15. How Revolution Ended the First World War¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 15: How Revolution Ended the First World War¶
The First World War was not concluded by military victory alone, but by revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 ignited a wave of working-class insurgency across Europe. At Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky weaponised peace negotiations to broadcast revolutionary propaganda, hoping to spark uprisings in Germany and Austria. The Bolsheviks were ultimately forced to accept harsh German terms after the old tsarist army disintegrated and the Red Army had yet to be built. By October 1918, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy collapsed under revolutionary pressure. Ludendorff’s spring offensives had failed, costing nearly 700,000 German casualties while American reinforcements arrived. By autumn, Germany faced both military defeat and internal revolt. A sailors’ mutiny at Kiel on 30 October ignited the German Revolution; Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils formed across the country. On 9 November, the Kaiser abdicated and fled. The Social Democrats under Ebert took power but preserved the old imperial state apparatus—the bureaucracy, military, and elite—and crushed the Spartacist Revolt in January 1919 using the Freikorps. The armistice of 11 November 1918 was effectively a German surrender.
In Italy, a wave of strikes and factory occupations in 1919–20 brought the country to the brink of revolution, yet lacked determined revolutionary leadership. The proletariat confronted a bourgeoisie unable to resolve Italian society’s deep contradictions, which could only be settled outside bourgeois democracy’s narrow limits: by proletarian revolution or fascism. Italian bourgeois democracy had weak roots; during the war, parliament rarely met, and power lay with a tiny clique of politicians, industrialists, and generals. Fascism emerged as a movement of the petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat—embittered veterans, former officers, rich sons, and de-classed elements. Its blend of chauvinism, imperialism, and social demagogy united disparate discontented forces. Mussolini, a blacksmith’s son and former socialist, initially opposed Italy’s entry into the war but became a rabid chauvinist. He attacked the government over the Treaty of Versailles, united right-wing groups, and formed the Fascist Party in March 1919. His plebeian origins, socialist credentials, and demagogic talent made him the perfect leader. Under the pretext of fighting the establishment, fascist violence targeted revolutionary workers and peasants. Mussolini used fascist gangs to smash the labour movement and save the bourgeoisie from revolution. Declaring only he could restore order, he compelled the terrified bourgeoisie to hand him power after the March on Rome, then placed his jackboot on their necks, dismantling bourgeois democracy and taking the title ‘Il Duce’. The failure of workers’ leaders to seize the revolutionary situation led directly to fascism’s victory in Italy, just as Social Democratic betrayal prepared for Hitler’s rise in Germany.