Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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238 matthew stibbe

concessions outside Europe; but if it refused to attend the conference, then the

United States would “probably” enter the war on the side of the Allies (the House–

Grey memorandum, February 22, 1916). Wilson knew of and approved House’s

statement to Grey, but later tried to distance himself from direct involvement in the

affairs of Europe when it became clear that this might jeopardize his chances of being

reelected as president in November 1916. The French and British governments were

also reluctant to commit themselves to speciﬁc peace terms before they knew the

views of their other alliance partners (i.e., Italy, Russia, and Japan).

Wilson’s election victory in November enabled him to return to his quest for peace

in Europe and the reordering of international relations. A key turning point came

on December 5 when the Central Powers offered a general peace without speciﬁc

terms, thereby preempting Wilson’s own offer of mediation which was issued two

weeks later. Wilson’s offer enabled Britain and France to put forward their own peace

proposals, while highlighting the fact that Berlin was simply looking for an excuse to

resume unrestricted submarine warfare. Allied unity remained unshaken, in spite of

the Central Powers’ victory over Romania and a worsening supply crisis in Russia.

In the early part of 1917 German diplomacy made its most serious blunder yet,

when, in anticipation of a ﬁnal break with the United States over unrestricted sub-

marine warfare, the foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a secret telegram to

the German ambassador in Mexico instructing him to offer the Mexican government

ﬁnancial support and the chance to reconquer the lost territories of New Mexico,

Texas, and Arizona in return for a joint declaration of war against America. This so-

called “Zimmermann Telegram” was intercepted by British intelligence and published

in the United States on March 1, 1917, thus playing straight into the hands of Wilson

and the advocates of war. The offense caused by Zimmermann was made even worse

by his apparent offer of a similar deal to Japan to join in an attack on the USA. It

was only a matter of time before Wilson made a formal declaration on this issue, and

he now had most of the nation behind him, including the previously isolationist states

in the southwest.

Meanwhile, the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in Russia in March 1917 opened

up new opportunities for a settlement in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet’s

call for a peace without annexations or indemnities. Strikers in Germany in April

1917 raised the same demand, but it was ignored by both the German and Russian

governments, and by the western Allies, who preferred to engage in secret talks with

the new rulers in Petrograd, as well as with contacts in Vienna. A French plan to

negotiate a separate peace with Austria-Hungary via Prince Sixtus de Bourbon, the

brother-in-law of the new Emperor Karl, foundered because of Italian opposition in

April 1917, while the provisional government in Russia publicly conﬁrmed its claim

to Constantinople and the Straits in May 1917. In Germany, the new Chancellor

Georg Michaelis paid lip-service to the Reichstag peace resolution of July 19, 1917,

which rejected “territorial acquisitions imposed by force” and called for a “peace of

understanding” in order to banish “hostility between nations.” In reality, though,

the high command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff now controlled German war

aims policy behind the scenes and were able to block any moves towards what they

saw as a policy of surrender.

The nearest the powers came to a negotiated settlement was in the late summer

of 1917, when the Papal Peace Note of August 1, coupled with reports of the

the war from above 239

imminent collapse of Russia’s war effort on the eastern front, encouraged the opening

of tentative channels of communication between Germany and Britain. In September

1917 Lloyd George came close to accepting the idea of a separate peace at the expense

of Russia, but his cabinet colleagues were unwilling to jeopardize the unity of the

Entente and insisted that Britain’s partners would have to be approached ﬁrst. In

Berlin, however, the new foreign secretary, Richard von Kühlmann, was unwilling to

negotiate with the Allies as a whole, believing that this was not to the Central Powers’

advantage. Fierce opposition from the admiralty, backed by the high command, also

prevented him from offering Britain the one concession that might have ended the

war: unconditional restoration of Belgium, including the Flanders coast.

Meanwhile,

another channel of communication, this time between Germany and France, was

closed after the French foreign minister, Alexandre Ribot, vetoed a proposed meeting

between French and German ofﬁcials in Switzerland. In the end, as David Stevenson

argues, the rulers in Berlin were unwilling to sacriﬁce any meaningful part of their

war aims program in the west in exchange for peace. What was offered was too vague

to persuade either France or Britain to abandon Russia, which was still at this time

ruled by a provisional government under the moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky

and remained – at least in theory – committed to the war.

Events in Petrograd and

on the eastern front were nonetheless to prove critical in the following weeks.

The Turning Point: November 1917–November 1918

While the summer of 1917 had seen a ﬂurry of diplomatic initiatives in favor of a

negotiated peace, in the last few months of that year both sides suddenly became

more optimistic that victory could be achieved by military means. In Germany, for

instance, Hindenburg and Ludendorff believed that they could knock Russia out of

the war before the end of the winter, allowing them to plan a new offensive in France

for the following spring. The Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 led to

the complete collapse of the Russian army on the eastern front, and an armistice was

signed in December. Foreign Secretary Kühlmann’s pleas for a moderate peace settle-

ment with Russia were brushed aside by Ludendorff, and the eventual Treaty of

Brest-Litovsk gave Germany direct or indirect control over vast swathes of non-

Russian (but formerly tsarist-ruled) territory in eastern Europe. Austria-Hungary, the

junior partner in the negotiations, was now on its last legs, with Germany taking

ruthless advantage of the weakness of its ally to demand a dominant position in

Poland, Courland, Lithuania, the Baltic provinces, Finland, and the Ukraine.

Britain and France were also more optimistic about the possibility of victory by

the end of 1917. The German submarine blockade had been largely overcome

through the adoption of the convoy system, and American credits had restored Allied

ﬁnances to a reasonable state of health. The news from the east was grim, and up to

300,000 Italians had been captured at Caporetto in October 1917, but this was

at least partly offset by the growing number of US soldiers arriving in France.

Furthermore, there were signs that the home fronts in Germany and Austria-Hungary

were beginning to crack, with big strikes in Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, and other major

industrial cities in January 1918. Above all, Wilson’s Fourteen Points seemed to add

moral force to the Allied cause, and although the president had clearly not endorsed

all of the Allies’ war aims, he at least seemed to support the demand for the full

240 matthew stibbe

restoration of Belgium, Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro, the return of Alsace-

Lorraine to France, the creation of an independent Poland, the granting of “autono-

mous development” to the subject nations of Austria-Hungary, and the “readjustment

of the frontiers” between Austria and Italy “along clearly recognizable lines of nation-

ality.” There was thus everything still to ﬁght for.

Nonetheless, when the German spring offensive began in March 1918, the Allies

were caught on the defensive and Ludendorff’s armies again got perilously close to

reaching their target, Paris. Only after the military turn-around in July and August,

when German units were forced into full-scale retreat on the western front, followed

by the total collapse of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria-Hungary a few weeks later, did

Hindenburg and Ludendorff call for the opening of secret talks with the enemy.

Constitutional reforms were also announced, in order to make Germany appear more

democratic. In the course of negotiations, however, the issue of the monarchy arose,

with Wilson again calling for the Kaiser to abdicate as a precondition for an armistice.

In late October the extreme right-wing Fatherland Party, a successor to the

Independent Committee for a German Peace, brieﬂy considered the idea of launching

a popular uprising in defense of the monarchy and in favor of continuation of war,

but this project never got off the ground. By the beginning of November 1918, with

naval mutinies spreading from Wilhelmshaven and Kiel to other German ports, and

workers’ and soldiers’ councils taking control of many key cities, rumors circulated

that the government had fallen and the socialists had seized power. Other rumors

suggested that the Kaiser might be gathering together an army from loyal remnants

in Belgium which would march back into Germany to restore law and order. Civil

war was indeed in the air and it was now clear that the war was lost.

In the end, the German revolution, when it came, was considerably less violent

than at ﬁrst feared. The Kaiser was advised to go quietly on November 9, ﬂeeing

from Supreme Headquarters in Spa, Belgium to the safety of the Netherlands, where

he formally abdicated on November 28. Meanwhile, moderate socialists led by

Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann prevented a fully-ﬂedged communist take-

over by negotiating a secret deal with the new ﬁrst quartermaster general of the army,

General Groener, to crush any “Bolshevik” disturbances. The new German republic

was to be a western-style parliamentary democracy, and not a Leninist “dictatorship

of the proletariat.” Nonetheless, the total surrender of November 11 came as a shock

to the German people, who had been led by the press to believe in victory almost

up until the last week of the war. Some could never accept defeat: instead, they took

ﬂight in myths about the invincibility of the German army and the alleged treachery

of the home front.

Most soldiers were glad to go home, however, and it is interest-

ing to note that in September 1939 enthusiasm for war was far less evident in

Germany – and elsewhere in Europe – than it had been in August 1914.

NOTES

1 Fritz Fischer,

Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto and Windus,

1967), esp. pp. 103–6.

2 On the Independent Committee see K.-H. Schädlich, “Der ‘Unabhängige Ausschuß für

einen deutschen Frieden’ als Zentrum der Annexionspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg,”

the war from above 241

in Politik im Krieg. Studien zur Politik der deutschen herrschenden Klassen im Ersten

Weltkrieg, Fritz Klein et al, eds (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1964), pp. 50–65.

3 Helmut Stoecker, ed.,

German Imperialism in Africa (London: Hurst, 1986),

p. 290. See also Holger H. Herwig, “Admirals versus Generals: The War Aims

of the Imperial German Navy, 1914–1918,” Central European History 5 (1972):

208–33.

4 See Ulrich Trumpener,

Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (Princeton NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 370.

5 Holger H. Herwig,

The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918

(London: Arnold, 1997), p. 160.

6 See Horst G. Linke,

Das zarische Rußland und der Erste Weltkrieg. Diplomatie und

Kriegsziele, 1914–1917 (Munich: W. Fink, 1982), p. 39.

7 On the Belgian question, see John Horne and Alan Kramer,

German Atrocities 1914: A

History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

8 See David Stevenson,

French War Aims against Germany, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1982), pp. 53–6.

9 On British war aims the key book is Victor H. Rothwell,

British War Aims and Peace

Diplomacy, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). See also Kenneth J. Calder,

Britain and the Origins of the New Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1976).

10 David Lloyd George,

British War Aims: Statement by the Prime Minister on January 5th

1918 (London: HMSO, 1918), pp. 6, 14.

11 David Stevenson,

The First World War and International Politics (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1988), p. 107.

12 Ibid, p. 112.

13 David Lloyd George,

War Memoirs, vol. 2, new edn (London: Odhams Press, 1938), p.

1092.

14 Wilson’s reply to Pope Benedict XV, as reproduced in Lloyd George,

War Memoirs, pp.

1220–2.

15 Joseph Grew to his father-in-law, Tom Perry, 6 December 1914, in Houghton Library,

Cambridge, MA, Grew Papers, MS Am 1687 (5). Cited by permission of the Houghton

Library, Harvard University.

16 John Keegan,

The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998), p. 402.

17 See A. J. P. Taylor,

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1954), p. 535.

18 See Fischer,

Germany’s Aims, pp. 120ff.

19 See Keegan,

The First World War, p. 268.

20 Matthew Stibbe,

German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 135.

21 Niall Ferguson, “Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards

a Political Economy of Military Defeat,” War in History 11 (2004): 148–92. Cf. Ferguson,

The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane, 1998), pp. 339–88.

22 Stibbe,

German Anglophobia, p. 135.

23 See Herwig,

First World War, p. 318.

24 See Keegan,

First World War, p. 401.

25 See Lancelot L. Farrar, Jr,

Divide and Conquer: German Efforts to Conclude a Separate

Peace, 1914–1918 (London: East European Quarterly, 1978), esp. pp. 13–34.

26 See Barbara Tuchman,

The Zimmermann Telegram (London: Constable, 1959).

27 See Herwig, “Admirals

versus Generals,” p. 220.

28 David Stevenson, “War Aims and Peace Negotiations,” in

World War I: A History, Hew

Strachan, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 210–11.

242 matthew stibbe

29 See, for example, Annelise Thimme, Flucht in den Mythos. Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei

und die Niederlage von 1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1969); Ulrich

Heinemann, Die verdrängte Niederlage. Politische Öffentlichkeit und Kriegsschuldfrage in

der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1983).

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Lancelot L. Farrar Jr, Divide and Conquer: German Efforts to Conclude a Separate Peace,

1914–1918 (London: East European Quarterly, 1978). An important monograph on an

important subject.

Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane, 1998). Offers fresh perspectives on a

whole range of issues, including a useful chapter on prisoners of war.

Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967).

The English translation of the 1961 classic that launched the so-called “Fischer

controversy.”

Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (London:

Arnold, 1997). Provides an extended analysis of the German and Austrian war efforts.

Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz, eds, Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg

(Paderborn,: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003). A substantial reference book, with hundreds of

entries by leading scholars in the ﬁeld.

John Keegan, The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998). A detailed military history

written by an expert in this genre.

Hort G. Linke, Das zarische Rußland und der Erste Weltkrieg. Diplomatie und Kriegsziele,

1914–1917 (Munich: W. Fink, 1982). A thorough investigation of Russian war aims.

Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (Cambridge MA: Harvard

University Press, 1959). Good on the submarine controversy from an international

perspective.

Wolfgang Michalka, ed., Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse (Munich: Piper,

1994). Forty-two essays, including many on the question of strategy and war aims.

Victor H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1971). The best and most detailed book on British war aims.

David Stevenson, French War Aims Against Germany, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1982). The best and most detailed book on French war aims.

David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1988). Provides a clear and concise synthesis.

Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001). Focuses on the domestic background to the submarine controversy

in Germany.

Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (Princeton NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1968). An intelligent and well-written monograph on German–Turkish

relations.

Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (London: Constable, 1959). Still the standard

account after nearly ﬁfty years.

The World War I Document Archive at www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/. A useful website con-

taining the full texts of the key treaties, declarations, speeches, and memoranda discussed

in the above essay.

Chapter Sixteen

The War and Revolution

Mark Baker

One of the most widespread and consequential results of the Great War was revolu-

tion. While most non-specialists think only of the Russian revolution in this regard,

in fact the war sparked several upheavals of various kinds and varying magnitudes

across the European continent. In 1917–18 the three dynastic empires that ruled

over much of the land area of Europe (Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern),

worn down by the intense, protracted economic and social strains of ﬁghting indus-

trial warfare, collapsed into chaos and revolution. Although nineteenth-century

Europe is often portrayed by contrast as a sort of paradise lost, there were in fact

serious class and national tensions in many countries in the period leading up to the

war. Along with an increasing life expectancy, material improvement, and technologi-

cal advances, industrialization brought a large and growing urban working poor,

living in vast, dirty, disease-ridden and alienating cities. These working people were

increasingly drawn to and inspired by the ideas of social democracy, creating a for-

midable working-class movement before 1914 (particularly in Germany). At the same

time, industrialization (especially by requiring literacy) and democratization (inspired

by the American and French revolutions) promoted and encouraged the nationalisms

of the various subject peoples of these empires, especially in Austria-Hungary. And

because the ruling elites of these empires repeatedly rejected or ignored the have-

nots’ demands, many of the latter increasingly looked to a general war as a possible

path to improving their lives. While this prewar situation certainly played an impor-

tant role in the outbreak of revolution, this essay will focus on the ways in which the

Great War contributed to the collapse of these empires, to show how the war exac-

erbated existing tensions and turned discontent into revolution. These empires

encountered similar problems as the war progressed, but reacted in different ways

depending on their particular circumstances.

Revolutions in the Russian Empire

Certainly, a revolutionary movement among some sections of the educated

classes emerged in the Russian Empire long before World War I, at the latest by

244 mark baker

1861, when Alexander II ﬁnally emancipated Russia’s huge serf population

(the last major European state to do so) and instituted a number of other

reforms in response to defeat in the Crimean War, 1853–6. The members of this

“intelligentsia,” as it came to call itself, demanded a radical transformation of

the empire and frequently the end of autocracy. They gradually formed into

political parties, the most important of which were the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)

and the Social Democrats (SDs); the latter in about 1903 split into the Mensheviks

and Bolsheviks. In 1905 this revolutionary movement, along with Russia’s defeat

in the Russo-Japanese war, Bloody Sunday, January 9, 1905 (when government

troops were ordered to ﬁre on peaceful workers petitioning the tsar), workers’ strikes,

and peasant land seizures, combined to provoke the ﬁrst Russian revolution. In the

face of mounting chaos, Tsar Nicholas II begrudgingly issued a Manifesto (not a

constitution), granting “his subjects” inviolability of person, freedom of speech,

assembly, and association; and a kind of parliament, called a Duma, elected by

estates. These changes appeared to be and were celebrated as fundamental and

promising: Russia was ﬁnally moving toward democracy. In fact, they were illusory:

neither Nicholas nor the educated public was committed to playing by the new rules

of the game. The government soon took steps to change the rules; in June 1907

newly appointed prime minister Petr Stolypin had Nicholas dissolve the quite radical

and oppositionist Second Duma. Stolypin then used a special emergency law

to pass legislation sharply curtailing the Duma’s electoral franchise, favoring the

propertied classes (about 1 percent of the empire’s population now elected a majority

of deputies). Over the next seven years other rights were curtailed and frequently

violated. After a brief respite, a renewed strike wave began in 1912, sparked by the

massacre of workers at the Lena goldﬁelds, and culminating in massive strikes on the

eve of the war.

Almost since the outbreak of the February revolution, historians have debated

the war’s role in the Russian Empire’s sudden collapse. While historians in the west

stressed the war’s decisiveness, Soviet historians increasingly proclaimed the revolu-

tion’s inevitability: the war was the tsarist regime’s last ditch effort to stop the great

revolutionary upsurge engulﬁng the country; it only delayed the revolution. The

“scientiﬁcally determined progress” towards the Great October Socialist Revolution

was inevitable. These positions held until about 1964, when Leopold Haimson pub-

lished the ﬁrst serious attempt to analyze social change in the Russian Empire on the

eve of the war. Based on his analysis of the available published documents, Haimson

argued that in the period leading up to World War I dual polarizations were splitting

the empire: a growing political and social rift between industrial workers and the

better-off members of urban society; and another divergence between all urbanites

(workers and non-workers alike) and the ruling elite supporting Nicholas and autoc-

racy. Charting these widening cleavages, Haimson concluded: “What the war years

would do was not to conceive, but to accelerate substantially, the two broad processes

of polarization that had already been at work in Russian national life during the

immediate prewar period.”

Haimson’s work sparked a ﬂurry of debate on the inevi-

tability of the revolution and a great deal of research into the role of the masses in

the upheavals of 1917.

Although the question of the revolution’s inevitability has

not been settled, there is no doubt that Russia’s participation in the war greatly

contributed to the revolutions of 1917.

the war and revolution 245

The proclamation of war provoked some ﬂeeting enthusiasm and expressions of

unity, but these were quickly dashed. Although educated society earnestly embraced

the initial call to arms and thought that the masses would follow their lead, in fact

most soldiers (the majority of whom were peasants) trudged off to war with sullen

resignation. At the front, after some initial successes, especially against the weaker

and poorly mobilized Austro-Hungarian army in Eastern Galicia, the army’s repeated

defeats and retreats greatly depressed and defused early enthusiasm. Horriﬁc battle-

ﬁeld experiences – death, destruction, and incompetent command – turned resigna-

tion into resentment. By late 1916, 3.6 million were dead, seriously sick, or wounded.

Not surprisingly, frontline soldiers numbered prominently among the most radical

revolutionaries in 1917.

As in all belligerent countries, more civilian involvement was provoked in Russia

than in all previous wars. Although the government was resistant to such public

participation, by 1915, facing a catastrophic shortage of munitions, it agreed to the

organization of War Industries Committees, set up by leading industrialists to coordi-

nate and expand military supplies. The state was characteristically suspicious of these

very patriotic committees; not only was it resistant to the creation of worker represen-

tatives on the committees, but it also denied even the leading industrialists essential

access to state institutions and information. In essence the bureaucracy saw the com-

mittees (and the public in general) not as partners, but as rivals.

Other similarly com-

posed organizations were established to deal with various aspects of the war, especially

food supply, with similar results. In consequence, the war mobilized not only soldiers,

but also much of educated society, whose efforts the state largely frustrated. And as

defeat followed defeat, greater public involvement led to greater public criticism.

Russian liberals and even some conservatives became increasingly disparaging of

the government; their main criticism was not its continuing unwillingness to share

political power with them as much as its horrid prosecution of the war. In November

1916 a leading liberal, Pavel Miliukov, concluded a poignant speech to the Duma

on the government’s conduct of the military campaign by asking the deputies: “What

is it, stupidity or treason?” The deputies overwhelmingly (and more conﬁdently than

Miliukov) supported the latter interpretation.

The war, into which the tsar had

stumbled in an effort to prop up Russia’s waning great power status, delegitimized

his authority more than any other event in 300 years of Romanov rule.

Another very consequential result of the war was a rapid increase in the price and

decrease in the availability of basic foodstuffs, which the urban working population

especially resented. Recent research has shown that this was not a result of lower

harvests but rather the empire’s insufﬁcient transportation system and the demands

of the front. In early 1917 railway cars full of spoiling food sat on rails in the south,

while most of the locomotives were being used to move men, weapons, and food to

the front. Territorial squabbles among provincial ofﬁcials added to the problem.

Hence, food, especially bread, became increasingly rare and expensive, contributing

greatly to the urban working population’s anger, unrest, strikes, and other distur-

bances, especially in the capitals, Moscow and Petrograd.

By early 1917 the war had created an explosive concoction in Russia: educated

society considered the government inept and the tsar no longer in control; economic

conditions were terrible; workers, despite the danger of being sent to the front,

increasingly went on strike; peasants at home believed that a radical reordering of

246 mark baker

rural land relations was in the ofﬁng; radicalized soldiers at the front were on the

verge of revolt. All were extremely war-weary and there was a creeping feeling that

something had to give.

A new strike wave began on January 9, 1917, when about 140,000 Petrograd

workers downed their tools and took to the streets, commemorating the anniversary

of Bloody Sunday. On February 23, 1917, International Women’s Day, a large dem-

onstration of working women, protesting the scarcity and price of bread, turned into

a massive revolt against the authorities; locked-out, striking workers from the Putilov

works joined in. The demonstrators grew in boldness and demands; the authorities

responded with violence, ordering police and troops to ﬁre on demonstrators. From

the start the troops appeared reluctant to ﬁre. Over the next week more and more

of the Petrograd garrison’s soldiers refused to ﬁre on the demonstrators. On February

27 the Volynsky Guard Regiment rebelled, shooting their commanding ofﬁcer. By

that evening workers and soldiers were in control of the capital of the largest empire

on earth. They created a Soviet (Russian for council) of Workers’ and Soldiers’

Deputies to represent their interests and agreed to the creation of a Provisional

Government composed of leading Duma deputies. Nicholas did not even manage to

return from the front to Petrograd before he was persuaded by his generals, hoping

to save the war effort, to abdicate in favor of his brother Mikhail. On March 3 Mikhail

met with the Provisional Government and, learning that they could not guarantee

his safety, declined the throne. Thus ended the 300-year old Romanov dynasty. As

Hasegawa has argued, the February revolution resulted from the coincidence of the

revolt of the masses against the regime, its handling of the war and food supplies,

the soldiers’ revolt, and middle-class opposition to the entire institution of tsarism.

In this revolution Russia’s educated elite, whether liberals or socialists, did not lead;

they followed the masses.

The February revolution was not a conclusive event. It took a long time for the

revolution to spread across the vast empire; in some cities there was a violent struggle;

in others the authorities quickly ran away. It took longer still to spread to the empire’s

many villages, where one could still ﬁnd tsarist police in place as late as May 1917.

And this was only the beginning; for “Glorious February” spawned a number of

other revolutions.

The empire’s many nationalities (who composed more than half its population)

took the birth of “Free Russia” as an opportunity to explore their own national

development. The year 1917 was for them also a year of national revolution, often

beginning with troops of the former tsarist army organizing themselves into national

units. National committees (composed mostly of educated elites) were set up to

express the interests of each nation. The most successful movements combined

national and economic interests; for example, Ukrainians were also (even primarily)

peasants with a strong interest in land reform. Sometimes these movements sought

only the right to develop their national culture or territory within a federated Russia;

but most educated Russians, including the leading socialist parties and the Provisional

Government, proved surprisingly resistant to such modest demands. Later, especially

after the Bolsheviks seized power and revealed their great willingness to violate their

own ofﬁcial policy of national self-determination, some nationalities sought outright

independence from the former empire. Their armies then played independent roles

in the emerging civil war.

the war and revolution 247

Peasants also carried out their own revolution. Beginning in late spring 1917, once

they began to realize just how free they had become, they embarked on an agrarian

revolution, seizing land, forests, and property from all non-peasants by violent and

non-violent means. This peasant revolution was massive in scale but local in scope.

Indeed, the localness of these struggles suggests that there was not one peasant revo-

lution but many, many village revolutions. Moreover, soon after they had acquired

some land and forest, many peasant villages began to squabble among themselves

over the appropriate redistribution; these squabbles sometimes turned into small

battles between villages.

Finally, there occurred one more revolution in 1917, sometimes called the “October

Revolution,” sometimes the “Bolshevik revolution.” This one has provoked the most

intense study and controversy. The Provisional Government, discredited by its con-

tinuing prosecution of the war, inability to solve the food supply problem, delay in

holding the constituent assembly elections, and unwillingness to give peasants the

land, came under increasing attacks from the Petrograd Soviet, especially from its

Bolshevik members. On October 25, 1917, the soviet’s Military Revolutionary

Committee (which Leon Trotsky created to ﬁght the counter-revolution and was

Bolshevik-controlled) resolved to depose the government and declare “All Power to

the Soviets!” that is, all power should belong to the councils set up and elected by

workers, peasants, and soldiers across the empire. A Soviet of People’s Commissars

(Sovnarkom), led by Vladimir Lenin and composed of Bolsheviks, was then declared

the new government, promising that it would hold the elections to the constituent

assembly as soon as possible and give the people “Bread, Peace, and Land!” Very

few objected to the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Many workers and

soldiers, especially in Petrograd, supported the Bolsheviks’ actions. Most non-

Bolshevik socialists and their supporters, however, objected to the Bolsheviks’ unwill-

ingness to share power. Across the empire most people approved of the idea of “All

Power to the Soviets!” but interpreted this to mean local power, not Bolshevik one-

party, centralized rule from Moscow. It took a while for most to realize that Lenin

had the latter interpretation in mind. Only when pro-Bolshevik “Red Guards” dis-

persed the constituent assembly (the Bolsheviks won only about 25 percent of the

seats; the SRs 51 percent) the morning after its ﬁrst day of meeting, January 5, 1918,

did most come to understand what the Bolsheviks envisioned. The result was a

massive civil war (1918–21), in which the combatants employed the brutal practices

and weaponry of the world war against each other. The total number of deaths is

unknown; 5 million is a conservative estimate.

Total war evolved into total, extremely

violent revolution.

Revolutions in the Habsburg Empire

Compared to the Russian revolution, there has been less politically driven

debate about the causes and legitimacy of the revolutions that broke up the

Habsburg Empire in the fall of 1918. Most historians have argued that the

empire was in decline, its political life characterized by “absolutism and anarchy,”

long before 1914. Born centuries before the appearance of modern nationalism,

the Habsburg monarchy, to the twentieth-century observer, appeared to be an out-

dated, ramshackle conglomeration of many peoples and lands, whose only common