Revolutions of

1917–1923

This article needs additional citations for

verification. Learn more

The Revolutions of 1917–1923 was a

revolutionary wave that included political
unrest and revolts around the world
inspired by the success of the Russian
Revolution and the disorder created by
the aftermath of World War I. The
uprisings were mainly socialist or anti-
colonial in nature. Many attempted
socialist revolts failed to have a long-
term impact.[1]
 Revolutions of 1917–1923
Part of Opposition to World War I and the
aftermath of World War I

European countries involved in revolutions

Date 8 March 1917 – c.
16 June 1923
Location Worldwide (mainly in
Europe and Asia)
Caused by World War I
Russian
Revolution
(outside Russia)

Goals World
communism
 World revolution
National liberation
Constitutionalism
Irredentism
Vigilantism
Resulted in Russian
Revolution
February
Revolution
October
Revolution
Russian Civil
War
November
Revolution
Revolution of
1919
Revolution of
1921
World War I mobilized millions of troops,
reshaped political powers and drove
social turmoil. From the turmoil outright
revolutions broke out, massive strikes
occurred, and many soldiers mutinied. In
Russia the Tsar was overthrown during
the Russian Revolution of 1917. That
was followed by the Russian Civil War.
Many French soldiers mutinied in 1917
and refused to engage the enemy. In
Bulgaria, many troops mutinied, and the
Bulgarian Tsar stepped down. Mass
strikes and mutinies occurred in Austria-
Hungary, and the Habsburg monarchy
collapsed. In Germany, the November
Revolution of 1918 threatened to
overtake Germany but eventually failed.
Italy faced various mass strikes. Greece
succumbed to a coup d'état in 1922.
Turkey experienced a successful war of
independence. Across the world, various
other protests and revolts occurred from
the turmoil of World War I and the
success of the Russian Revolution.[2]
Ernst Nolte theorized that fascism in
Europe arose as a response to the
political crisis after World War I.[3]

Communist revolutions in
Europe

Russia …
October Revolution in Moscow, Russia (1917).

In war-torn Imperial Russia, the liberal

February Revolution toppled the
monarchy. A period of instability
followed, and the Bolsheviks seized
power in the October Revolution. The
ascendant communist party soon
withdrew from the war with large
territorial concessions by the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk. It then battled its political
rivals in the Russian Civil War, including
invading forces from the Allied Powers.
In response to Lenin, the Bolshevik Party
and the emerging Soviet Union, anti-
communists from a broad assortment of
ideological factions fought against them,
particularly through the counter-
revolutionary White movement and the
peasant Green Army, the various
nationalist movements in Ukraine after
the Russian Revolution and other would-
be new states like those in Soviet
Transcaucasia and Soviet Central Asia,
through the anarchist-inspired Third
Russian Revolution and Tambov
Rebellion.[4]

By 1921, due to exhaustion, the collapse

of transportation and markets, and
threats of starvation, even dissident
elements of the Red Army itself were in
revolt against the communist state, as
shown by the Kronstadt rebellion.
However, the multiple anti-Bolshevik
forces were uncoordinated and
disorganized, and in every case operated
on the periphery. The Red Army,
operating at the center, defeated them
one by one and regained control. The
complete failure of Comintern-inspired
revolutions was a sobering experience in
Moscow, and the Bolsheviks moved from
world revolution to the theme of
socialism in one country, Russia. Lenin
moved to open trade relations with
Britain, Germany, and other major
countries. Most dramatically, in 1921,
Lenin introduced a sort of small-scale
capitalism with his New Economic Policy
(or NEP). In this process of revolution
and counter-revolution the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was
officially born in 1922.[5]

Western Europe …

Statue of a revolutionary soldier; memorial to the

German Revolution in Berlin
The Leninist victories also inspired a
surge by the world Communist
movement: the larger German Revolution
and its offspring, like the Bavarian Soviet
Republic, as well as the neighbouring
Hungarian Revolution, and the Biennio
Rosso in Italy in addition to various
smaller uprisings, protests and strikes, all
proved abortive.

The Bolsheviks sought to coordinate this

new wave of revolution in the Soviet-led
Communist International, while new
communist parties separated from their
former socialist organisations and the
older, more moderate Second
International. Despite ambitions for
world revolution, the far-flung Comintern
movement had more setbacks than
successes through the next generation,
and it was abolished in 1943.[6] before
the Second World War when the Red
Army occupied most of Eastern Europe,
Communists would come to power in the
Baltic states, Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Romanian, Bulgaria, and
East Germany.[7]

Non-Communist revolutions

Ireland …
In Ireland, then part of the United
Kingdom, the nationalist Easter Rising of
1916 anticipated the Irish War of
Independence (1919–1921) within the
same historical period as this first wave
of communist revolution. The Irish
republican movement of the time was
predominantly a nationalist and populist
form of radical-republicanism, and
although it had left-wing positions and
included socialists and communists, it
was not Communist. The Irish and Soviet
Russian Republics nevertheless found
common ground in their opposition to
British interests, and established a
trading relationship. However the
historian E. H. Carr later commented that
".. the negotiations were not taken very
seriously on either side".[8] Both the then-
Irish Republic and the then-Russian
Soviet Federative Socialist Republic were
pariah states excluded from the Paris
Peace Conference (1919–1920).

The resulting Irish Free State was

founded in 1922, and was run on a
clerical ideology.

Greece …

The clash between radical republicanism

and conservative monarchism was also
at the heart of political conflict in Greece.
In the years leading up to the First World
War, Greece had participated in several
wars with neighbouring states on
nationalist and irridentist grounds. The
world war, by bringing Greece into the
victorious side against its old rival of
Ottoman Turkey, had brought to a head
existing tensions between two loose
camps of Greek political elites known as
the 'National Schism'. On the left the
'Venizelist' camp, led by Eleftherios
Venizelos, was liberal, republican,
progressive and nationalist; it favoured
France and Britain in foreign policy, and
sought profound democratising reforms
on the model of the Radicals of the
French Third Republic and Lloyd-George
in Britain. On the opposing side, the
'monarchist' camp was conservative,
clerical and traditionalist, favoured
Germany in foreign policy, and favoured a
powerful political role for the king.
Between 1919 and 1922 Greece pursued
war with Turkey on the grounds of
seizing upon its neighbour's period of
instability to acquire territory inhabited by
ethnic Greeks. The disastrous
development of the war prompted the
discrediting of the country's conservative
and monarchist establishment: the army
mutinies and popular uprisings in 1922
led to, initially, a military coup by
republican army officers, followed by the
forced abdication of King Constantine in
1923, and the abolition of the monarchy
and establishment of the First Hellenic
Republic in 1924. This period of
instability carried on for the rest of the
interwar, first with General Pangalos
installed as dictator in the military coup
of 1925, followed by a return to
democracy under Venizelos in 1928, and
finally the restoration of the monarchy by
military coup in 1935.

Spain …

In the aftermath of the war Spain was

also affected by the turmoil between
radical republicanism and traditionalist
monarchism. The Restoration Monarchy
of 1874 was a parliamentary regime, but
a conservative one that
underrepresented popular classes and
gave the monarch a major political role.
A democratising revolution was
attempted in 1917 by an alliance of
radical republicans, socialists, and
disaffected military officers, but soon
failed. After the world war, however,
critics of the constitutional monarchy
grew as the international climate proved
favourable to republican or
democratising institutionalchange, while
the Restoration state proved unable to
resolve a series of challenges brought on
by the war, notably a postwar economic
slump and renewed anti-imperial action
in the colonies. Strike movements
proliferated between 1919 and 1923,
leading notably to an escalating
paramilitary conflict between worker and
employer movements in cities such as
Barcelona. Meanwhile, Spain went to war
in 1920 to maintain control over the last
remnants of its colonial empire; this
culminated in the disastrous defeat of
the Battle of Annual in 1922, which finally
discredited the constitutional monarchy.
Repeated elections failed to produce
working majorities in parliament for
either of the two establishment parties,
the Fused Liberal Party or the Liberal-
Conservative Party, to address the crises.
In the face of widespread social unrest
and institutional paralysis, General
Miguel Primo de Rivera demanded power,
and was appointed head of government
with dictatorial powers by King Alfonso.
The revolutionary and democratising
movements of 1916-22 were forestalled
by the installation of a military
dictatorship that would last until the
Second Republic of 1931.

Mexico …

The same was true of the Mexican

Revolution (1910–1920), which had
broken out in 1910 but had devolved into
factional fighting among the rebels by
1915, as the more radical forces of
Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa lost
ground to the more conservative
"Sonoran oligarchy" and its Constitutional
Army. The Felicistas, the last major
group of counterrevolutionaries,
abandoned their armed campaign in
1920, and the internecine power
struggles abated for a time after
revolutionary General Álvaro Obregón
had bribed or slain his former allies and
rivals alike, but the following decade
witnessed the assassination of Obregon
and several others, abortive military coup
attempts and a massive right-wing
uprising, the Cristero War, due to
religious persecution of Roman
Catholics.
Malta …

The Sette Giugno of 1919 was a revolt

characterised by a series of riots and
protests by the Maltese population,
initially as a reaction to the rise in the
cost of living in the aftermath of World
War I, and the sacking of hundreds of
workers from the dockyard. This
coincided with popular demands for self-
government, which resulted in a National
Assembly being formed in Valletta at the
same time of the riots. This dramatically
boosted the uprising, as many people
headed to Valletta to show their support
for the Assembly. This led to the British
forces firing into the crowd, killing four
local men. The cost of living increased
dramatically after the war. Imports were
limited, and as food became scarce
prices rose; this made the fortune of
farmers and merchants with surpluses to
trade.

Egypt …

The Egyptian Revolution of 1919 was a

countrywide revolution against the British
occupation of Egypt and Sudan. It was
carried out by Egyptians and Sudanese
from different walks of life in the wake of
the British-ordered exile of revolutionary
leader Saad Zaghloul, and other
members of the Wafd Party in 1919. The
revolution led to Britain's recognition of
Egyptian independence in 1922, and the
implementation of a new constitution in
1923. Britain, however, continued in
control of what was renamed the
Kingdom of Egypt. British guided the king
and retained control of the Canal Zone,
Sudan and Egypt's external and military
affairs. King Fuad died in 1936 and
Farouk inherited the throne at the age of
sixteen. Alarmed by the Second Italo-
Abyssinian War when Italy invaded
Ethiopia, he signed the Anglo-Egyptian
Treaty, requiring Britain to withdraw all
troops from Egypt by 1949, except at the
Suez Canal. During World War II, British
troops used Egypt as a major base for its
operations throughout the region. British
troops were withdrawn to the Suez Canal
area in 1947, but nationalist, anti-British
feelings continued to grow after the
war.[9]

List of conflicts

Communist revolutions that

started 1917–1924
…

Russian Revolution (1917)

Russian Soviet Republic
Ukrainian Soviet Republic (1918)
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
(1919)
 Lithuanian–Byelorussian Soviet
Socialist Republic
Lithuanian Soviet Socialist
Republic (1918–19)
Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic
Estonian Soviet Republic
In Spain:
Revolution of 1917
'Red Triennium' of 1918-1921
Jungle Movement of Gilan (1915/17–
1920)
Persian Socialist Soviet Republic
(1920-1921)
Free Territory (1918)
Aster Revolution (1918)
Red Week (Netherlands) (1918)
Finnish Civil War (1918)
Darwin Rebellion (1918)
Political violence in Germany (1918–
1933)
German Revolution (1918–1919)
People's State of Bavaria
(1918–1919)
Soviet Republic of Saxony
(1918-1919)
Bremen Soviet Republic
(1919)
Bavarian Council Republic
(1919)
Ruhr Uprising (1920)
 March Action (1921)
Hamburg Uprising (1923)
German October (1923)
Brussels Soldiers' Council (1918)
Revolutions and interventions in
Hungary (1918–1920)
Hungarian Soviet Republic
Slovak Soviet Republic (1919)
Battle of George Square (1919)
Fascist and anti-Fascist violence in
Italy (1919–1926)
Biennio Rosso (1919–20)
Labin Republic (1921)
Tragic Week (1919)
Limerick Soviet (1919)
 Canadian Labour Revolt (1919)[10]
Georgian coup attempt (1920)
Provisional Polish Revolutionary
Committee (1920)
Patagonia Rebelde (1920-1922)
Mongolian Revolution of 1921
Rand Rebellion (1921–22)
September Uprising (Bulgaria) (1923)
Tatarbunary uprising (1924)
Estonian coup d'état attempt ("Tallinn
Uprising") (1924)

Left-wing uprisings against the

USSR
…

Left SR uprising (1918)

 Left-wing uprisings against the
Bolsheviks (1918–1922)
Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of
Ukraine (1918–1922)
Tambov Rebellion (1920–1921)
Kronstadt Rebellion (1921)
August Uprising (Georgia) (1924)

Counter-revolutions against USSR

that started 1917–1921
…

White movement (1917–1923)

Ukrainian People's Republic (1917-
1921)
Kuban People's Republic (1918–1920)
Mountainous Republic of the Northern
Caucasus (1917–1920)
 Democratic Republic of Georgia
(1918–1921)
First Republic of Armenia (1918–1920)
Mountain Republic of Armenia (1921)
Azerbaijan Democratic Republic
(1918–1920)
Republic of Prekmurje (1919)
Bulgarian coup d'état (1923)
Military Coup of 1923 (Spain)

Soviet counter-counter-
revolutions that started 1918– …

1919

Russian Civil War (1917–1923)

Red Terror (1918)
Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921)
 Tuvan coup d'état (1929)

Other …

Greater Poland Uprising (1918–19)

Sejny Uprising (1919)
Silesian Uprisings (1919–1921)
Turkish War of Independence (1919–
1923)
Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919)
Iraqi revolt against the British (1920)
Uprising in West Hungary (1921)

See also
Aftermath of World War I
Diplomatic history of World War I
 International relations of the Great
Powers (1814–1919)
International relations (1919–1939)

References
1. Motadel, David (April 4, 2011).
"Waves of Revolution" . History
Today. Retrieved May 5, 2015.
2. "Revolutions" . International
Encyclopedia of the First World War.
October 8, 2014. Retrieved
August 25, 2019.
3. Schmitt, Hans. "Neutral Europe
Between War and Revolution, 1917-
23" . Retrieved May 5, 2016.
4. Abraham Ascher, //The Russian
Revolution: A Beginner's Guide
(Oneworld Publications, 2014)
5. Rex A. Wade, "The Revolution at One
Hundred: Issues and Trends in the
English Language Historiography of
the Russian Revolution of 1917."
Journal of Modern Russian History
and Historiography 9.1 (2016): 9-38.
6. Kevin and Jeremy Agnew, The
Comintern: A History of International
Communism from Lenin to Stalin
(Macmillan, 1996).
7. Robert Service, Comrades!: A History
of World Communism (2010).
 8. Carr, EH The Bolshevik Revolution
1917–23, vol 3 Penguin Books,
London, 4th reprint (1983), pp. 257–
258.
9. P.J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern
Egypt (4th ed., 1992).
10. Kealey, Gregory (1984). "1919: The
Canadian Labour Revolt" . Journal of
Canadian Labour Studies. Archived
from the original on October 22,
2017.

External links
Maps of Europe showing the
Revolutions of 1917–23 at
omniatlas.com
Retrieved from
"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Revolutions_of_1917–
1923&oldid=956789581"

Last edited 4 days ago by 78.16.66.226

Content is available under CC BY-SA 3.0 unless

otherwise noted.