The First World War was Europe’s first shocking experience with modern mass warfare.
Even a few statistics reflect the mind-boggling dimensions of this widespread conflict: the thirty-four countries that eventually participated in the war mobilized 65 million soldiers of whom 10 million died and over 20 million were wounded.
Civilian casualties were almost as high. Not only was the war massive, but it was total. Entire societies and their economies were harnessed to support the huge armies at the front. But as the losses mounted, the tremendous pressures they created, both at the battlefront and at home, exposed and aggravated the fatal political and socioeconomic weaknesses of Europe’s old imperial order. Consequently, for the German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, which constituted the Central Powers, and for the Russian Empire, which, together with Britain, France, and America was a member of the Entente, the war eventually became an exercise in self-destruction.The Russian Empire was the first to collapse under the impact of the war. Not unexpectedly, its demise was accompanied by the rapid rise of various Russian parties that had long opposed the tsarist regime and now attempted to impose their models of a new socioeconomic and political order on the disoriented society. But to the surprise of many, the former empire’s apparently docile non-Russian nationalities also demanded to arrange their affairs as they saw fit. As a result, the common view of the revolution of 1917 as a titanic class struggle in Russia is inadequate for an understanding of what happened in Ukraine; there, a Ukrainian revolution occurred, and it was national as well as socioeconomic in nature.