The War that Ended Peace

Although the war with Japan and the subsequent revolutionary upheavals in 1905 set Russian development back, it picked up again rapidly in the last years before the Great War. By 1913 Russia was the biggest agricultural producer in Europe and in industry was catching up fast with the other industrial powers.

Indeed, the king of Bulgaria, a country which Germany hoped to make an ally of, once left Berlin ‘white-hot with hatred’ after the Kaiser smacked him on the bottom in public.

If you wish to get on with the people with whom you are living, you must not be looking for perpetual opportunities of getting a little advantage over them; you must view your own claims and theirs in a just and neighbourly spirit, – on the one hand never sacrificing any important and genuine right in respect to which you think that oppression or encroachment is being attempted, – and, on the other hand, abstaining from erecting small controversies into envenomed disputes and treating every difference as a matter of vital principle.

The old international order had gone for ever. Weakened and poorer, Europe was no longer the undisputed master of the world. In its colonies nationalist movements were stirring and new powers were rising on its periphery, to the east Japan and to Europe’s west the United States.

It had not been expected that he would be the heir to the throne but the execution of his uncle Maximilian in Mexico, the suicide of his cousin Rudolf, and his own father’s death from typhoid which he got from drinking the water of the River Jordan in the Holy Land

The contempt for what the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called Bürokretinismus served further to undermine public confidence in their government.

universal male suffrage

Radicals, liberals and socialists all had many reasons to hate the regime with its secret police, censorship, lack of basic human rights, its persecution of its opponents, its crushing of ethnic minorities and its appalling record of anti-Semitism.

Economic and social changes that had taken a century or more in western Europe were compressed into a generation in Russia. And Russia did not have strongly developed and deeply rooted institutions that might have helped to absorb and manage the changes.

The People’s Budget, as it was coming to be known, was bringing a revolution in British society. The landed classes threatened to lay off estate workers and the Duke of Buccleuch announced that he would have to cancel his annual subscription of one guinea to the local football club.