That's a slippery slope you
really don't wanna go down. IOTL, the Germans only funded the Reds after it became a question of "if we don't, we die next year; if we do, we'll die later but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it".
If you start funding Reds or separatists, you show yourself to have no ideological standards whatsoever and show your willingness to strike low blows in peacetime, which marks you out as dishonorable in a time when honor means something.
Two can play at that game, and there's nobody more motivated to play hard than somebody who's just been low-blowed and a.) wants revenge, and b.) is outraged that you would stoop so low.
And considering the politics of Imperial Russia, you really,
really don't want to touch the Reds around them, because that's guaranteed to end badly for you. Not just because they hate the Reds' guts, but because the Okhrana are elbow-deep into all the revolutionary movements in Europe (the fear of subversion by Okhrana IOTL motivated a lot of the early Leninist purges) (^1). To precede the inevitable "but why didn't they destroy the Reds then?" comment: simple, the country was completely fractured by that point and the Okhrana couldn't exercise that level of
active power anymore even if they still had all their
observatory power.
Given that the Okhrana are the guys whose instruction manuals the KGB followed without modification well into the 70s (ie. back in the glory days of Russian counterintelligence culture), you ought to be very afraid of them if you start playing around in their pen. After all, if they have their hands in the revolutionary and terrorist movements of Europe, they can easily do things to you with them that you wouldn't want done to you (assassinations, bombings, etc).
Germany funding Reds? Well, Russia can fund Reds too, and plenty. Funding Ukrainian separatists? Well, how about fund crazies like the Black Hand or any other thorn in Austria's side?
It's all the sort of stuff that can very easily escalate into a no-holds-barred war, because by the end of the escalation nobody will give a shit about being honorable or holding themselves back.
People didn't play around like this back then for a reason, and it wasn't because they didn't know this sort of shit existed.
Destabilizing elements are like torpedos: once they're out of the tube, they're not your (or anyone else's) friend.
^1: Look up Roman Malinovsky and Yezno Azef. Just goes to show how deep the Okhrana had infiltrated the revolutionary movements, and what they could do with them.
