Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (57 page)

The United States entered the war in 1917, and the entry of American troops into combat in spring 1918 turned the tide in favor of Britain and the other Allied Powers. The First World War ended that year with the defeat of Germany and the other Central Powers. The victors blamed the entire war on the Central Powers and punished them mercilessly. Both the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were broken up in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles (1919). An international organization, the League of Nations, was founded in an attempt to prevent another great war, but the United States refused to join—Congress was as usual controlled by the most aggressively ignorant and self-serving among the populists. This seriously weakened the new organization’s effectiveness.

The treaty ending the First World War was a disaster for Europe and a primary cause of the Second World War. The importance of Germany to the European economy as a whole was not then sufficiently appreciated. The physical damage wrought by World War I, together with the crushing war debts incurred by the major European powers and especially their ill-advised economic policies, are partly responsible for the Great Depression, while the war indemnities, treaty restrictions, and humiliation imposed on the defeated Central Powers, Germany and Austria, made it politically certain that the latter would rearm at the first opportunity. As the First World War was ending, radical socialist or communist revolutions broke out in several of the major combatant nations, including, most significantly, Russia and Germany.

Radical Modernist Revolutions after the First World War

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The long festering internal socioeconomic problems in Russia were compounded by the unpopular First World War. The democratic revolution of March 1917 overthrew the Romanov Dynasty,
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but the new government still did not pull out of the war. The weakness of the new regime and the continuing losses from the war lent popular support to a more radical revolution. On November 7, 1917 (October 25, 1917, according to the Julian calendar), the Marxist revolutionary Lenin (Vladimir Iljič Uljanov, 1870–1924 [r. 1917–1924]) announced the fall of the Provisional Government and the next day proclaimed a new socialist “Soviet” regime.
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Lenin did not, however, pull Russia out of the war right away, and after further losses upon the resumption of the German offensive in February 1918, the capital was moved from St. Petersburg back to the continental city of Moscow, the old capital.

Almost immediately after the declaration of the new socialist government, a civil war (1917–1920) broke out among different factions of revolutionaries, as well as between the socialists, or Reds, and the antisocialists, or Whites. Lenin and his supporters used terror and mass executions to hold onto power while drafting soldiers into a new army to fight against both Russian opponents and the European and American powers who supported the White faction against the Reds and sent substantial military forces into the country at various points. But the socialists, with the full force of extreme Modernism behind them, prevailed.

The Soviet regime was responsible for radical change throughout the huge empire, some of it positive. Literacy and education was extended to all nationalities, even the smallest tribal peoples. Though the primary initial reason was to indoctrinate everyone in the new “socialist” ideology, it also spread advanced European science and technology throughout Northern Eurasia, Soviet Central Asia, and the Soviet client state of Mongolia.

Lenin died in 1924 and was succeeded by Josef Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovič Džugašvili, 1879–1953 [r. ca. 1929–1953]), a Georgian whose faction was victorious over his rivals by 1927. By 1929 he had taken all power and become absolute dictator. He is responsible for the death of many millions of people—especially intellectuals, who were executed, and farmers, an estimated ten million of whom were starved to death—in a reign of terror and mass-murder unprecedented in world history.
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THE GERMAN REVOLUTIONS

As the First World War was ending late in 1918, populist revolutionary movements with strong socialist leanings broke out in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941 [r. 1888–1918]) abdicated, ending the reign of the Hohenzollern Dynasty. The socialist and communist elements were defeated by the moderate and nationalist elements, and the “Weimar” republic of Germany was established in 1919. But the new government was weak, the economy remained a shambles, and the continuing treatment of Germany as a second-class nation by some of the other European governments encouraged the growth of extreme nationalism.

When Germany was struck severely by the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945 [r. 1933–1945]), the Austrian-born leader of the radical National Socialist Party, or Nazis, who had been imprisoned briefly after a failed revolutionary coup attempt a decade earlier, saw his chance. He promised to save Germany from its woes and restore the country to its former greatness. In several successive elections his party won an increasingly higher percentage of the vote. Finally, in 1933, after winning the second largest number of votes, he was duly appointed chancellor of the German Republic. The Nazis rapidly took full power and began putting their revolutionary proposals into action.

Some of the new government’s programs were admirable. A new, inexpensive, but technically advanced automobile, the Volkswagen or ‘people’s car’, was designed to allow all Germans to be able to own one,
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and construction was put fully underway on a system of superhighways intended to crisscross the country for citizens to tour on. Other changes were understandable. Hitler began secretly rebuilding the German military, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. When he felt confident of his power, he stopped all payment of war indemnities. German industry joined with German science, which was then the most advanced in the world, to build the country into a military and economic power.

But Hitler went much further. He cultivated his personal power through huge rallies in which he used his electrifying oratorical skills and incendiary rhetoric to whip the people into a frenzy on whatever topic he chose. He and his followers, like many other people in Europe and America at that time, blamed their country’s woes on minority groups. Immediately after taking power, Hitler ordered the government to begin a program of methodical elimination of the Jews, beginning with extreme racism and economic oppression to the point that many people were no longer able to support themselves and their families. A flood of refugees left Germany seeking safety elsewhere.
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As the Nazis extended their program to the territories that came under German control during the Second World War, it became an organized genocidal campaign, which eventually was responsible for the murder of an estimated six million people, including most of the remaining German and Polish Jewish populations, among other people targeted for destruction.
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THE TURKISH REVOLUTION

In the First World War, because the Ottoman Empire had been allied with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British in Egypt fought directly against the Ottomans and also indirectly via the Arabians and other rebellious subjects of the Ottomans who allied themselves with the British throughout the Near East.

The Ottomans’ defeat and loss of most of their colonial empire paved the way for the “Young Turk” revolutionaries led by the charismatic nationalist leader Kemal Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal, 1881–1938 [r. 1922–1938]). In 1922 the Ottoman Dynasty was abolished and replaced by the secular, “democratic,” European-oriented Turkish Republic. In 1923 Atatürk moved the capital from Constantinople (which he renamed Istanbul)
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to the continental Anatolian city of Angora (ancient Ancyra), which he renamed Ankara.

The Allies’ vengeance against the Ottomans did not win long-term colonial power in the region for the British, as they had hoped. The British did dominate Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq, as well as Egypt, until shortly after the Second World War, but the great diminution of British power after that war forced them to abandon most of their colonies. As they withdrew from Palestine in 1947, a civil war broke out and a radical Jewish nationalist (“Zionist”) state formed. The results were incendiary.
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The British-led breakup of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, and the Turks’ establishment in self-defense of the nationalistic, inward-looking Turkish Republic, had serious, long-term consequences for Southwestern Asia.
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Persia also continued to be weak, and thus the age-old division of Southwestern Asia between two large powers, one centered in Greece or Constantinople and another in Persia, could not be reestablished. The fragmentation and animosity in the Middle East worsened and led to ever increasing instability during the latter part of the twentieth century.

Modern Central Eurasia before the Second World War

In Turkic-speaking Central Eurasia, the liberalizing movement known as Jadidism
(uṣûl-i jadîd
‘, literally, ‘the new methods’)
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spread from its birthplace in Kazan, Tatarstan,
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around 1880 to other leading Islamic cities. East Turkistani intellectuals introduced modern Western-style schools and curricula, journals and other modern media, and along with them modern nationalistic ideas. With the spread of the revolution to Central Asia, some Jadidists became involved in the Bolshevik movement in the early years of the revolution, believing that it would help free their homeland from the oppressive rule of the conservative Muslim leadership and the local rulers of the old regime.
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One indirect result of the First World War was the 1921 communist revolution in Mongolia, which then came under increasingly powerful Russian influence over the course of the century.

In East Turkistan, the Soviets crushed a local civil war that broke out in the 1930s and installed a Chinese warlord in Ürümchi. The first, ephemeral, East Turkistan Republic (November 1933 to February 1934), based in Kashgar, was quickly suppressed.
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However, the influence of the Soviet Union spread there as well.

Tibet enjoyed nearly a half century of restored full independence, despite the periodic ravages of one or another Chinese warlord in its eastern provinces.

The Soviet Union and the Great Depression

The weak postwar economy in Europe was aggravated by the end of Lenin’s liberalized New Economic Policy in the former Russian Empire and substitution of the disastrous socialist economic policies of Josef Stalin, marked by the institution of the first centrally directed Five-Year Plan in 1929 and in the following year the beginning of the forced “collectivization” of agriculture.
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Foreign trade was also severely limited, and not only was the currency made nonconvertible (from 1926–1928 on), but it became a crime to convert it. As a result, the Soviet economy shrank drastically, and the Soviet Union—including Russia and nearly all of Central Eurasia—was almost completely cut off from “capitalist” world commerce.
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