Early contacts with suitable figures amongst the anti-Bolshevik Russians, most notably the Kadet Pavel Miliukov, ousted as Russian Foreign Minister by the Petrograd Soviet in May 1917, led to the conclusion that no self-respecting Russian patriot would ever accept the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, let alone Ludendorff’s even more expansive vision.18 Furthermore, as Kühlmann and the Reichstag anxiously pointed out, the German military were alarmingly unclear about how their expansive visions of hegemony in the East were to be reconciled with the demands of the war in the West. Though wave
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