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1. CAUSES OF THE CONFLICT
Two of the biggest industrial powers, France and Germany, remained hostile because, during the process of German unification, the Prussians had defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and seized the territories of Alsace-Lorraine.
In the partition of colonies, Germany had been left at a disadvantage relative to France and Great Britain. However, the new country led the industrial and economic development of Europe and claimed its own colonial empire.
Each power tried to protect its interests by seeking alliances with other nations. No forum for debate or international organisation was created to discuss conflicts between states.
Owing to the technological progress of the Second Industrial Revolution, countries began to manufacture new weapons on an industrial scale, embarking on an uncontrollable arms race.
In the Balkans, there were enormous tensions because Slavic nations were fighting to gain independence from the Austrian Empire. These nationalist movements were supported by Russia.
1.1. WEAPONRY
The Great War, as its name suggests, was the most devastating military conflict that history had ever seen. Technological advances in the weapons industry largely contributed to this fact. It was the first war in which aviation played a fundamental role, following the manufacture of the first metal aeroplane by the German company Junkers in 1915. Other inventions of enormous destructive power were tanks and armoured vehicles, German Zeppelins and airships, as well as lethal mustard gas, which killed people and left the environment polluted and infertile.
1.2. THE ALLIANCES
As a result of the pre-war situation, two blocs of alliances were created. They were, to a great extent, heirs of the Bismarckian Alliance System:
• The Triple Alliance, formed by Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary (1882)
• The Triple Entente (1907), formed by Russia, France and Great Britain. Italy abandoned the Triple Alliance because of its rivalry with Austria and, once the war started, ended up joining the Triple Entente.
2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WAR
On June 28th, 1914, the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian separatist. In response, Austria threatened to annex Serbia, while Russia stood up in defense of Serbia. Immediately, there was a reaction from all the alliances: Germany attacked France through Belgium, and Great Britain decided to defend France and Belgian neutrality.
2.1. FIRST PHASE (1914)
In the first phase, called war of movement, Germany launched a rapid attack against France with the intention of quickly dominating it. At the same time, a combined action by the Germans and Austrians defeated Russia on the eastern front.
2.2. SECOND PHASE (1915-1916)
By 1915 (In September 1914), French troops had stopped the Germans from advancing along the Marne River, close to Paris. A new phase began, trench warfare or war of position, and both armies were unable to advance. As a result, the war came to a standstill, with terrible losses of human life on both the Franco-British and German sides.
To protect themselves from the enemy, soldiers had to dig complex systems of trenches. From the North Sea to Switzerland, a front thousand of kilometers long became a death trap. Rain, cold, snow, mud, rats, lice and illnesses pushed human suffering to the extreme. The attempts of the military high commands to breach the lines resulted in bloody battles.
2.3. THIRD PHASE (1917-1918)
The last phase of the war began in 1917, a year that would be critical. After the triumph of the revolution in Russia, Russia made peace with Germany on terms that practically entailed its surrender. However, the power of the Entente overcame this setback thanks to the intervention of the United States in their favour. In 1918, near the end of the war, the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, proposed a peace plan known as Wilson’s Fourteen Points. After the defeat of the Central Powers, an armistice was signed, bringing the hostilities to an end.
3. CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR
The human losses were enormous. In addition to the ten million soldiers killed, huge numbers were wounded or maimed, and there were also many civilian victims. The Austro-Hungarian, German, British and Russian empires, along with France, were affected the most. There were many economic losses, although their impact varied. France and Belgium were the countries that suffered the most. Germany had to pay a high price, and the war reparations the other countries demanded hindered its economic recovery. The many economic problems led to the crisis of 1929.
The political consequences were reflected in the new map of Europe, which was radically changed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated and was reduced to the territory of present-day Austria. This is how new countries like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland were created. At the same time, the German Empire came to an end and its territory was reduced; the territory of Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. The Ottoman Empire also disappeared, losing the territories of Iraq, Palestine and Syria in the Middle East. Europe lost hegemony on a world scale and had to recognize the leadership of a new power: The United States of America.
The female labour force replaced men in the factories during the war, which opened the doors for the incorporation of women into the working world. After the war, many women kept their jobs, and different countries began to grant women the right to vote.
3.1. PEACE: THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
Peace was finally declared via five treaties signed separately by the defeated powers. All of them were signed in palaces on the outskirts of Paris and are known collectively as the Paris Peace Treaties (1919-1920). The principle of collective security, through which peace must jointly be sought before any confrontation, led to the creation of the League of Nations. Its objectives were to establish international relations in which peace was the fundamental principle. It was the first organization that was created with this objective, and the most immediate precursor to what would later become the United Nations.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed with Germany (1919). This included economic, military and territorial agreements that for Germany meant the loss of territories in Europe and its colonies. These harsh conditions were viewed by the German people as a humiliation, which produced a feeling of injustice that was the origin of Nazism. This was one of the causes of the Second World War.
– The territory of Alsace-Lorraine, which had belonged to Germany since the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, was returned to France again. Germany also had to give away different territories to Denmark, Poland and Lithuania.
– Germany had to pay high economic compensation for the damage it had caused. For example, the mining region of the Saarland had to ship its entire production of coal to France.
– A demilitarized zone was created in the German territory bordering France: the Rhineland. The German army was limited to 100 000 men, and restrictions were placed on its navy and air force.
– Germany lost its overseas colonies, which were distributed between Great Britain, France and Japan. These territories were known as mandates.
4. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1905 AND 1917
4.1. CZARIST RUSSIA
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Empire encompassed an immense territory that amounted to one sixth of the earth’s surface. It extended from western Europe, across the Steppes and Siberian forests, to the Pacific Ocean, and from the frozen lands of the Arctic to the temperate shores of the Black Sea.
This vast space housed around 150 million inhabitants in 1917. The population was very unevenly distributed and possessed a great diversity of nationalities, peoples and cultures. The economy, based on agriculture, was slowly beginning to develop industrially.
Russia was governed by an autocratic monarchy, in which the Czar exercised his power – established by divine right – as an absolute ruler. The sovereign was backed by a feudal aristocracy, the Orthodox Church and a corrupt bureaucracy.
Gradually, political opposition to Czarism grew in Russia. This opposition was tied to the cultural elite, which was based on the liberal European tradition.
At the end of the 19th century, the Marxist-inspired Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) was also founded. This party felt that the working class should carry out a revolution to eliminate injustice and inequality.
In 1903, the RSDWP split into two groups:
• Bolsheviks, who defended the seizure of power by a committed working-class minority. Their most famous motto was ‘Peace, bread and land’. Their leader was Lenin.
• Mensheviks, who were more moderate and favored an alliance with reformist liberalism.
4.2. THE REVOLUTION OF 1905
In 1905, forces that were hostile to Czarism tried to rise to power by means of a revolution. Its root causes lay in a severe economic, political and social crisis which provoked a powerful strike movement, and in Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which demonstrated the weakness of the Czarist regime.
What sparked the revolution was the savage repression of a peaceful demonstration where people were petitioning the Czar for better conditions. The massacre, known as Bloody Sunday, unleashed a wave of popular outrage and marked the final rupture between the people and the Czar.
Popular protests, workers’ strikes, peasant revolts and military uprisings culminated in a prerevolutionary situation. Political strikes became the main weapon. To coordinate them, the first soviet was formed in St. Petersburg (Petrograd). It consisted of workers, peasants and soldiers that would later play a fundamental role in the revolution.
In 1905, the revolutionaries did not succeed in taking power, but they pressured the
Czar into implementing some reforms:
• Creation of the Duma or National Legislative Assembly, which in theory was the equivalent of a parliament but was controlled by the Czar.
• The start of an agrarian reform with distribution of lands that would serve, in the long term, to create a social base of support for the liberal regime. The project was prevented because of the assassination of its promoter, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, in 1911.
• The establishment of limited individual and citizens’ liberties. In the summer of 1914, the First World War began. After the initial defeats, Czar Nicholas II took direct control of the army in 1915 but couldn’t prevent the collapse of the front or the breakdown of civil power. The Czarina, under the influence of the extravagant Rasputin, openly manipulated the disoriented government. The war produced the demoralization of the army and the people, which generated conditions for a new revolutionary outburst.
4.3. THE REVOLUTION OF FEBRUARY 1917
The spark of this new revolution was the imposition of ration cards in a situation of war, hunger and general demoralisation. These cards allowed families to acquire a small quantity of provisions to be able to subsist in times of scarcity.
The Czar was obliged to abdicate. The revolution had triumphed.
Two poles of power would emerge from the political space left by the Czar. They were both heirs to the Revolution of 1905, but had different characteristics and goals: one liberal, the Duma, and the other revolutionary, the Soviet. Both tried to give political direction to the revolution and agreed to form a Provisional Government which would establish democratic freedoms, form a constituent assembly and grant a political amnesty.
4.4. THE REVOLUTION OF OCTOBER 1917
Lenin felt the time had come and made the decision to move to an armed uprising. From the Smolny Institute, seat of the Petrograd Soviet, the Bolsheviks organized the revolution. During the night of the 24th to the 25th of October, according to the Russian calendar, revolutionary troops occupied the strategic points of the city, took the Winter Palace and dismissed the government.
The following day, warning shots from the cruiser Aurora announced the triumph of the revolution and with it spread the idea that a Communist revolution was beginning worldwide.
On October 26th, a revolutionary government was formed. Led by Lenin, it included representatives from all the political factions that had participated in the revolution.
The first decrees of the new Soviet state were immediately published:
– The Decree on Peace, which outlined Russia’s withdrawal from the war without territorial losses.
– The Decree on Land, by which the state confiscated the property of the Crown, the Orthodox Church and landowners, and handed it over to the control of local soviets and agrarian committees for division among the peasants.
5. THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR (1918-1920)
After the October Revolution, Bolshevik control was complete in the main cities and industrialized areas. Conversely, the outlying regions remained under the control of the counterrevolutionaries who were opposed to the Bolshevik regime. The internal tensions led to the outbreak of a civil war that pitted the following two sides against each other:
– The White Army: made up of counterrevolutionaries that had the backing of foreign powers. These countries wanted the revolution to fail so that it would not spread to Western countries and, at the same time, so they could control Russian natural resources, such as oil.
– The Red Army: consisting of Bolsheviks, under Trotsky’s command; their discipline and courage enabled them to win the war
Politically, the war contributed to consolidating the regime and strengthened the single party. This is how the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was born in 1922. To control the revolution and carry out their plans, the Bolsheviks tried to control other revolutionary groups, which responded with uprisings and even an attack against Lenin. The secret police, the Cheka, resolved to eliminate all dissidents.
Lenin died in January 1924 with no successor for Head of State. It was expected that the Communist Party would be the unchallenged political centre and that the direction of the revolution would fall to a collective body formed by Trotsky and Stalin.
However, Stalin prevailed over most of his rivals and established himself as undisputed leader. Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. During his exile in Mexico, he founded the Fourth International. He was assassinated in 1940 by an agent sent by Stalin.