The causes of the FIRST WORLD WAR
1_ The assassination at Sarajevo. (political murder) On 28th June Franz Ferdinand and his wife visited the Town of Sarajevo. The Archduke was the heir to the throne of the Empire of Austria-Hungary. As the car passed along the street, someone threw a bomb at it. The bomb bounced off the back of the car and exploded, injuring an officer in the car behind. The Archduke and his wife were unhurt. Later that day the Archduke said that he wanted to change his plans and visit the injured officer in hospital. He set off again by car, but the driver was not told the route had change. Some minutes later a man called Gavrilo Princip shot them and died.
2_ The great powers in 1914.
If see the map the six most important and powerful countries in Europe were split into two armed groups.
The triple Alliance. Central powers.
Germany: was made up of many small states that had united and become one country only as recently as 1871. Otto von Bismarck, who was the Chancelor of the newly united Germany, firmly believed that all questions of the day could be solved by military strength by blood and iron. The stong national feeling in Germany and its wealth from industry made the Germans keen to play a leading part in world affairs. Kaiser Wilhelm II was impatient to make Germany the leading country in Europe.
Austria-Hungary: the empire of Austria-Hungary was Germany´s oldest ally. German was the language of Government, but each group spoke its own language and had its own customs. This made the empire difficult to rule. Many of this people (Austrians, Slovacks, Serbs, Croats) were demanding their independence. In Germany the Kaiser had ambitions to build a railway all the way from Berlin to Baghdad. He supported the Austrians in their Balkan plans.
Italy: it was the weakest of all the central powers. They were looking for new areas to colonize. Unlike Germany, however Italy had very little industry.
The triple entente ( agreement). Entente powers.
Britain: in the nineteen century was the “workshop” of the world. Its goods were traded all over the world.
France: one of France´s main aims ever since 1870 had been to take revenge on Germany for the terrible defeat it has suffered in the Franco-Prussian war of that year. France was building up its Industrial strength.
Russia: it was by far the largest of the Great Powers in area and population. Most Russians lived as peasants in thousand villages. The ruler of Russia, the Tsar, was in complete personal control of the country.

On 1st August, Germany declared war on Russia and on 3rd August, on France . German troops entered Belgium . with Britain allies at war and German troops across the Channel, Britain stood by its 1839 agreement to protect Belgium. Britain declared war on the Central Powers on 4th August 1914.

Steps to war
Naval rivalry
Germany and Britain began a race to expand their navies as fast as possible. In 1906 Britain launched the Dreadnought. This battleship had heavier guns and thicker armour-plating and was faster than any other battleship in the world.
Morocco
The Kaiser was jealous of the empires built up by Britain and France. He took every chance to embarrass Britain and France about their colonial possessions.
Britain and France had agreed that they must control the Mediterranean between them. Britain was powerful in the eastern Mediterranean and France in the western Mediterranean.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR 1914-1918
The Schliefen plan
The German commanders realized that if war came they faced the danger of fighting to enemies at once: France to the west and Russia to the east. It was splitting their forces into two. It was a calculated gamble. The Germans took two risks. The first was that the Russians would be slow to get ready for war. The second risk they took was that Britain would not join in the war when Germany invaded Belgium.
The Germans Advance
The war began on 3th August 1914, when German troops invaded Belgium. Belgians put up more resistance than expected. This slowed down the German advance. The British kept to their treaty with Belgium and sent over the British Expeditionary Force.
The Russians for their part, mobilized more quickly than Germans had expected and invaded Germany.
The German advance was stopped at the battle of Marne and then pushed back. For five days the German army retreated until they managed to dig themselves into trenches and the allies found they could not advance any further. They too dug themselves in facing the German positions.
Trench warfare
The most effective weapons were those used by soldiers in defensive positions: the rifle, the mortar, the heavy guns of the artillery and above all, the machine gun.
The trenches
The only place which was safe from the deadly fire of machine guns was in a trench dug into the ground. Every soldier carried tools to dig with as part of his equipment.
Tactics
Their only method to attack was to pound the enemy trenches with artillery, then send the soldiers over the top of the trenches, on foot, towards the enemy lines.
Gas
Some new ideas were tried to drive the enemy out of their trenches. One of these was poison gas. This was first used by the Germans in the Second Battle of Ypres, in 1915, but was soon used by both sides. Its effect was horrific.
Tanks
One new invention which could end the deadlock of trench warfare was the tank. A few were used by the Allies at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, but they were not used in great numbers until the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. They were still very primitive in design.

THE HOME FRONT
The First World War was a war fought on many fronts, on land, sea and in the air, and it affected everybody, including civilians at home. There was a great contrast between life in the trenches and life back home in Britain. The soldiers in the trenches had to get used to terrible living conditions and to the fact that they were likely to be killed.
Conscription
Conscription was not started until 1916. Until then the British army was made up of volunteers. Different kinds of pressure were put on young men to join up. Some women began giving white feathers to young men in the street who were not in uniform.
Women at work
With so many men away at war, women had to take their places. Before the war women had been regarded as incapable of many jobs. Now women joined in wherever they could.
Food
European countries had to import some of their food to feed their people. As food supplies were disrupted by the war, people at home began to suffer.
In Germany and Austria things were much worse, because of the Allied blocklade.
THE WAR AT SEA
As soon as the war started the British navy blockaded all German ports. This cut off supplies of raw materials, machine tools and food to Germany. This gradual stranglehold (dominio completo) on Germany was an important cause of its defeat. No country can fight a modern war for very long if it has no raw materials for its industries. Germany was soon very short of food as well.
In May 1915 the passenger liner Luisitania sailing between the USA and Britain was sunk by a German U-Boat. Over 1000 passengers were killed.

THE WAR IN THE AIR
Aeroplanes were still new inventions in 1914, and the part they could play in war had not really been thought out. At first they were used for reconnaissance- to find out what the enemy was doing. The light open planes could easily fly over enemy lines to take photographs.
Planes were developed to carry bombs, although these were small, killed fewer people than modern aeroplanes do, and did little damage to buildings.
THE WAR ON OTHER FRONTS
THE EASTERN FRONT
Russia soon fell back on the Eastern Front. The brave attacks it launched into Germany in 1914 could not be kept up. The Germans stopped the Russian advance at Tannemberg and the Masurian.
THE END OF THE WAR
Americans arrived gave Germany one last chance. General Ludendorff pulled together all his forces, including many which he could withdraw from the Eastern Front.
WHY GERMANY LOST THE WAR
• The effects that the long war had on the Germany economy.
• The arrival of the Americans.
• The naval blocklade.
• On the battlefield, the development of the tank made trench warfare out-of-date.

Treaty of Versailles

On 28 June 1919, Germany reluctantly signed the Treaty of Versailles as part of the Paris Peace Conference in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles – exactly five years on from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the spark that had ignited the First World War.
On being presented with the document, in early June, Germany was given three weeks to comply. The German government complained that having not been consulted, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were nothing less than a dictate set by the representatives of the thirty-two nations present. (The conference was led by the Allies, the ‘Big Four’, represented by, left to right: David Lloyd George for Great Britain, Vittorio Orlando for Italy, Georges Clemenceau for France and Woodrow Wilson for the US). Germany had not been permitted to take part in the talks and ultimately the German government was too weak, both politically and militarily, to do anything but add its signature, which, on 28 June, they duly did.
The Treaty of Versailles was only one of five treaties produced by the Paris Peace Conference, one for each of the defeated Central Powers, none of whom were in attendance, and each named after a Parisian suburb.
The Treaty of Sevres, for example, officially closed down the Ottoman Empire and virtually abolished Turkish sovereignty, while the Treaty of Trianon imposed strict punishments on Hungary.
The League of Nations

Out of the talks came the founding of the League of Nations, an international body to help maintain peace and arbitrate over disputes. The idea was originally Wilson’s and formed part of his ‘Fourteen Points’, a blueprint he formulated in January 1918 for the future peace. The Paris Peace Conference was meant to provide the means to ensure that the Great War, as it was known then, was ‘the war to end war’, the phrase coined by HG Wells and often attributed to Wilson. But Lloyd George was more accurate when, mockingly, he said, ‘This war, like the next war, is a war to end war’.

The Treaty of Versailles

The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were harsh and not for negotiation. Germany lost 13 per cent of her territory, which meant 12 per cent of Germans now lived in a foreign country, and Germany’s colonial possessions were redistributed among the other colonial powers. The German Rhineland, on the border with France, was to be demilitarized (stripped of an armed presence) and placed under Allied control until 1935. The small but industrially important Saar region was to be governed by Britain and France for fifteen years and its coal exported to France in recompense for the French coal mines destroyed by Germany during the war. After fifteen years a plebiscite (or referendum) of the Saar population would decide its future.
Most of West Prussia was given to Poland. The German city of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk) was made a ‘free’ city so that Poland could have use of a port. To give Poland access to Danzig, they were given a strip of land, the ‘Polish Corridor’, through Prussia, thereby cutting East Prussia off from the rest of Germany.
Militarily, Germany’s army was to be limited to a token 100,000 men, and its navy to 15,000, plus a ban on conscription. She was not permitted to have an air force, nor tanks, and was prohibited from producing or importing weaponry.
The payment of reparations was for ‘compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allied powers and their property’. It was to include raw material, such as the coal from the Saar and Ruhr regions. Two years later, in 1921, the cost of reparations was announced – £6.6 billion, which German economists calculated would take until 1988 to pay. The figure shocked and angered Germans who conveniently forgot that Germany had demanded an even greater sum from a defeated France following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1.
But it was the humiliating clause that forced Germany into accepting responsibility for the war and for the damage to the civilian populations of the Allies that rankled most with the public at home.
‘An armistice for twenty years.’

Ultimately, the treaty satisfied no one. Britain thought it too harsh, believing an economically weak Germany would be detrimental to all Europe; Wilson returned to the US to find a country increasingly isolationist in its outlook and a Senate that refused to either ratify the treaty or join the League of Nations; and the French who felt it not harsh enough. It was they, the French argued, who had suffered most during the war. The French public was so dissatisfied with their president, Clemenceau, that they voted him out six months later, replacing him with Ferdinand Foch who, with sharp intuition, said, ‘This is not peace, this is an armistice for twenty years.’
Italy, lured into war in 1915 by territorial promises, was treated dismissively during talks causing its prime minister, Vittorio Orlando, to walk out. Italy was disappointed by its spoils of war. Orlando, heavily criticised by Italy’s rising Right, led by Benito Mussolini, was soon ousted.
Germany was outraged by the Treaty of Versailles and Germans throughout the country rounded on the politicians that had signed it. The war had been lost, not by the German army, they claimed, but the politicians – the government had ‘stabbed the nation in the back’. After all, not since 1914 had a single foreign soldier stepped on German soil.
The Kapp Putsch may have failed but there was another agitator waiting in the wings, seething at how Germany had been betrayed by its politicians. His name was Adolf Hitler.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

THE LONG TERM CAUSES OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

PEASANTS
WORKERS
THE TSAR
THE OPPOSITION
BOLSHEVIKS
THE DUMA
The February Revolution
The Russian Revolution of 1917 centers around two primary events: the February Revolution and the October Revolution. The February Revolution, which removed Tsar Nicholas II from power, developed spontaneously out of a series of increasingly violent demonstrations and riots on the streets of Petrograd (present-day St. Petersburg), during a time when the tsar was away from the capital visiting troops on the World War I front.
Though the February Revolution was a popular uprising, it did not necessarily express the wishes of the majority of the Russian population, as the event was primarily limited to the city of Petrograd. However, most of those who took power after the February Revolution, in the provisional government(the temporary government that replaced the tsar) and in the Petrograd Soviet (an influential local council representing workers and soldiers in Petrograd), generally favored rule that was at least partially democratic.
The October Revolution
The October Revolution (also called the Bolshevik Revolution) overturned the interim provisional government and established the Soviet Union. The October Revolution was a much more deliberate event, orchestrated by a small group of people. The Bolsheviks, who led this coup, prepared their coup in only six months. They were generally viewed as an extremist group and had very little popular support when they began serious efforts in April 1917. By October, the Bolsheviks’ popular base was much larger; though still a minority within the country as a whole, they had built up a majority of support within Petrograd and other urban centers.
After October, the Bolsheviks realized that they could not maintain power in an election-based system without sharing power with other parties and compromising their principles. As a result, they formally abandoned the democratic process in January 1918 and declared themselves the representatives of a dictatorship of the proletariat. In response, the Russian Civil War broke out in the summer of that year and would last well into 1920.

LENIN AND RUSSIA, 1917- 1928

The Bolsheviks controlled Petrograd, but in other places their takeover was not easy.

THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

The passing of all banks into the possessions of the Workers and Peasants State is confirmed as one of the conditions for freeing the toiling masses from the burden of Capitalism.
The Workers and Peasants Government calls upon all people and governments to start immediate negotiations for peace.
Other decrees gave women equal rights. Divorce was made easy, free education for all was planned, and some of the minority peoples in Russia. The Ukranians and Georgians were offered more independence. Lenin tried to deal with the shortage of food in towns by sending soldiers out into the countryside to seize grain.
The Bolsheviks claimed to represent the proletariat, the working people.
Most of the Bolshevik supporters in Russia were in the army, the navy and among the workers of Moscow and Petrograd. They therefore controlled the important centres of power.

ASSAMBLY ELECTIONS

This lack of support was seen very clearly in the elections for the Assembly held in January 1918. Lenin had blamed Kerensky for no calling elections quickly enough after the March Revolution, he could hardly put them off now that he was in power.

CIVIL WAR

From 1918 to 1921, Russia suffered a terrible civil war. The Bolsheviks in 1918 controlled only the areas round Moscow and Petrograd. They were now attacked by their many enemies. The Bolsheviks were called REDS since red is the colour of the Communist flag. Their opponents were called WHITES. The name was about all the Whites had in common: there was Tsarists and liberals, Social Revolutionaries and Anarchists ( those who believed all types of government were wrong)

The WHITES were also helped by several countries: Britain, France, the USA and Japan. At first, these countries hoped to open up the eastern front with Germany again. Later they wanted to crush the new Communist state to prevent its ideas from spreading.
Trotsky himself spent the years of the Civil war rushing from front in a special train. The train had an office, sleeping accommodation and a printing press to turn out propaganda leaflets. He made speeches, encouraged the soldiers and made sure that supplies were available.
Fortunately for Trotsky, the WHITES did not act together.

War Communism
Lenin´s government was prepared to go to any lengths to win the war. His ruthless policy in these years was called “war communism”. This stated that everyone between 16 and 60 had to work, except the ill and pregnant women. Workers could be sent to work anywhere in the country.

Red victory
The REDS won the civil war, leaving Lenin as undisputed ruler of Russia. There were several reasons for this victory. The White Forces did not act together, whereas the Reds were united under Trotsky´s command. The WHITE armies were hundreds of miles apart, and they found it difficult to get supplies.
Famine 1921
By 1921 Russia was in state of total collapse after seven hard years of war. The First World War and then the Civil War had disrupted life to such an extent that land was not being farmed. War Communism had brought passive resistance from the peasants. Towns were deserted as people went into the countryside to look for food.
Agricultural production was down by 50%, and industrial production down by 90% compared to the 1913 figure. In addition to all of this, there was a drought in 1921. No one knows how many Russian people died, but figures vary from five million to twenty-five million.
In early 1921, there was a mutiny among the sailors at the naval base at Kronstadt, near Petrograd. They called for a third revolution, more free elections, free speech and free trade unions. These were not WHITES but men who had supported the Bolsheviks from the beginning. Trotsky ordered his red army to crush the mutiny. It was a bloody battle and was followed by more executions.

New Economic Policy (NEP)
This new economic policy allowed peasants to farm their own land and sell their own produce. The government would take a small fixed percentage of their produce as tax. The more they produced, the more they could keep.
People were also allowed to run small businesses again. Shops, small factories and trades began to flourish. Lenin kept what he called “the commanding heights of the economy” in the hands of the state. These were the vital heavy industries- coal, iron and steel- together with railways, shipping and banking.

Death of Lenin
In 1918, a social Revolutionary called Dora Kaplan had fired several shots at Lenin. Unfortunately, the doctors were forced to leave two bullets in his body. In 1922, he suffered a stroke and never fully recovered. He died in January 1924. His incredible energy and determination had changed the history of the world. He had organized the Bolshevik Party until it was ready for Revolution. He had called for a second Revolution in 1917, and he had led the Bolshevik state through the difficulties of its first seven years.

Stalin or Trotsky?
Lenin was only 53 when he died. His death left the Party with the problem of who was to follow him. Trotsky was clearly the most able of the Communist leaders: he had organized the October Revolution and the Red army brilliantly.
A struggle for power between Stalin and Trotsky lasted for four years. Gradually, Stalin emerged as the leading figure. Stalin joined the group wanting to establish “socialism in one country” that is Russia first.
Trotsky was sent to Siberia and finally exiled from Russia completely in 1929. Stalin was able to remove all other leaders from key positions so that he was in complete control.

THE RISE OF HITLER
Germany 1919-1923
Hitler´s rise to power was made easier by the same factors which helped Mussolini become dictator of Italy.

1_Resentment over the war
By the 1918 the Allied naval blockade was working well. The German people were very short of food. Their morale was low, but they still did not know how bad the situation really was. The fighting had not reached Germany when the war ended, so the Kaiser was able to keep the news of all German defeats from the people. Only German victories were announced.