Late XIX Century Darwinism, Marxism (how they influenced on people)

WWI: causes (acronym), what happened in the west front, the stale
mate, why it was a war of trenches, the entry of the USA to the war and what it
meant. How the Allies won the war and why not the other side. Consequences
of the war. New map of Europe
Treaty of Versailles. Wilsons 14 points. The League of Nations what
happened with Germany?
The Russian Revolution: why it happened in Russia. How Marxism had
to be adapted to the Russian context (they were mainly farmers and did not
have a strong bourgeoisie), who where the main leaders.

Trend of thoughts during the late XIX Century

The Theory of Evolution
The greatest change came in the new emphasis upon biology and the life
sciences. The greatest symbolic publication to date is that of the Origin of
Species in 1859, by Charles Darwin. Previous to this publication Evolutionary
philosophies had been introduced by Marx and Hegel. The idea of progress had
made people think of human affairs in terms of a time process.
What Darwin meant by Evolution was that species are mutable, no species is
created to remain unchanged once and for all, all species of living organisms,
have developed by successive small changes from, other species that went
before them. Darwin thought that species changed, not by any intelligent or
purposeful activity in the organism, but by a kind of chance. There was a
struggle for existence resulting in the survival of the fittest through a natural
selection of the most favored races, races meaning not human races but the
strains within species.
With the popularization of biological evolution, there came to be known a school
known as Social Darwinism. It applied the ideas of the struggle for existence
and survival of the fittest to human society. Their doctrines were put to various
uses, to show that some peoples were naturally superior to others. This applied
to ethnicities and also to classes. The upper and middle classes saw
themselves as deserving of these blessings because they had proved
themselves fittest than the poor, or that big business had to take over smaller
ones, or even that some states were bound to rise and that war was a morally
fine thing, proving the virility and survival value of those who fought in it.

World War I

Causes: there were many causes to the outbreak of WWI. The main causes can
be summarized with the acronym MAIN Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism and
Nationalism.
Militarism: It meant that the army and military forces were given a high profile by
the government. The European divide had led to an arms race between the
main countries. The armies of France and Germany had more than doubled
between 1870 and 1914 and there was fierce competition between Britain and
Germany for mastery of the seas.
The German naval program, which mounted rapidly after 1898, became a
source of concern to the British, and by 1912 was felt as a menace. The
Germans insisted that they must have a navy to protect their colonies, secure
foreign trade, and for the general purposes of their greatness.
Alliances: An alliance is an agreement made between two or more countries to
give each other help if needed. When one is signed, those countries become
known as Allies. A number of alliances had been signed between 1879 and
1914. They were important because they meant that some countries had no
option but to declare war if one of their allies declared war first.
In 1879 Germany formed a military alliance with Austria-Hungary, to which Italy
was added in 1882. The Triple Alliance was formed and it lasted until the First
World War. Its terms were, briefly, that if any member became involved in war
with two or more powers its allies should come to its aid by force of arms. The
French, faced by the Triple Alliance, soon seized the opportunity to form their
own alliance with Russia, the Franco-Russian Alliance signed in 1894. The
continent was then divided into two opposed camps, the German-AustrianItalian against the Franco-Russian.
In 1904 the British and the French government formed an Alliance that was not
a specific one, that is to say, that neither side said what it would do in the event
of war, it was only a close understanding, and entente cordiale. By 1907
England, France and Russia were acting together. The older Triple Alliance
faced a new Triple Entente, the latter being somewhat the looser, since the
British refused to make any formal military commitments.
Imperialism: Imperialism is when a country takes over new lands or other
countries to make them subject to their rule. By the 1900 the British Empire
extended over five different continents and France had control of large areas of
Africa. The amounts of lands owned by Britain and France increased the
rivalry with Germany who had entered the scramble to acquire colonies late and
only had small areas of Africa.
Nationalism: Nationalism means being a strong supporter of the rights and
interests of ones countries. The Congress of Vienna, held after the Napoleonic
Wars left both Germany and Italy as divided states. It was nationalism that
brought the re-unification of Italy in 1861 and Germany in 1871. France was
angry because the settlement at the end of the Franco-Prussian war had given
Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Large areas of both Austria-Hungary and Serbia

were home to differing nationalist groups, all of whom wanted freedom from the
states in which they lived.
Crises
The Moroccan Crisis. In 1904 Morocco had been given to France by Britain, but
the Moroccans wanted independence and were supported by Germany. War
was avoided, but in 1911, the Germans were again protesting against French
possession of Morocco. Britain supported France and Germany was persuaded
to back down for part of French Congo.
The Bosnian Crisis. In 1908, Austria-Hungary took over Bosnia. This angered
Serbians who felt the province should be theirs. Serbia threatened AustriaHungary with war, Russia, allied to Serbia, mobilised its forces. Germany, allied
to Austria-Hungary mobilized its forces and prepared to threaten Russia. War
was avoided when Russia backed down. In 1911 and 1912 there was war in the
Balkans when states drove Turkey out of the area. The states then fought each
other over which area should belong to which state. Austria-Hungary intervened
and forced Serbia to give up land. Tension between Serbia and Austria-Hungary
was high.
The Sarajevo Crisis and the Outbreak of War
On June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian revolutionary, member of the Serbian
secret society called Union or Death, acting with the knowledge of certain
Serbian officials, assassinated the heir to the Habsburg empire, the Archduke
Frances Ferdinand, in the streets of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, in the
Austrian Empire. Austria, consequently, declared war to Serbia. Russia
prepared to defend Serbia and hence to fight Austria. The German government
demanded an end to the Russian mobilization on its border and, receiving no
answer, declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914. Convinced that France
would soon follow it, Germany also declared war on France on August 3.
How did Britain enter the war? It was due to the invasion of Belgium. Germany planned
to crush France by crossing Belgium, violating the treaty of 1839 which guaranteed
Belgiums neutrality. As a result, Britain declared war on Germany on August 4.
The armed stalemate
The German war plan, known as the Schlieffen Plan, was a battle plan, drawn up by
German tacticians, to secure victory against both France and Russia. German military

tacticians mused over a particular strategic concern: if Germany ever found

itself at war with both France and Russia, she would be surrounded and forced
to fight on two fronts, dividing her resources and doubling the risk.
Germanys idea was to defeat France by the rapid wheeling motion of an army
through Belgium and then to turn at more leisure against Russia, whose great
size and less developed railways would make its deployment much slower.
The war on land 1914-1916

In the West, the war of movement settled into a war of position. Since aviation was
barely beginning, and motor transport was still new, the basic soldier was the men on
foot. The most deadly new weapon was the machine gun, which resulted in soldiers
advancing across open fields without artillery preparation. This also resulted in a long
stalemate of war in the trenches in which the indispensable infantry sought protection.
The war at sea
With land armies helpless, both sides looked to the sea. The long preponderance of
British sea power, and the more recent Anglo-German naval race, would be tested. The
British, with French aid, imposed a strict naval blockade. The one nearly decisive sea
battle took place in 1916 but although German battle cruisers initially caused
considerable damage to their British counterparts and that the British lost more ships
and men in the battle, the German fleet was more heavily damaged and spent most of
the rest of the war in its home ports.
The withdrawal of Russia and the entering of the United States in the War
The mass of the Russian people were wearied of a war. They were drawn to another
form of socialism, Marxist and non-marxist. The Russian Marxist party, the social
Democrats, was divided between Menshevik and Bolshevik factions, the latter being
the most extreme. To promote rebellion against the Provisional Government and to
eliminate Russia, Germany planned the safe passage to Lenin through Germany to
Russia. In 1917 the situation became untenable and Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized
power. In 1918 the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed where Russia indicated it
wouldnt or couldnt keep fighting in the war.
The entering of the United States in the War
Although President Wilson clung persistently to neutrality there were many attacks and
sinking of American vessels which interfered with their rights as neutrals. That is why
on April 6 1917 the United States declared war to Germany. The United States navy,
unlike the army, was of considerable size and ready for combat, supplied enough
additional force to the Allies to make convoying and other antisubmarine measures
highly effective. By the end of 1917 the submarine was no more than a nuisance.
The Americans made good use of the time given them. Conscription, democratically
entitled selective service, was adopted immediately after the declaration of war.
Finally, on November 11, 1918, firing ceased on the Western Front. The German High
Command notified its government that it could not win the war, the German foreign
office made peace overtures to President Wilson. American assistance was decisive in
the defeat of Germany, but it came so late, when others had been struggling for so
long, that the mere beginnings of it were enough to turn the scale.
The peace of Paris, 1919
The victors assembled in Paris in the winter of 1919, to construct the world. They
signed during that year five treaties, being the most important that signed with
Germany, the Treaty of Versailles. They all admitted that American intervention had
decided the conflict.
The fourteen points and the Treaty of Versailles

The fourteen points demanded an end to secret treaties and secret diplomacy (open
covenants openly arrived at), freedom of the seas, removal of barriers and inequalities
in international trade, reduction of armaments by all powers, colonial readjustments,
evacuation of occupied territory, self-determination of nationalities and redrawing of
European boundaries along national lines, and, last but not least, an international
political organization to prevent war. On the whole, Wilson stood for the fruition of the
democratic, liberal, progressive, and nationalistic movements of the century past, for
the ideals of the Enlightment, the French Revolution, and of 1848.
Wilson had some difficulty in persuading the Allied governments to accept his fourteen
points, but with two reservations the Allies expressed their willingness to follow
Wilsons lead. Wilson first fought a hard battle for a League of Nations, a permanent
international body in which all nations, without sacrificing their sovereignty, should meet
together to discuss and settle disputes, each promising not to resort to war.
The League was an international organization founded after the Paris Peace
Conference in 1919. Its goals included disarmament, preventing war through collective
security, settling disputes between countries through negotiation diplomacy and
improving global welfare. This was a fundamental shift in thought from the preceding
hundred years. Before, the old philosophy saw Europe as a shifting map of alliances
among nation-states, creating a balance of power maintained by strong armies and
secret agreements. Under this new philosophy, however, the League was a
government of governments, with the role of settling disputes between individual
nations in an open and legalist forum. The impetus for the founding of the League
came through the American President, Woodrow Wilson. The league lacked an armed
force of its own and so depended on the Great Powers to enforce its resolutions,
however, they were often reluctant to do so. In the end, the League proved itself
incapable of preventing World War Two.
The new map of Europe after WWI
After the Peace of Versailles the principle of nationality was recognized. Germany
returned Alsace-Lorraine to France and lost the region around Danzing (the Polish
Corridor) to Poland, essentially the area taken by Prussia. In place of the AstroHungarian Empire we find the succession states, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia, and Rumania. Austria-Hungary also lost Trieste and some of the Dalmatian
Islands to Italy. Poland regained its independence, and Finland and the three Baltic
states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, emerged from the tsarist empire. Most of Ireland
became a free state in the British Commonwealth of Nations, only Ulster remaining in
the United Kingdom. These boundaries lasted until 1938, when, as the Second World
War approached, the Germans annexed Austria and the Sudeten part of
Czechoslovakia.
The Treaty of Versailles was designed to put an end to the German menace. It was
not a successful treaty. The Allies imposed upon the German republic about the same
terms that they might have imposed upon the German Empire. The Social Democrats
and liberals bore the shame of Versailles. The treaty makers drafted a set of terms
which the test of time showed that they themselves did not in the long run wish to
impose. As the years passed, many people in Allied countries declared various
provisions of the Versailles treaty to be unfair or unworkable.
Treaty of Versailles: The War Guilt Clause

Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, known as the War Guilt Clause, was a statement
that Germany was responsible for beginning World War I. It reads as follows:
"The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility
of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and
Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of
the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies."
The War Guilt Clause was added in order to get the French and Belgians to agree to
reduce the sum of money that Germany would have to pay to compensate for war
damage. The article was seen as a concession to the Germans by the negotiators. It
was bitterly resented, however, by virtually all Germans who did not believe they were
responsible for the outbreak of the war. This article was a constant thorn in the side of
the Weimar leaders who tried to meet the terms of the agreement while trying to have
these terms modified.

The Russian Revolution

Before the Revolution Russia began to pass through the Industrial Revolution and take
its place as an integral part of the world economic system. European capital entered
the country, financing railways, mines and factories. Although still industrially
underdeveloped by Western standards, Russia was industrializing rapidly.
Industrialization brought an increase both of the business and of the wage-earning
classes, that is to say the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat. Though growing, they
were still not numerous by standards of the West.
Russia was predominantly agricultural; they lived in their village communes or mirs.
The peasants paid high taxes, the farm population in general bore a considerable
share of the costs of industrialization. The peasants, also, were forever demanding
more land, the so called land hunger was felt both by individual families and by the
mirs.
The emergence of Revolutionary Parties
The peasants were the ancient source of revolutionary disturbance in Russia. They
demanded credit from the government to buy from the big landowners or farmer
masters. Their land hunger could not be appeased. The other traditional source of
revolutionary disturbance lay among the intelligentsia. The revolutionary intelligentsia
yearned for a catastrophic overthrow of the stardom. They had formed secret
organizations, comprising a few hundred or thousands of members, engaged in
outwitting the tsarist police.
The disputes of this intelligentsia were about such topics as whether the peasants or
the new factory workers were the true revolutionary class, whether the peasants were
potentially proletarian or bourgeois, whether Russia was bound to experience the same
historical process as the West or whether it was different; and, specifically, whether
Russia had to go through capitalism or might skip the capitalist stage in reaching the
socialist society.
The populists were interested in peasant problems and their welfare. They believed
that a great native revolutionary tradition existed in Russia. They admired the Russian
communal village or mir, in which they saw the European socialist idea of a commune
represented. They read and respected Marx and Engels but didnt believe that an

urban proletariat was the only true revolutionary class. They didnt believe that
capitalitalism, by creating such a proletariat, had inevitably and logically to precede
socialism. They said that, in Russia, the horrors of such a stage could be skipped. They
address themselves to the plight of the farmer and the evils of landlordism, and favored
strengthening the mir and equalizing the shares of all peasants in it, and, since they
didnt have to wait for the triumph of capitalism in Russia, they thought that revolution
might come quite soon. This populist sentiment crystallized in the founding in 1901 of
the Social Revolutionary party.
In 1898 the Marxists in Russia founded the Social Democratic Labor party. They
were not more revolutionary than the larger group of Social Revolutionaries; they had a
different conception of the revolution. They were more inclined to see the revolution as
an international movement. Russia, for them, was no different from other countries
except that it was less advanced. They expected the world revolution to break out first
in Western Europe. They admired the German Social Democratic party. They did think
that Russia must develop capitalism, an industrialist proletariat, and the modern form of
class struggle before there could be any revolution. Seeing in the urban proletariat the
true revolutionary class, they looked upon all peasantry with suspicion, ridiculed the mir
and were against the Social Revolutionaries. Lenin used to say Marxism has forever
shaken itself loose from the nonsensical patter of the populists and anarchists to the
effect that Russia can escape a capitalist development.
The split in the Social Democrats: Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
The Russian Marxists held a second party congress in Brussels and London in 1903.
The purpose of it was to unify all Russian Marxism, but in fact it split it. The two
resulting factions called themselves Bolsheviks, or majority men, and Mensheviks, or
minority men. Lenin was the main author of the split and hence the founder of
Bolshevism.
Bolshevism or Leninism originally differed from Menshevism mainly on matters of
organization and tactics. They were referred to as hards and softs respectively.
Lenin believed that the party should be a small revolutionary elite, a hard core of
reliable and zealous workers. The Mensheviks wished for a larger and more open
party. Lenin insisted upon a strongly centralized party, without autonomy for national or
other component groups. He demanded strong authority at the top. Mensheviks came
to resemble the Marxist of Western Europe, in constrast, Lenin stood for the rigid
reaffirmation of Marxian fundamentals- dialectical materialism and irreconcilable class
struggle.
In Leninism the intellectuals supply the brains and the workers the brawn, the elite
leads while the toilers follow. This is one of the most distinctive traits of Leninism and
one of the most foreign to the democratic movement of the West.
The Revolution of 1905
After 1900 there was a growing popular unrest. Peasants were trespassing on lands of
the gentry and even rising in local insurrections against landlords and tax collectors.
Factory workers also refused to work. But they had not yet formed any solid links. The
government also refused to make concessions of any kind.
Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg snapped the moral bond upon which all stable
government rests. The workers saw how the tsar was not their friend. The Social
Democrats (more Mensheviks than Bolsheviks) appeared from the underground or
from exile to give revolutionary direction to these movements. Councils or soviets of

workers were formed. The peasants in various parts of the country also begun to erupt.
The liberal Constitutional Democrats, professors, engineers, businesspeople, lawyers,
leaders in the provincial zemstvos tried to seize leadership. They all agreed on one
demand, there should be more democratic representation in the government.
After all this the tsar agreed to called an Estates General, for which peasants,
landowners, and city people should vote as separate classes. Nevertheless the St.
Petersburg Soviet declared a general strike in October.
The Duma
The Duma was convoked after the events of the Revolution of 1905. From 1906 to
1916 Russia had a superficial attributes of a semi constitutional monarchy. But the
intentions of Nicholas II were soon showed, he did not intend to yield much, he
announced in advance, in 1906, that the Duma would not have power over foreign
policy, the budget, or government personnel.
The first Duma was elected in 1906 by a system of indirect and unequal voting, in
which peasants and workers voted as separate classes, and with proportionately far
less representation than was granted to the landlords. The liberal Constitutional
Democrats, the cadets obtained the majority. They were fighting for the principle of
constitutional government. They demanded true universal male suffrage and
responsibility of ministers to a parliamentary majority. The tsar dismissed the Duma
shortly after.
The second Duma was elected in 1907 with the government trying to control the
elections. Some 83 socialists were elected but the Duma came to an abrupt end when
the government denounced and arrested some socialists as revolutionaries.
The third Duma was elected after an electoral change that gave increased
representation to the landed propertied class and guaranteed a conservative majority.
This Duma lasted from 1907 to 1912. The fourth Duma, from 1912 to 1916 kept alive
a modicum of parliamentary institutions in the tsarist empire.
The Stolypin Reforms
Some officials believe that the way to calm the revolutionaries and strengthen the hold
of the monarchy was to attract support of moderate and reasonable people by a
program of reforms. One of theses officials was Peter Stolypin, he dissolved the first
two Dumas and his aim was to build up the propertied classes as friends of the state.
He favored and broadened the power of the provincial zemstvos. For the peasantry he
put through legislation more sweeping than any since the Emancipation. Seeing that
the mir was the source of communal agrarian restlessness he hoped to replace this
ancient institution with a regime of private individual property. His policies were
successful but this trend does not have to be mistaken toward individual property and
independent farming. The results, as well, must not be exaggerated; the mir was far
from broken. He was finally shot dead while attending the theatre in Kiev, in the present
of the tsar and the tsarina in 1911.
The Revolution of 1917
The end of the Tsardom: The revolution of March 1917

The war had put the tsarist regime to a test that it could not meet. The ordinary
workingman and peasant marched off with the army, but without the sense of personal
conviction felt by the common people in Germany and the West, more decisive was the
attitude of the middle class. The middle class was organized in such a way that people
became conscious of their own strength and more critical of the bureaucracy.
The war revived all the basic political issues that had been latent since the Revolution
of 1905. The union of zemstvos demanded the assembly of the Duma. It was
reassembled in November 1916 and, conservative though it had always been,
expressed loud indignation at the way affairs were conducted. It was again the workers
of Petrograd who precipitated the crisis. On March 8, 1917, food riots broke out,
crowds shouted Down with the tsar, the troops within the city refused to fire on the
insurgents.
Middle class leaders demanded dismissal of the ministry and formation of a new one
commanding the confidence of a majority of the Duma. The tsar disbanded the Duma.
The Duma set up an executive committee to take charge until the situation clarified,
there were now two new authorities; the Duma committee, moderate, constitutionalist
and relatively legal, and the Petrograd Soviet, representing the revolutionary forces.
The Soviet became the public auditorium and administrative center of the workingclass upheaval. All the factions of socialists (Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and
Bolsheviks) tried to win it over and utilize it for their own ends.
The Duma committee, under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet, on March 14, set up
a Provisional Government under Prince Lvov. The Duma liberals admitted one socialist
to the new government, Alexander Kerensky, a moderate Social Revolutionary, and
they consented to demand the abdication of Nicholas II. Nicholas finally yielded and, on
March 17, 1917, Russia became a republic.

The Bolshevik Revolution: November 1917

The provisional Government called for elections by universal male suffrage to a
Constituent Assembly. It also tried to continue the war against Germany, but the
Petrograd Soviet, opposing the Provisional Government, called for a speedy
termination of the war.
The revolution was well advanced when Lenin and the other Bolsheviks arrived in
Petrograd. They took sides with the Petrograd Soviet against the Provisional
Government but he had to flee to Finland, after being blamed for an armed uprising of
soldiers and sailors. But still the Provisional Government named the socialist Kerensky.
The Bolsheviks adapted their program to what the most aroused elements in a
revolutionary people seemed to want. Lenin concentrated on four points: immediate
peace with the Central Powers, redistribution of land to the peasants, transfer of
factories, mines, and industrial plants from the capitalists to committees of workers,
and, finally, the recognition of the soviets as the supreme power instead of the
Provisional Government. He promised peace, land, and bread to soldiers, peasants
and workers.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks called an all-Russian Congress of Soviets. The time had
come for the seizure of power. The Bolsheviks themselves were divided, but Lenin was
backed by Trotsky, Stalin, and a majority of the party Central Committee. The congress
finally pronounced the Provisionary Government defunct and named in its place a
Council of Peoples Commissars, with Lenin as its head. The congress introduced two
resolutions: negotiate a just democratic peace, and abolish al landlord property. The
dictatorship of the proletariat was now established, in March 1918 the Bolsheviks
renamed themselves the Communist party.