs, 1549) helped shape European attitudes to Russia for generations. More sustained relations between Austria and Russia began during the reign of Peter the Great (1689 -1725), who made the Russian Empire a permanent force in the European balance of power.
Austria maintained an alliance with Russia for most of the eighteenth century, because its rival, France, was seeking aid from Russia’s neighbors Poland and Turkey. Austria and Russia prevented Stanislaw Leszczynski, a French-supported candidate to the Polish throne, from unseating the Saxon dynasty in the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735). Russia supported Maria Theresa’s claim to the inheritance of her father, Emperor Charles VI, in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Year’s War (1756-1763).
Austria and Russia joined with Prussia in the First Partition of Poland (1772), a cynical but effective attempt to preserve regional equilibrium by compensating the three powers at Poland’s expense. Austria then supported Empress Catherine II’s ambitions in the Balkans, but, concerned by the threat of the French Revolution, withdrew from the war with Turkey in 1791. While Austria was preoccupied with France, Russia and Prussia cooperated in the Second Partition of Poland (1793), but Austria joined them in the Third Partition following Kosciuszko’s revolt (1795).
During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Russia and Austria were allies in the War of the Second Coalition (1798-1801, Russia withdrew in 1799) and the War of the Third Coalition (1805-1807). French victories forced Austria to make an alliance with Napoleon, sending troops to join his invasion of Russia in 1812. When the invasion failed, however, Austria joined Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain in the final coalition that defeated Napoleon in 1814 and occupied Paris.
Following the Congress of Vienna (1815), Austria signed Alexander I’s Holy Alliance, and the two states generally cooperated to support the conservative order and prevent revolution. Nicholas I (1825-1855) sent a Russian army to help Austria defeat the Hungarian bid for independence in 1849. This was poorly repaid by Austria’s malevolent neutrality during the Crimean War (1853-1856).
After the unification of Italy and Germany, Austria turned its ambitions exclusively to the Balkans, where it clashed with Russia. The Balkan crises in 1875 to 1878 and in 1885 destroyed Otto von Bismarck’s Three Emperors’ League. Subsequent Austro-Russian success at keeping the Balkans “on ice” ended after Russia’s disastrous war with Japan in 1904 to 1905. As Russia turned from the Far East to a more active Balkan policy, Austria in 1908 annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina (occupied since the Congress of Berlin in 1878), leaving Serbia bitter and Russia humiliated. Russia responded by encouraging Balkan cooperation to thwart further Austrian penetration, but instead the Balkan League turned on Turkey in two wars in 1912 and 1913. At the peace conference in Lon100
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don in 1913, Austria blocked Serbian access to the Adriatic, again to Russia’s chagrin.
This accumulation of tension set the stage for the assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, touching off World War I. Austria was determined to punish Serbia for the assassination. Russia’s support for Serbia drew in Germany, Austria’s ally. The German war plan called for an attack on France, Russia’s ally since the 1890s, before Russia could mobilize. The attack, through neutral Belgium, provoked Great Britain’s entry. During the war, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires both collapsed.
The empire’s diminished successor, the Republic of Austria, and the Soviet Union did not enjoy significant relations between the wars. Absorbed into Hitler’s Germany in 1938, Austria regained its independence after World War II because the Allies had decided in 1943 to treat it as liberated, not enemy, territory. Nevertheless, Austria was occupied in four zones, with Vienna, also divided, located in the Soviet zone. On the fault line of the developing Cold War, Austria emerged united, neutral, and free of Soviet domination when the State Treaty was signed in
