European History—AP
Unit 11—The Great War and Russian Revolution, 1914-21
2014-15
1. Describe the principles behind the Bismarckian alliance system. How did the alteration of
Bismarck's policies and the Balkan situation create a situation ripe for war?
2. What kind of war did Europe expect? How did the alliance system and military timetables
influence the decision for war? What was the Schlieffen Plan and how did it affect the first
phase of the war?
3. Why did the assassination of a mediocre heir to the Habsburg throne in Austria create the
most significant conflict in European history? Consider the intellectual, social, and cultural
background.
4. Describe the tactics used on both sides during the war. What was the role of technology?
What came of the Schlieffen Plan?
5. Describe warfare on the Eastern Front. Discuss the problems of the Russian army. Identify
the major battles and their significance. Trace the chronology of battles in the Western Front.
6. In what areas did the war expand after 1914? Why did the Italians enter the war? Why was
the Ottoman Empire important? What were the results of Gallipoli, the campaign in the Middle
East, the naval battle of Jutland? What impact did the German U-boats have on the course of
the war? Why did America enter the war and what impact did this have on the course of the
war?
7. In what ways was WWI the first "total war"? What impact did women have on the home
front? How did governments organize for war? How did governments deal with dissent? To
what extent is moral opposition justified during wartime?
8. Compare the postwar goals of Woodrow Wilson and Georges Clemenceau. What were the
Fourteen Points and to what extent were they fulfilled? What were the ultimate provisions of the
Treaty of Versailles and how did the public of each participant receive it?
9. What was the financial, political, demographic, and psychological impact of the Great War?
10. How did the period, 1861-1914, lead up to the Russian Revolution? How did revolutionary
groups agitate against the tsarist system?
11. Why did the tsar fall in March 1917? What problems did the Provisional Government face?
How did the Bolsheviks seize and hold power? What impact did the Civil War and Allied
intervention have?
Terms
Balkan crises
Berlin Congress, 1878
Three Emperors League
Reinsurance Treaty
Dual Alliance
Triple Alliance
Anglo-French rapprochement (1904)
Bismarck's alliance policy
Triple Entente
Battle of Marne (1914)
Battle of Verdun (1916)
Schlieffen Plan
Black Hand (Gavrilo Princip)
Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914)
Wilson's Fourteen Points
submarine warfare
"over the top"
Zimmerman Telegram
mobilization
All Quiet on Western Front (1929)
poison gas
Gallipoli
Lawrence of Arabia
total war
propaganda
war bonds
rationing
Erich Ludendorff
Spartacists
censorship
American Expeditionary Force
Treaty of Versailles
League of Nations
Lusitania
Georges Clemenceau
Vittorio Orlando
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1923)
Nicholas II (1894-1917)
V.I. Lenin (1870-1924)
Revolution of 1905
Duma
Stolypin reforms
Sergei Witte/industrialization
Petrograd soviet
Provisional Government
Bolsheviks
Social Revolutionaries (SRs)
Cadets
"all power to the soviets"
"peace, bread, and land"
Army Order # 1
Rasputin
Civil War
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970)
Mensheviks
Red Army
war communism
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918)
women's role
New Economic Policy
Third International—Comintern
European History—AP
Unit 11—The Great War and Russian Revolution, 1914-21
2014-15
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An Ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori [It is sweet and proper to die for one's country.]
Modern European History has had many turning points. Of these, I contend that the First World
War caused the greatest revolution in both attitudes and conditions. The above poem illustrates
the profundity of this change. It was written in 1918 by British poet Wilfred Owen and was
typical of the war's disillusioning effect, especially for the group of young men who fought in it;
henceforth, they would be designated "The Lost Generation." We can gauge the war's impact
on politics and the economy from measurable data—trade figures, sizes of armies, treaty
arrangements. What cannot be directly observed, though of greatest significance, is the change
in perceptions about European civilization.
Wilfred Owen came to the war late; he joined the army in 1916 to share the experience with his
youthful comrades, most of whom had volunteered in a crescendo of patriotic fervor in August
1914. Leaders and public expected a war of short duration, with several sharp battles of
decisive effect. Though irrational and violent impulses were evident in prewar society, most
Europeans placed an unwavering faith in technology and science to achieve progress. Europe
optimistically assumed that long tribal or revolutionary struggles were a relic of the past. Future
wars would be fought among civilized and sovereign nations for limited objectives, rather like a
rugby match—violent but with rules nonetheless. Europe got a war like nothing it had imagined.
Technology had rendered massed infantry assaults useless. The result of such tactics was a
harvest of death, with the equivalent of whole towns being wiped out every day. Limited war
degenerated into a costly struggle for survival and demanded the total mobilization of each
nation.
Before 1914, national leaders had beaten the drums of nationalism to build support for their
regimes and distract from social conflict. Imperial conflicts were placed in terms of national
prestige and even race. With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the
Austrian throne, all the tributaries of institutional strain—massive strikes, feminist agitation, antiSemitism, the business cycle, irrational doctrines—coalesced into a great flood. This flood
ultimately wiped away the remnants of the Old Regime and also accelerated cultural trends
toward the violent, relative, and nihilistic. War had proved to the generation of Wilfred Owen
that struggle and sacrifice were meaningless, progress an illusion, and that Western civilization
was rotted out with decadence.
No conflict has spawned so much literature (poetry, novels, plays, film) of the devastating
impact upon its participants' faith and future. With cruel irony, Wilfred Owen was killed in a
barrage of machine-gun fire one week before the armistice was signed in November 1918. He
was twenty-five years old and had almost lived to see the end of the war. But the end did not
mean peace, for the true conflagration lit by the Great War was to come in the following
decades.
Unit Big Idea
The Great War proved a devastating blow to European civilization, undermining Europe's
dominant world position and faith in technological and scientific progress. It was the shaping
event of the twentieth century, sowing the seeds for future disasters—the Great Depression,
totalitarian ideologies, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War.
Syllabus
Tues., Feb. 17: Read pp. 774-76, 802-05 in text.
Wed., Feb. 18: Significance of Great War. Begin DBQ on causes. Read pp. 806-14, 823-25 in
text and research context on your assigned document.
Thur., Feb. 19: Film clips on causes of war. DBQ on causes. Prepare for mini-forum on
responsibility for Great War (as per your assigned nation).
Fri., Feb. 20: Guest speaker on AP exam and work on DBQ. Read handout on trench warfare
(SharePoint) and pp. 800-01, 814-17 in text.
Mon., Feb. 23: Discuss DBQ on origins. Course of war. Write a poem on trench warfare for
Wednesday.
Tues., Feb. 24: Course of war; activities on total war. Read handout on causes of Russian
Revolution.
Wed., Feb. 25: Continue activities on total war; Great War Poetry Slam. Read 817-23 in text.
Thur., Feb. 26: Overview of Russian Revolution. Prepare for Russian Revolution simulation.
Fri., Feb. 27: Simulation on Russian Revolution. Visit sites and read WWI poems; read
handout on impact of WWI.
Mon., Mar. 2: Final clips and discussion of WWI impact. Study for exam.
Tues., Mar. 3: Review and clean-up day. Study for exam; prepare for Humanities Fair.
Wed., Mar. 4: Exam: 1st/2nd—MC on Units 10-11; 3rd—essay/MC on Units 10-11.
Mon., Mar. 9: WWI Humanities Fair in Room 216.
Key Concept 3.4
European states struggled to maintain international stability in an age of nationalism and
revolutions.
Following the dismissal of Chancellor Bismarck in 1890, European diplomacy became
increasingly tense. Imperial antagonisms, growing nationalism, militarism, and other factors
resulted in the development of a rigid system of alliances. The Great Powers militarized their
societies and built up army and naval forces to unprecedented levels (fed by industrial and
technological advances), while at the same time developing elaborate plans for the next war. The
long-anticipated war finally came in the summer of 1914. The assassination of the heir to the
Austrian throne in Sarajevo forced the political leaders of the Great Powers, locked in the rigid
structure of the Triple Entente vs. Triple Alliance, to implement war plans that virtually required
the escalation of hostilities. The ensuing Great War revealed the flaws in the diplomatic order
established after the unifications of Germany and Italy, but, more important, it produced an even
more challenging diplomatic situation than that faced by the diplomats in 1814-1815.
Key Concept 4.1
Total war and political instability in the first half of the twentieth century gave way to a
bipolar state configuration during the Cold War, and e eventually to efforts at
transnational union.
European politics and diplomacy in the twentieth century were defined by total war and its
consequences. After World War I, the destruction of the balance of power and the instability
caused by the Treaty of Versailles created conditions for the emergence of extremist ideologies
that challenged liberal democracy and sought to reverse the post-war settlement. In Russia,
hardships during World War I gave rise to a revolution in 1917, which further upset the balance
of power, while newly-established democracies in central and Eastern Europe were too weak to
provide much-needed stability. The international tensions unleashed by the First World War
made it all but impossible for the League of Nations to employ collective security measures to
prevent World War II, an even more violent conflict than World War I. The combatants engaged
in wholesale destruction of cities, deliberate attacks on civilians, and the systematic destruction
of their enemies’ industrial complexes. The Nazi government in Germany undertook the
annihilation of Jews from the whole continent (the Holocaust). At the end of the war, the
economic and political devastation left a power vacuum that facilitated the Cold War division of
Europe.
Key Concept 4.2
The stresses of economic collapse and total war engendered internal conflicts within
European states and created conflicting conceptions of the relationship between the
individual and the state as demonstrated in the ideological battle among liberal democracy,
communism, and fascism.
During the First World War, states increased the degree and scope of their authority over their
economies, societies, and cultures. The demands of total war required a centralization of power
and a regimentation of the lives of citizens. During the war, governments sought to control
information and used propaganda to create stronger emotional ties to the nation. Ironically, these
measures also produced distrust of traditional authorities. At the end of the war, four empires
dissolved—the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires—but the democratic
nations that arose in place of the first three lacked a tradition of democratic politics and suffered
from weak economies and ethnic tensions. Even before the end of the war, Russia experienced a
revolution and civil war that created not only a new state, the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (i.e., USSR or Soviet Union), but also a new conception of government based on
communist ideals.