"Europe's violent transition from world war to chaotic peace is the subject of this book." The focus is on the losing side: the Romanov, Hapsburg, Ottoman and Hohenzollern Empires, as well as Greece and Italy. "Post-war Europe...was the most violent place on the planet." The author compares the devastation of 1918-23 to the Thirty Years War as millions died in the continuing armed conflict. The wars were inter-sectional battles within old empires, civil wars and revolutions. From Finland south to Turkey, war continued; Europe remained in flames.
The failure of Russia's war led to the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. The decision of Kerensky's government to continue fighting smoothed the way for Lenin and Russia's withdrawal from hostilities by the end of 1917. Two days after the 1918 Armistice was signed by Germany and the Entente powers, the Russians launched an attack in an attempt to recover some of what they had lost at Brest-Litovsk. "For most of 1919 and 1920 the western borderlands experienced a three-way struggle involving the Bolsheviks, the Whites and a host of nationalist movements.." The incredibly brutal war trickled to an end in 1922 as the heart of the former Russian Empire lay in ruins. Between the revolution and the establishment of the USSR in 1922, an estimated 10 million people had died in Russia.
Revolution came to Germany when the Kaiser abdicated in November, 1918. However, in elections the following January, the forces of moderation prevailed, as they did in Austria in February. In Bulgaria and in Constantinople, centrists took control. The hope of all the defeated powers was for a moderate peace. "Liberal democracy, which had failed to come into existence in 1848, had finally emerged triumphant."
The communists attempted putsches in Berlin, Munich, Spain, Italy, and Hungary. In Germany, the centrist Weimar Republic held them off. Elsewhere, right-wing forces violently put down the Reds. Europe's first red scare had passed, although a very real fear of Bolshevism would dominate Europe for decades.
The Paris Peace Conference focused on the lands of the defeated powers. "As the continental empires disintegrated, ten new nation states emerged from the ruins: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Turkey. " As the conference took place, there was endless fighting in the lands of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire as various nationalities asserted their statehood. The Poles and Russia fought a war from 1919-21. The losing Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Ottomans did not negotiate in Paris. Terms were dictated on a take it or leave it basis. Very few of Wilson's Fourteen Points, particularly the concept of national self-determination, found their way into the treaties imposed by the Allies. Many of the new states, in particular Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, were nationality smash-ups that guaranteed future conflicts. "Although Europe's territorial reorganization in 1918-19 actually halved the total number of people deemed minorities,.....the new successor states initially had no legal framework in place to secure their rights."
The last scene of violence and genocide was in Anatolia, the Turkish heartland, whose Aegean coast had substantial Greek Christian minorities. Greece decided a land-grab should be its reward for siding with the Allies. The Greeks advanced east from Smyrna (Izmir today) and for three years committed atrocities against the majority Muslim population. In 1922, the Turks evicted them. Over a million Anatolian Christians left for Greece and approximately 400,000 Muslims in Greece moved to Turkey.
To a great extent, the fighting after the war presaged the disaster that would follow twenty-years later. Europe's reprieve was brief.
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