Part SixCataclysm
I he Great War began in August 1914. Germany and
Austria-Hungary fought Great Britain, France, and Russia.
Although most statesmen, military leaders, and ordinary soldiers
and civilians believed that the war would be over quickly, it
raged on for more than four years. A military stalemate, bogged
down in grisly trench warfare on the western front, took the
lives of millions of soldiers. In the war's wake, four empires fell.
In 1917, a revolution overthrew the tsar of Russia, and then the
Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government, withdrew
from the world conflict, and imposed Communist rule. The
German Empire collapsed in November 1918 upon the victory
of Britain, France, and their allies (including the United States
since 1917). The multinational Austro-Hungarian and Turkish
Ottoman Empires (which had joined Germany on the losing
side) also collapsed.
The Versailles Peace Treaty, signed by the new German Republic
in 1919, carved up the fallen empires, creating successor states
in Central Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
The treaties signed between the victors and the vanquished left
a legacy of nationalist hatred in Europe that poisoned interna
tional relations during the subsequent two decades. Out of the
economic, social, and political turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s
emerged authoritarian movements that were swept to power in
many European countries, beginning with Mussolini's Italian
fascists in 1922. In Germany, Hitler's National Socialist
Party—the Nazis—grew in strength with the advent of the
Great Depression in 1929. The Nazis drew on extreme right
wing nationalism that viewed the Treaty of Versailles as an
unfair humiliation to Germany. In the Soviet Union, Joseph
Stalin became head of the Communist Party following Lenin's
death in 1924; he purged rivals within the party, launched a