A “first generation” of revolutionary theory centered around a “natural history of revolutions” developed in the 1920s and 1930s. In studying revolutionary movements, scholars have used differing criteria to determine what events constitute a “revolution” and why revolutions happen. National and political revolutions may occur quickly and violently to create new nations and political structures, while social and cultural revolutions can more slowly transform entire societies. One can identify political revolutions that created new governments, national revolutions that created, liberated, or reshaped existing countries, and social or cultural revolutions that fundamentally transformed social and cultural relationships. Revolutionary movements during World War I took a number of different forms, but were united by the common desire to overthrow an existing government or social order in favor of a wholly new system or set of relationships. One more monarchy would appear during the interwar period, Albania, while other states devolved from fragile democracies into reactionary dictatorships. In Europe, the newly formed nations and truncated surviving states appeared to be on the path to democracy, apart from Vladimir Lenin’s (1870-1924) Communist Russia and Yugoslavia (or the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, as it was known until 1929), which emerged as a monarchy. The former areas of the Ottoman Empire were soon placed under mandates by Britain and France the remaining Turkish heartland forged the new nation of Turkey through war. In contrast, by 1919, eleven states filled the territories previously controlled by the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, and the Hohenzollerns. The other major powers across Europe were monarchies of one kind or another.
In 1914, only France and the new government in Portugal were republics, while Britain and Italy had parliamentary governments. In Germany sailors and soldiers mutinied, while massive strikes broke out, ranging from Berlin to Vienna, from Paris to Brussels to Glasgow, and stretching across the Atlantic to Chicago, San Francisco, and Canada. At the same time, whole societies were in turmoil. The war, and the peace treaties that ended it, redrew the map of Europe and brought an end to four empires in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Middle East (Ottoman). Over a span of fifty-two months, from August 1914 to November 1918, some 65 million men were mobilized of those, over 8 million were killed and another 21 million wounded. The First World War began as a struggle between European powers that grew to encompass much of the wider world.
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