Abnormal Times

2019 ◽  
pp. 313-328
Author(s):  
Emily Gioielli
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
State Building ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Short Term ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Political Factions ◽  
Military Occupations ◽  
First World

THE END of the First World War in eastern Europe could hardly be said to have inaugurated a period of peace. Marked by revolutions, counter-revolutions, renewed foreign warfare, and military occupations, the early post-armistice state-building processes were violent affairs, as political factions wrestled for dominance over their political, ethnic, and religious enemies, and armies battled for territory. This extended period of conflict and violence in the region could be described as the ‘long First World War’. The conflicts that shaped it traced their short-term roots to the preceding years of open warfare and the revolutions that occurred in the wake of the defeat of the Central Powers....

Introduction

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Separate Identity ◽  
First World

This introductory chapter describes the unique aspects of the yeshivas of nineteenth-century Lithuania. These yeshivas represented a major attempt on the part of traditional Jewry to cope with the challenges of modernity. The Jews of nineteenth-century Lithuania thus defined had several distinguishing characteristics. In religious terms, most were traditional, in the sense that they had withstood the innovations of hasidism; in fact, the strength of the opposition to that movement in Lithuania was such that they came collectively to be known as mitnagedim (opponents) — that is, opponents of hasidism. Economically, they were mostly poorer than Jews in other major areas of Jewish settlement, such as Poland or Bukovina, and lived in more crowded conditions. Until 1764, they benefited from self-government under the Va'ad Medinat Lita (Council of the Land of Lithuania). By the beginning of the eighteenth century this body had ceased to function, but the distinction between the Jews of Lithuania and those of the neighbouring regions continued to exist — not least because the Lithuanian Jews spoke a distinctive dialect of Yiddish. These and other factors ensured that they continued to maintain a separate identity among the Jews of eastern Europe until the First World War.

The Russian Economy, 1861–1932

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Waldron
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Agricultural Reform ◽  
Russian Economy ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

The Russian economy has been faced with significant environmental challenges, and agriculture—the mainstay of the economy during this period—suffered from consistently low yields. Neither the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, nor Stolypin’s agricultural reform of 1906 succeeded in bringing about fundamental change in Russian farming. Russia also had substantial difficulty in stimulating industrial growth. Before 1917, it had to rely on foreign investment to develop its industrial sector. The pressures of the First World War exposed Russian economic weakness. After 1917, the Bolshevik regime’s attempts to reform both agriculture and industry in the first years of its existence, while at the same time constructing a socialist society, proved unsuccessful. At the end of the 1920s, Stalin’s dictatorship was able to collectivize agriculture and to bring about industrial revolution through the Five-Year-Plans. While these brought short-term economic advantages, the USSR paid a heavy price for the Stalinist revolution.

scholarly journals „Neutralność” Litwy podczas Bitwy Warszawskiej

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Jarosław Wołkonowski
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Nation State ◽  
World War ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

After the First World War, three concepts clashed in Eastern Europe: the model of the nation state, the expansion of the Bolshevik revolution implemented by Russia and the union of nation-states (Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia) according to Piłsudski resulting from the threat. Russia in the years 1920-1921 signed five peace treaties, but only the treaty with Lithuania contained secret arrangements regarding the neutrality of Lithuania in the Bolshevik-Polish war. The analysis of the source material shows that Russia used the secret provisions of the peace treaty in its plans for the expansion of bolshevism, and after the defeat of the Polish army, it was to carry out a Bolshevik coup in Lithuania. Despite the proclaimed neutrality, Lithuania turned out to be on the side of Russia in this conflict, causing additional difficulties for Polish troops in the Battle of Warsaw. The Polish victory over the Vistula impeded the expansion of Bolshevism to Europe.

Origins

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-27
Author(s):  
Dmitar Tasić
Keyword(s):  
State Building ◽  
First World War ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Balkan Wars ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Chapter I presents the story of origins of modern Balkan paramilitaries which was shaped during the late 19th—early 20th century nation and state building processes in the Balkans. Existing traditions of guerrilla warfare were used during the struggle between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia over Ottoman Macedonia when all three countries initiated sending of small armed bands to Macedonia in order to protect their own and intimidate rivals followers. It also describes appearance of Albanian national movement and how Balkan countries used their respective paramilitaries during the Balkan Wars 1912-1913 and the First World War. It also shows how during the Toplica uprising in 1917 against Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian occupation regimes in Serbia happened yet another bloody encounter of Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian paramilitaries. Situation after the First World War was characterised by adjusting to new realities, by creation of new organizations and by arrival of non-Balkan actors—‘White’ Russians émigrés and former participants in Russian revolutions. Both groups brought their own experiences, visions and rivalries.

EUROPE AND ITS ORIENTS IN ZIONIST CULTURE BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1105-1123 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARIEH BRUCE SAPOSNIK
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
National Culture ◽  
European Society ◽  
First World War ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
World War ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Zionism’s call for a Jewish return to ‘the East’ was rooted in part in a broader European fascination with ‘the Orient’. This interest in ‘the East’ coincided in time and in much of its imagery with a conceptual division of Europe itself into its ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ parts. The Jews were deeply implicated in these twin conceptualizations of ‘the Orient’ and of Europe’s own orient at home (referred to at times as halbasien, or half-Asia). The notion that Jews – particularly those of eastern Europe – constituted a semi-Asiatic, foreign element in European society became a pervasive trope by the latter part of the century, and one to which Zionist thought and praxis sought to respond in a variety of ways. When Zionists in Palestine, mostly eastern European Jews transplanted further east yet to the ‘Orient’, set out to create a new Hebrew national culture there, competing images of occident and Orient – resonating with a wide range of racial, social, political, and cultural overtones – would play defining roles in their praxis and in the cultural institutions, the rituals, and the national liturgy they would fashion.

1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires

2018 ◽  
pp. 26-42
Author(s):  
Robert Gerwarth
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
The First World War ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
First World

This, the first of two complementary chapters on the First World War and its colonial aftermaths, focuses on the collapse of ‘compact’ empires in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe. It conceptualizes the reconfiguration of Europe and its eastern borderlands after the collapse of Imperial Russia, Austria-Hungary and Imperial Germany as a form of decolonization internal to Europe during a ‘Greater War’ that, broadly speaking, continued until 1923. The global ramifications of this particularly European struggle became evident in new repressive techniques by colonial states and the widespread turn towards political violence to achieve the overthrow of imperial regimes.

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