Chapter 25: War and Revolution

The Road to War

Growing Internal Conflict

The First World War began, in part, because European statesmen failed to resolve the diplomatic problems created by Germany’s rise to Great Power status.
But how was peace to be preserved? Bismarck’s first concern was to keep France—bitter over its defeat and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine—diplomatically isolated and without allies
Bismarck’s accomplishments in foreign policy were great, but only temporary.
From 1871 to the late 1880s, he maintained German leadership in international affairs, and he signed a series of defensive alliances with AustriaHungary and Russia designed to isolate France.
The Triple Alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy faced an increasingly hostile Dual Alliance of Russia and France, and the German general staff began secret preparations for a war on two fronts.
As rivalries deepened on the continent, Great Britain’s foreign policy became increasingly crucial. After 1891 Britain was the only uncommitted Great Power.
Many Germans and some Britons felt that the advanced, racially related Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples were natural allies.
There were several reasons for this ill-fated development.
Commercial rivalry in world markets between Germany and Great Britain increased sharply in the 1890s, as Germany became a great industrial power.
Alarmed by Britain’s closer ties to France, Germany’s leaders decided to test the strength of their alliance. In 1905 William II declared that Morocco— where France had colonial interests— was an independent, sovereign state and demanded that Germany receive the same trading rights as France.
The result of the First Moroccan Crisis in 1905 was something of a diplomatic revolution.
Britain, France, Russia, and even the United States began to see Germany as a potential threat.
In 1907 Russia, battered by its disastrous war with Japan and the revolution of 1905, agreed to settle its quarrels with Great Britain in Persia and Central Asia and signed the Anglo-Russian Agreement.
This agreement laid the foundation of the Triple Entente, an alliance between Britain, Russia, and France.
Germany’s decision to expand its navy with a large, enormously expensive fleet of big-gun battleships, known as “dreadnoughts” because of their great size and power, heightened international tensions.
The leading nations of Europe were divided into two hostile camps, both ill-prepared to deal with the worsening situation in the Balkans.
By 1914 many believed that war was inevitable.

The Mood of 1914

Diplomatic rivalries and international crises played key roles in the rush to war, but a complete understanding of the war’s origins requires an account of the “mood of 1914”— the attitudes and convictions of Europeans around 1914.
Germany was especially famous for its powerful and aggressive army, but military institutions played a prominent role in affairs of state and in the lives of ordinary people across Europe.
The continent had not experienced a major conflict since the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), so Europeans vastly underestimated the destructive potential of modern weapons.
Support for military values was closely linked to a growing sense of popular nationalism, the notion that one’s country was superior to all others.
Leading statesmen had practical reasons for promoting militarism and nationalism.
Political leaders had long used foreign adventurism and diplomatic posturing to distract the people from domestic conflicts.
Determined to hold onto power and frightened by rising popular movements, ruling classes across Europe were willing to gamble on diplomatic brinksmanship and even war to postpone dealing with intractable social and political conflicts.

The Outbreak of War

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by Serbian revolutionaries during a state visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.
Princip’s deed, in the crisis-ridden border between the weakened Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, led Europe into world war.
By the early twentieth century nationalism in southeastern Europe was on the rise.
Independent Serbia was eager to build a state that would include all ethnic Serbs and was thus openly hostile to AustriaHungary and the Ottoman Empire, since both states included substantial Serbian minorities within their borders
The tensions in the Balkans soon erupted into regional warfare.
In the First Balkan War (1912), Serbia joined Greece and Bulgaria to attack the Ottoman Empire and then quarreled with Bulgaria over the spoils of victory.
In the Second Balkan War (1913), Bulgaria attacked its former allies. Austria intervened and forced Serbia to give up Albania.
After centuries, nationalism had finally destroyed the Ottoman Empire in Europe.
Within this complex context, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand instigated a five-week period of intense diplomatic activity that culminated in world war.
From the beginning of the crisis, Germany pushed Austria-Hungary to confront Serbia and thus bore much responsibility for turning a little war into a world war.
The diplomatic situation quickly spiraled out of control as military plans and timetables began to dictate policy.
The German general staff had also long thought in terms of a two-front war.
Their misguided Schlieffen Plan called for a quick victory over France after a lightning attack through neutral Belgium— the quickest way to reach Paris— before turning on Russia.
The speed of the so-called July Crisis created shock, panic, and excitement, and a bellicose public helped propel Europe into war.
In a little over a month, a limited Austrian-Serbian war had become a European-wide conflict, and the First World War had begun.

Waging Total War

When the Germans invaded Belgium in August 1914, they and everyone else thought that the war would be short and relatively painless.
On the western front in France and the eastern front in Russia, the belligerent armies bogged down in a new and extremely costly kind of war, termed total war by German general Erich Ludendorff.
Total war meant new roles for soldiers and civilians alike

Stalemate and Slaughter on the Western Front

In the face of the German invasion, the Belgian army heroically defended its homeland and fell back in good order to join a rapidly landed British army corps near the Franco-Belgian border.
On September 6 the French attacked a gap in the German line at the Battle of the Marne.
With the armies stalled, both sides began to dig trenches to protect themselves from machine-gun fire.
By November 1914 an unbroken line of four hundred miles of defensive trenches extended from the Belgian coast through northern France and on to the Swiss frontier.
Armies on both sides dug in behind rows of trenches, mines, and barbed wire defenses, and slaughter on the western front began in earnest.
The cost in lives of trench warfare was staggering, the gains in territory minuscule.
The leading generals of the combatant nations, who had learned military tactics and strategy in the nineteenth century, struggled to understand trench warfare.
The Battle of the Somme, a great British offensive undertaken in the summer of 1916 in northern France, exemplified the horrors of trench warfare.
During the bombardment, the Germans had fled to their dugouts— underground shelters dug deep into the trenches— where they suffered from lack of water, food, or sleep.
As the war ground on, exhausted soldiers found it difficult to comprehend or describe the bloody reality of their experiences at the front.

The Widening War

On the eastern front, the slaughter did not immediately degenerate into trench warfare, and the fighting was dominated by Germany.
Yet Russia continued to fight, marking another failure of the Schlieffen Plan.
To govern these occupied territories, the Germans installed a vast military bureaucracy, with some 15,000 army administrators and professional specialists.
The changing tides of victory and hopes for territorial gains brought neutral countries into the war.
In October 1914 the Ottoman Empire joined Austria and Germany, by then known as the Central Powers.
The following September Bulgaria followed the Ottoman Empire’s lead in order to settle old scores with Serbia.
The Balkans, with the exception of Greece, were occupied by the Central Powers.
The entry of the Ottomans carried the war into the Middle East.
In 1915, at the Battle of Gallipoli, British forces tried and failed to take the Dardanelles and Constantinople from the Ottoman Turks.
The British were more successful at inciting the Arabs to revolt against their Ottoman rulers.
The British enjoyed similar victories in the Ottoman province of Iraq
The war spread to East Asia and colonial Africa as well.
After three years of refusing to play a fighting role, the United States was finally drawn into the expanding conflict.
In May 1915 a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, claiming more than 1,000 lives, among them 139 U.S. citizens.
Early in 1917 the German military command— hoping that improved submarines could starve Britain into submission before the United States could come to its rescue— resumed unrestricted submarine warfare.

The Home Front

Mobilizing for Total War

In August 1914 many people greeted the outbreak of hostilities enthusiastically. In every country, ordinary folk believed that their nation was right to defend itself from foreign aggression.
By the late nineteenth century the responsive national state had already shown an eagerness to manage the welfare of its citizens.
Germany went furthest in developing a planned economy to wage total war.
As soon as war began, the Jewish industrialist Walter Rathenau convinced the government to set up the War Raw Materials Board to ration and distribute raw material.
Following the terrible Battles of Verdun and the Somme in 1916, German military leaders forced the Reichstag to accept the Auxiliary Service Law, which required all males between seventeen and sixty to work only at jobs considered critical to the war effort.
After 1917 Germany’s leaders ruled by decree. Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff— heroes of Tannenberg— drove Chancellor BethmannHollweg from office.
Only Germany was directly ruled by a military government, yet leaders in all the belligerent nations took power from parliaments, suspended civil liberties, and ignored democratic procedures.
The war may have been deadly for citizen armies, but it was certainly good for the growth of the bureaucratic nation-state.

The Social Impact

The social changes wrought by total war were no less profound than the economic impact, though again there were important national variations.
The need for workers meant greater power and prestige for labor unions.
Unions cooperated with war governments on workplace rules, wages, and production schedules in return for real participation in important decisions.
The role of women changed dramatically.
The production of vast amounts of arms and ammunition required huge numbers of laborers, and women moved into skilled industrial jobs long considered men’s work.
The war expanded the range of women’s activities and helped change attitudes about proper gender roles, but the long-term results were mixed.
To some extent, the war promoted greater social equality, blurring class distinctions and lessening the gap between rich and poor.
Death itself had no respect for traditional social distinctions.
It savagely decimated the young aristocratic officers who led the charge, and it fell heavily on the mass of drafted peasants and unskilled workers who followed, leading commentators to speak of a “lost generation.”

Growing Political Tensions

During the first two years of war, many soldiers and civilians supported their governments.
Patriotic nationalism and belief in a just cause united peoples behind their national leaders.
Political and social tensions re-emerged, however, and by the spring of 1916 ordinary people were beginning to crack under the strain of total war.
In April 1916 Irish republican nationalists took advantage of the tense wartime conditions to continue their rebellion against British rule.
On all sides, soldiers’ morale began to decline.
Numerous French units refused to fight after the disastrous French offensive of May 1917.
The strains were even worse for the Central Powers.
In October 1916 a young socialist assassinated the chief minister of Austria-Hungary.
Germans likewise suffered immensely.
The British naval blockade greatly limited food imports, and the scarcity of basic necessities had horrific results: some 750,000 German civilians starved to death.
Such a peace was unthinkable for the Fatherland Party. Yet Germany’s rulers faced growing unrest.
When the bread ration was further reduced in April 1917, more than 200,000 workers and women struck and demonstrated for a week in Berlin, returning to work only under the threat of prison and military discipline.

The Russian Revolution

The Fall of Imperial Russia

Like its allies and enemies, Russia had embraced war with patriotic enthusiasm in 1914.
At the Winter Palace, throngs of people knelt and sang “God Save the Tsar!” while Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) repeated the oath Alexander I had sworn in 1812 during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
Enthusiasm for the war soon waned as better-equipped German armies inflicted terrible losses.
One problem was weak leadership.
Under the constitution resulting from the revolution of 1905, the tsar had retained complete control over the bureaucracy and the army.
A kindly but narrow-minded aristocrat, Nicholas II distrusted the publicly elected Duma and resisted popular involvement in government, relying instead on the old bureaucracy.
His departure was a fatal turning point.
In his absence, Tsarina Alexandra arbitrarily dismissed loyal political advisers.
Imperial Russia had entered a terminal crisis.
Tens of thousands of soldiers deserted, swelling the number of the disaffected at home.
The Duma declared a provisional government on March 12, 1917.
Three days later, Nicholas abdicated.

The Provisional Government

The February Revolution, then, was the result of an unplanned uprising of hungry, angry people in the capital, but it was eagerly accepted throughout the country.
Yet both liberals and moderate socialist leaders rejected these broad political reforms.
Though the Russian people were sick of fighting, the new leaders would not take Russia out of the war.
A new government formed in May 1917 included the fiery agrarian socialist Alexander Kerensky, who became prime minister in July.
From its first day, the provisional government had to share power with a formidable rival— the Petrograd Soviet (or council) of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
The most famous edict of the Petrograd Soviet was Army Order No. 1, issued in May 1917, which stripped officers of their authority and placed power in the hands of elected committees of common soldiers.
In July 1917 the provisional government ordered a poorly considered summer offensive against the Germans.
It was an unparalleled opportunity for the most radical and talented of Russia’s many revolutionary leaders, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924).

Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution

Born into the middle class, Lenin became an enemy of imperial Russia when his older brother was executed for plotting to kill the tsar in 1887.
Three interrelated concepts were central for Lenin.
First, he stressed that only violent revolution could destroy capitalism.
Second, Lenin argued that under certain conditions a Communist revolution was possible even in a predominantly agrarian country like Russia.
Third, Lenin believed that the possibility of revolution was determined more by human leadership than by historical laws.
Other Russian Marxists challenged Lenin’s ideas.
At meetings of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in London in 1903, matters came to a head.
Lenin demanded a small, disciplined, elitist party dedicated to Communist revolution, while his opponents wanted a more democratic, reformist party with mass membership.
The Russian Marxists split into two rival factions. Lenin called his camp the Bolsheviks, or “majority group”; his opponents were Mensheviks, or “minority group.”
Unlike other socialists, Lenin had not rallied around the national flag in 1914.
Arriving triumphantly at Petrograd’s Finland Station on April 3, Lenin attacked at once.
He rejected all cooperation with what he called the “bourgeois” provisional government.
Yet Lenin and the Bolsheviks almost lost the struggle for Russia.
A premature attempt to seize power in July collapsed, and Lenin went into hiding.
Kornilov’s forces disintegrated, but Kerensky lost all credit with the army, the only force that might have saved democratic government in Russia.

Trotsky and the Seizure of Power

Throughout the summer, the Bolsheviks greatly increased their popular support.
Party membership soared from 50,000 to 240,000, and in October the Bolsheviks gained a fragile majority in the Petrograd Soviet.
Painting a vivid but untruthful picture of German and counter-revolutionary plots, Trotsky convinced the Petrograd Soviet to form a special military-revolutionary committee in October and make him its leader.
Thus military power in the capital passed into Bolshevik hands.
On the night of November 6, militants from Trotsky’s committee joined with trusted Bolshevik soldiers to seize government buildings in Petrograd and arrest members of the provisional government.
The Bolsheviks came to power for three key reasons.
First, by late 1917 democracy had given way to anarchy: power was there for those who would take it.
Second, in Lenin and Trotsky the Bolsheviks had an utterly determined and superior leadership, which both the tsarist and the provisional governments lacked.
Third, as Reed’s comment suggests, Bolshevik policies appealed to ordinary Russians.
Exhausted by war and weary of tsarist autocracy they were eager for radical changes.

Dictatorship and Civil War

The Bolsheviks’ truly monumental accomplishment was not taking power, but keeping it.
Over the next four years, they conquered the chaos they had helped create and began to build a Communist society.
Lenin had the genius to profit from developments over which the Bolsheviks had little control.
Since summer, a peasant revolution had swept across Russia, as impoverished peasants had seized for themselves the estates of the landlords and the church.
The Bolsheviks proclaimed their regime a “provisional workers’ and peasants’ government,” promising that a freely elected Constituent Assembly would draw up a new constitution.
Lenin acknowledged that Russia had effectively lost the war with Germany and that the only realistic goal was peace at any price.
At first, Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks refused to accept such great territorial losses.
But when German armies resumed their unopposed march into Russia in February 1918, Lenin had his way in a very close vote.
A third of old Russia’s population was sliced away by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed with Germany in March 1918.
The peace treaty and the abolition of the Constituent Assembly inspired armed opposition to the Bolshevik regime.
By the summer of 1918 Russia was in a full-fledged civil war.
Eighteen self-proclaimed regional governments— several of which represented minority nationalities— challenged Lenin’s government in Moscow.
Lenin and the Red Army beat back the counter-revolutionary White armies for several reasons.
Ironically, foreign military intervention helped the Bolsheviks.
For a variety of reasons, but primarily to stop the spread of communism, the Western Allies (including the United States, Britain, France, and Japan) sent troops to support the White armies.
Other conditions favored a Bolshevik victory as well.
Strategically, the Reds controlled central Russia and the crucial cities of Moscow and Petrograd.
The Bolsheviks mobilized the home front for the war by establishing a system of centralized controls called War Communism.
The leadership nationalized banks and industries and outlawed private enterprise.
Revolutionary terror also contributed to the Communist victory.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks set up a fearsome secret police known as the Cheka, dedicated to suppressing counter-revolutionaries.
By the spring of 1920 the White armies were almost completely defeated, and the Bolsheviks had retaken much of the territory ceded to Germany under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
The Russian civil war was over, and the Bolsheviks had won an impressive victory.

The Peace Settlement

The End of the War

In early 1918 the German leadership decided that the time was ripe for a last-ditch, all-out attack on France.
The defeat of Russia had released men and materials for the western front.
By September British, French, and American armies were advancing steadily on all fronts.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff realized that Germany had lost the war.
As negotiations over an armistice dragged on, frustrated Germans rose up in revolt.
On November 3 sailors in Kiel mutinied, and throughout northern Germany soldiers and workers established revolutionary councils like the Russian soviets.
ocialist leaders in Berlin proclaimed a German republic on November 9 and agreed to tough Allied terms of surrender.
The armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918.
The war was over.

Revolution in Austria-Hungary and Germany

Military defeat brought turmoil and revolution to Austria-Hungary and Germany, as it had to Russia.
Having started the war to preserve an imperial state, the Austro-Hungarian Empire perished in the attempt.
In late 1918 Germany likewise experienced a dramatic revolution that resembled the Russian Revolution of March 1917.
There were several reasons for the German outcome.
The great majority of the Marxist politicians in the Social Democratic Party were moderates, not revolutionaries.
Yet the triumph of the Social Democrats brought violent chaos to Germany in 1918 to 1919.
The new republic was attacked from both sides of the political spectrum.
By the summer of 1920 the situation in Germany had calmed down, but the new republican government faced deep discontent.
Communists and radical socialists blamed the Social Democrats for the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg and the repression in Bavaria.
Right-wing nationalists, including the new Nazi Party, despised the government from the start.

The Treaty of Versailles

In January 1919 over seventy delegates from twentyseven nations met in Paris to hammer out a peace accord.
The conference produced several treaties, including the Treaty of Versailles, which laid out the terms of the postwar settlement with Germany.
This idealism was greatly strengthened by U.S. president Wilson’s January 1918 peace proposal, the Fourteen Points.
The plan called for open diplomacy; a reduction in armaments; freedom of commerce and trade; and the establishment of a League of Nations, an international body designed to provide a place for peaceful resolution of international problems.
Perhaps most important, Wilson demanded that peace be based on the principle of national self-determination, meaning that peoples should be able to choose their own national governments through democratic majority rule elections and live free from outside interference in territories with clearly defined, permanent borders.
The “Big Three”— the United States, Great Britain, and France— controlled the conference.
Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were excluded, though their lands were placed on the negotiating table.
Almost immediately, the Big Three began to quarrel.
Wilson, who was wildly cheered by European crowds as the champion of democratic international cooperation, was almost obsessed with creating the League of Nations.
The question of what to do with Germany dominated discussions among the Big Three.
Clemenceau wanted Germany to pay for its aggression.
In the end, Clemenceau, fearful of future German aggression, agreed to a compromise.
Clemenceau gave up the French demand for a Rhineland buffer state in return for French military occupation of the region for fifteen years and a formal defensive alliance with the United States and Great Britain.
The various agreements signed at Versailles redrew the map of Europe, and the war’s losers paid the price.
The new independent nations carved out of the AustroHungarian and Russian Empires included Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, the Baltic States, and Yugoslavia.
The Treaty of Versailles, signed by the Allies and Germany, was key to the settlement.
Germany’s African and Asian colonies were given to France, Britain, and Japan as League of Nations mandates or administered territories, though Germany’s losses within Europe were relatively minor, thanks to Wilson.
More harshly, in Article 231, the famous war guilt clause, the Allies declared that Germany (with Austria) was entirely responsible for the war and thus had to pay reparations equal to all civilian damages caused by the fighting.
The rapidly concluded Versailles treaties were far from perfect, but within the context of war-shattered Europe they were a beginning.
Yet the great hopes of early 1919 had turned to ashes by the end of the year.
The Western alliance had collapsed, and a grandiose plan for permanent peace had given way to a fragile truce.
There were several reasons for this turn of events.
First, the U.S. Senate and, to a lesser extent, the American people rejected Wilson’s handiwork.
A second cause for the failure of the peace was that the principle of national self-determination, which had engendered such enthusiasm, was good in theory but flawed in practice.
In the colonies, desires for self-determination were simply ignored, leading to problems particularly in the Middle East.

The Peace Settlement in the Middle East

Although Allied leaders at Versailles focused mainly on European questions, they also imposed a political settlement on what had been the Ottoman Empire.
The British government had encouraged the wartime Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks (see page 836) and had even made vague promises of an independent Arab kingdom.
In the secret accord, Britain and France agreed that former Ottoman territories would be administered by the European powers under what was later termed the mandate system.
British plans for the former Ottoman lands that would become Palestine further angered Arab nationalists.
The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, written by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour had announced that Britain favored a “National Home for the Jewish People” in Palestine, but without discriminating against the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities already living in the region.
In 1914 Jews accounted for about 11 percent of the population in the three Ottoman districts that the British would lump together to form Palestine; the rest of the population was predominantly Arab.
Though Arab leaders attended the Versailles Peace Conference, their efforts to secure autonomy in the Middle East came to nothing.
The Western reaction was swift and decisive.
A French army stationed in Lebanon attacked Syria, taking Damascus in July 1920.
The Allies sought to impose even harsher terms on the defeated Turks than on the “liberated” Arabs
Turkey survived the postwar invasions. Led by Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), the Turks refused to acknowledge the Allied dismemberment of their country and gradually mounted a forceful resistance.
Kemal, a nationalist without religious faith, believed that Turkey should modernize and secularize along Western lines.
By the time of his death in 1938, Kemal had implemented much of his revolutionary program and moved Turkey much closer to Europe, foretelling current efforts by Turkey to join the European Union as a full-fledged member.

The Human Costs of the War

World War I broke empires, inspired revolutions, and changed national borders on a world scale.
It also had immense human costs, and ordinary people in the combatant nations struggled to deal with its legacy in the years that followed.
The number of dead, the violence of their deaths, and the nature of trench warfare made proper burials difficult, if not impossible.
Millions of ordinary people grieved, turning to family, friends, neighbors, and the church for comfort.
Towns and villages across Europe raised public memorials to honor the dead and held ceremonies on important anniversaries: on November 11, the day the war ended, and in Britain on July 1, to commemorate the Battle of the Somme.
The victims of the First World War included millions of widows and orphans and huge numbers of emotionally scarred and disabled veterans.
The German case is illustrative.
Nearly 10 percent of German civilians were direct victims of the war, and the new German government struggled to take care of them.
The human cost of the war thus had another steep price: across Europe, newly formed radical right-wing parties, including the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists, successfully manipulated popular feelings of loss and resentment to undermine fragile parliamentary governments.