Timelines

A Political History of the Modern World

John Rees

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136337246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

War and revolution, economic crises and political conflict are the very stuff of modern history. This guide to the last 100 years of great power conflict, social rebellion, strikes and protests gives us the essential history of the world in which we live. Based on the Timeline TV series this is a rapid and accessible guide for those who want to know how power is exercised, by who, and for what purposes in the modern world.

From the rise and fall of great empires in two world wars, the Cold War and the 'war on terror' through to the rise of China Timelines describes the shifts in the imperial structure of the world. And it looks at the impact of those changes in the conflict zones of the 21st century, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

Finally Timelines looks at moments of popular resistance, from the Russian and Spanish revolutions to the fall of Apartheid in the 1990s and the ongoing socialist experiment that is Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. We live in turbulent times. These essays show us how we got here and outline the forces that are going to shape the history of the 21st century.

1

THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT POWERS

The First World War

The First World War has scorched itself into our memory as perhaps the most futile war in history. The killing, the blood, the mud, the trenches, the shells and the poison gas lasted from 1914 until 1918. It was the world’s first experience of total war and the world’s first experience of industrial war. Yet, when the War began tens of thousands in every country rushed to join the armed forces. Famously, the propaganda said the War would be ‘over by Christmas’, but of course it was not and 15 million people never saw their homes again.

On 28 June 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, were shot dead in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo by a Nationalist Serbian student. It was literally the final trigger, but not the cause, of the First World War. The European Powers, most of them still monarchies, were glued together in two competing alliances; Britain, France and Russia formed one bloc, whilst Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire formed another bloc that dominated the heart of Europe. Each bloc had colonies around the globe and each was tied by diplomatic obligations to the smaller countries of Europe. So, when a month after the assassination of their Emperor, Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia began a countermobilization. Germany then declared war on Russia and France. Then, on 6 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. On the Western Front, the Germans advanced within a few miles of Paris, but were driven back by an Allied counterattack at Marne. The opposing sides then settled into trench warfare at the River Aisne. Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front the Russian advance was checked by the Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia.

FIGURE 1.1 The rival alliances in the First World War

By 16 September 1916, all Germany’s African Colonies had surrendered to Allied Forces. On 30 August 1916, Turkey entered the War on the German side and attacked Russia in the Caucasus Mountains. The territory of the countries now at war stretched from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to the Pacific in the East and from the Mediterranean in the South to the Baltic in the North. Furthermore, the European Colonial system meant that peoples with no direct interest in the struggle of the European powers were also drawn into the conflict.

The military leaders who went to war in 1914 were utterly unprepared for what the conflict would bring. The monarchs of Europe were bound together by ties of class and blood. Interested newspaper readers could see pictures of Britain’s King Edward VII with Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, his nephew, just eight years before they went to war with each other. Like the monarchs of Europe, the Officer Corps of the rival empires had more in common with each other than they did with the ordinary soldiers under their command, but the rival industrial empires pitted them against each other in war just as rivalry for markets had pitted them against each other economically before the War. At first, workers enlisted in huge numbers as new popular newspapers transmitted a nationalist fervour from the political elite to ordinary citizens. However, the armies they joined still looked like they had done in the nineteenth century. The cavalry still wore breastplates and the uniforms were a gloriously outdated array of finery. The War turned into a very different struggle than the one the officers had imagined in their gentleman’s clubs and military academies. The growth of industry had transformed war and mass artillery barrages, barbed wire, chemical gas, machine guns and, later, tanks dominated the battlefield. Massive battleships hunted by submarines transformed naval warfare, whilst Zeppelins rained bombs on civilians from the air. Perhaps the last stand of so-called ‘noble’ individual combat was taking place with the newest of weapons: the fighter plane with the ‘aces’ of the air counting their successes in terms of the number of individual kills.

FIGURE 1.2 The War on the Western Front

Germany needed a quick victory in France to avoid fighting on both the Western Front and on the Eastern Front (against Russia). The plan for a swift advance through Belgium brought the Germans to within 50 miles of Paris, but it was halted in the Battle of Marne. Then a very different war began. In the second year of the War, the Western Front saw offensive after offensive. They all failed. Poison gas and chlorine were used for the first time during the battle for Ypres in Belgium during April and May 1915. On the Eastern Front, the Russians were driven back and Germany took Poland. In the Middle East, Britain attacked the Turkish in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. They failed. And they failed again in the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign of Spring 1915. Italy entered the War against Austria, mainly because her politicians thought that this way she would end up on the winning side, but Bulgaria joined the Austrian and German side. 1916 saw some of the bloodiest battles of the War on the Western Front at Verdun and the Somme. Tanks were used for the first time. On 31 May, the Battle of Jutland, one of the greatest sea battles of the War, began.

In February 1917, however, a light began to glimmer in the East. The Tsar of Russia was overthrown in a revolution, but the Provisional Government of pro-Capitalist politicians, soon to be supported by moderate Socialists, vowed to keep Russia in the War. In April 1917 the US entered the War. The bloodiest battles of the War took place that year at Ypres and Passchendaele. They lasted from July to November. By October, it was all over for the Russian Army as the Bolsheviks swept to power and began the process of taking their War-weary nation out of the War. It was the event that, finally, meant that the carnage was nearing its end. On 3 March the Bolsheviks kept their promise to take Russia out of the War as Leon Trotsky signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. On the Western Front, Germany began a final offensive, which was to see it reach the Marne by June. The Allied Forces countered at the battle of Amiens. Meanwhile, in Italy, at Vittorrio Vento, British and Italian Forces defeated the Austrians.

Then, suddenly, revolution spread from Russia to Germany. Naval mutinies in Kiel and other cities led to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and on 11 November 1918 the armistice was signed. The War started with workers rushing to the national flag, but it ended with the red flag flying in Russia and the Republican flag flying in Berlin. By the end of the War, age-old dynasties had vanished. Not only were the Romanovs gone from St. Petersburg and the Hohenzollerns from Berlin, but the Hapsburgs were gone from Vienna.

Timeline: the First World War

1914 (June): the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand

1914 (July): Austria declares war on Serbia

1914 (August): Germany, France, Russia, Britain, Japan enter the war

1914 (August): Battle of Tannenberg

1914 (October): Turkey enters the War

1915 (April): poison gas used for the first time in Second battle of Ypres

1915 (April–August): Gallipoli campaign

1916 (February–November): Battle of Verdun

1916 (July–November): Battle of the Somme

1917 (April): US declares war on Germany

1917 (October): Russian Revolution

1917 (December): Bolshevik government takes Russia out of the War

1918 (November): German Kaiser overthrown

1918 (November): Armistice brings the War to an end

The revolutions that made Russia

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the turning points of the twentieth century. Even after the ‘fall of Communism’ in 1989, the power of the Russian State still depended on the foundations laid by dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s. But how did Stalin come to power? How could the freedom and hope that millions of Russians felt when the Tsar was overthrown in 1917 turn into the oppression and exploitation that was Stalin’s Russia?

Russia was a ramshackle empire when it entered the First World War. The Tsar and the Russian aristocracy ruled over millions of peasants who tilled the land as they had done for centuries. But they were also faced with a small but growing working class concentrated in some of the largest factories in the world. And these workers were increasingly restive. There had been an attempt at revolution in 1905, but the Tsar had regained control. Nevertheless, the Revolutionary Movement began to regain its strength as the First World War approached. Famine, poverty and deprivation were a way of life for millions and the War only intensified their suffering. In its first battle of the War, Russia lost 30,000 killed or wounded, whilst another 90,000 were taken prisoner. After just five months of the War, 390,000 Russians had lost their lives. A year later, even the Ohkrana, the Tsar’s secret police, were warning of ‘the possibility in the near future of riots by the lower classes of the Empire enraged by the burdens of daily existence’.

The Russian Army was in retreat from 1915, short of arms and equipment. At home, food shortages and inflation led to lengthening queues and a strike wave in the factories. On the 23 February 1917, spontaneous food riots started the Revolution in Petrograd. Crowds chanting ‘give us bread’ were joined by striking women textile workers. The women struck partly to commemorate International Women’s Day, but mainly to protest about the lack of bread. The Tsar told the Commander of the Petrograd Military District, ‘I command you tomorrow to stop the disorders in the capital, which are unacceptable in the difficult time of war with Germany and Austria’. Some soldiers obeyed the orders to suppress the demonstrations, but many mutinied and joined the Revolution. The Government resigned and eventually the Tsar had to concede that his entire apparatus of political and military power had been overwhelmed by the Revolution.

On the 13 March, the Tsar abdicated, ending the 300 year rule of the Romanov Dynasty. Two bodies filled the power vacuum created by the abdication of the Tsar. One was the Provisional Government. Headed by Prince Lvov, it was at first dominated by the pro-Capitalist Cadet Party. It had the support of moderate Socialists who thought that the end of Tsarism would also be the end of the Revolution. The other body to fill the vacuum was the Petrograd Workers’ Council, or, to use the Russian word for council, ‘Soviet’. This institution had emerged in February as a delegate body of factory workers meeting to coordinate the strikes and protests against the Tsar, but as more and more factories, districts, army units and peasant villages began sending delegates to the Soviet it began to emerge as the most important focus of revolutionary activity. Subsequently, the Soviet model began to spread into the army and throughout Russia in both towns and the countryside.

These two institutions were bound to clash because they represented two fundamentally opposed constituencies with very different hopes for what the Revolution should deliver. The first crisis came in April. The Cadet leader Miliukov was determined to keep Russia in the War and made a speech saying that ‘Russia would fight to the last drop of her blood’. As Miliukov spoke, Russian soldiers were, according to one British general, ‘being churned into gruel until casualties in the firing line should make rifles available’. Meetings, riots, protests and street fights between pro- and anti-war crowds drove Miliukov from office. It was the end of the Cadet-led Government. In order to bolster its support among the increasingly militant population, the Cadet Government coopted members from the moderate Socialist Party, the Mensheviks, and the pro-peasant party, the Social Revolutionaries. The moderate Socialist Alexander Kerensky became leader of the Provisional Government. But although there were new faces in the Government, there were no new policies. In the face of starvation and social breakdown peasants were seizing the land and workers were taking control of the factories. The Provisional Government opposed them all. Worse still, Kerensky continued Miliukov’s pro-war policy, declaring that ‘the inevitability and necessity of sacrifice must rule the hearts of Russian soldiers … I summon you not to a feast but to death’. But as one war-weary peasant soldier replied, ‘what’s the point of the peasants getting the land if I’m killed and get no land?’ It was an argument of elemental power and it spurred tens of thousands of deserting soldiers to take the long trek back to their towns and villages in mid-1917. They simply walked away from the front.

By this point the Soviets were growing in power as an alternative source of governmental authority. This process of radicalization was accelerated when the leaders of the Revolutionary Left, many of whom had spent many years in prison and in exile under the Tsar, made perilous journeys across war-torn Europe to return to Russia. Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the 1905 Revolution, made it back from the US after being detained by Britain. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks (the most radical Socialist Party), returned from exile in Switzerland in a train provided by the German Government, who hoped that he would help withdraw Russia from the War. As he stepped down from the train at Petrograd’s Finland Station, Lenin surprised even his own supporters by insisting that the Left should not support the Provisional Government because it was a pro-Capitalist Government committed to continuing the War. However, Lenin’s policy of ‘Land, Bread and Peace’ chimed exactly with what large numbers of workers, peasants and soldiers were beginning to think, and Lenin’s demands were coupled with another slogan which explained exactly how to get these things: ‘All power to the Soviets’. The struggle for power between the Provisional Government under Kerensky and the Soviet now began in earnest.

In July 1917, the anger at the Provisional Government was so great that it almost boiled over into a second revolution. Kerensky used Czech mercenaries to try and drive Russian soldiers to the front, but this simply fuelled popular anger. Huge armed demonstrations flooded through the streets of Petrograd. They burst into the session of the Petrograd Soviet, still under the leadership of the moderate Socialists. One worker, white with anger, leapt onto the podium and, shaking his fist in the face of the Chairman, yelled at him, ‘take power … when it’s given to you!’ Nevertheless, the demonstrators were not quite ready for a revolution yet. The July Days were, Lenin said, ‘more than a demonstration and less than a Revolution’. But as the demonstrations subsided the Government moved back onto the offensive against the Left. Kerensky created a special squad to hunt down Lenin, with orders to shoot him on sight. Lenin went into hiding disguised as a worker. Trotsky and other Bolsheviks were imprisoned; other less-fortunate Bolsheviks were murdered. The Party’s offices and printing presses were also smashed.

Kerensky and the Provisional Government organized the anti-Bolshevik clampdown, but they were not its main beneficiaries. To the Right of the Provisional Government stood the big Capitalists of Russia – the old aristocracy and the officer corps of the Imperial Army. The abdication of the Tsar had been a blow to them, but they were still powerful and they dreamt of destroying the Left and imposing a military dictatorship. They were willing to use Kerensky and the Provisional Government, but only to deal with the Soviet. The leading figure of the reactionary Right was General Kornilov and from the moment he arrived in Moscow for a State Conference in August 1917, born aloft from his train by his officers, it was clear that a military coup was being prepared. Kornilov declared that he would ‘not hesitate to hang all the Soviet members if need be’. Furthermore, he was utterly cynical about Kerensky, saying that after he had dealt with the Soviet, ‘Kerensky and Co. will make way for me’. At first, Kerensky thought he could use Kornilov to crush the Soviet, but he soon realized that Kornilov meant to crush him too. Only then did he turn to the Soviet for help.

Not surprisingly, the Soviet delegates were losing faith in Kerensky and the moderate Socialists. Moreover, they did not trust the moderate Socialists to organize the defence of the Soviet against Kornilov’s attempted coup. The Bolsheviks, their leaders still in prison, successfully organized themselves to defeat Kornilov. It was a shattering blow for the Right, but it was also a mortal blow for the moderate Socialists. Kornilov was defeated at the end of August and on the 9 September 1917 the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet with Trot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION: The shape of modern history
• 1.THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT POWERS
• 2. EMPIRE AND AFTER
• 3. THE RULERS AND THE RULED
• CONCLUSION: The first decade of the twenty-first century
• FURTHER READING
• INDEX