Population displacement in East Prussia during the First World War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Leiserowitz
Keyword(s):  
Forced Migration ◽  
First World War ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
World War ◽  
Population Displacement ◽  
German Empire ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
East Prussia ◽  
First World

As a region bordering the Russian Empire, East Prussia was (apart from Alsace-Lorraine) the only part of the German Empire to be directly affected by the military operations of the First World War. The refugee crisis in 1914 found everyone totally unprepared. In August 1914 two distinct waves of forced migration took place: in the first, the population fled westwards before returning to their homes in 1916. The second wave concerned Germans who were seized by Russian occupying forces and forcibly settled in the Russian interior. Their repatriation was complicated by the Russian revolution and the ensuing civil war. This chapter discusses the experiences of these two groups, attempts to assist them and how population displacement was represented by contemporaries.

scholarly journals Russian Propaganda During the First World War: Technologies and Forms

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (6) ◽  
pp. 589-608
Author(s):  
Anna Hedo ◽  
Svitlana Liaskovska
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
World War ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Printed Materials ◽  
First World

The purpose of the article is to analyse the use of political propaganda methods employed by the Russian Empire before and during the First World War, in particular, on the Ukrainian lands, which became a direct theatre of military operations and a field of confrontation between intelligence and counterintelligence services of belligerent powers, which exercised manipulative influence upon great masses of population and implemented special technologies for the formation of public opinion. The research methodology is based on the principles of objectivity, systematicity, dialectics, historicism and interdisciplinarity. The study is grounded on problemchronological, institutional and historical methods, as well as social psychology methods, used in propaganda practices. Scientific novelty: on the basis of printed materials: brochures, First World War periodicals, published posters and woodcuts (lubki prints), as well as memoirs of people, involved in the organization of propaganda campaigns, certain objects, technologies and forms of propaganda, in particular, the involvement of intelligence officers of the Russian Imperial Army in manipulative technologies, were defined. The widespread use of propaganda and counter-propaganda by the states that were the main players of the First World War, became a kind of hallmark of that war. In Russia, unlike other states, there were no special bodies and no such bodies were created later to influence public opinion in their own, hostile or neutral states. The peculiarity of the propaganda of the Russian Empire was the use of mainly constructive (positive) propaganda aimed at neutralizing social conflicts within the state, uniting the population and the authorities and their joint struggle against the enemy. The ideas of Pan-Slavism and Neo-Slavism were actively applied in the international realm. They were aimed at the unity of the Slavic world under the auspices of Russia as the defender of the Slavic peoples and the Orthodox Christian faith. The use of destructive propaganda technologies was aimed at creating the image of the “enemy” and uniting patriotic forces against it. At the same time, Russia failed to offer Slavic peoples of the empire, in particular Ukrainians, to realize their political aspirations in resolving the national issue; it did not feel a change of mood and did not restructure the content of propaganda rhetoric, which eventually led to its defeat in the information and psychological space.

scholarly journals ATTEMPTS TO USE CAPTIVE UKRAINIANS AT THE RASTATT CAMP (GERMANY) TO UNDERMINE THE RUSSIAN ARMY IN UKRAINE DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Ihor Sribnyak
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
A Priori ◽  
State Building ◽  
First World War ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
World War ◽  
Russian Army ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
First World

The article discloses attempts by the German authorities to use certain captive Ukrainians from the Russian army to destabilize its arson during World War I. Due to the lack of relevant archival sources, it is not possible to determine the degree of informative nature of agent messages recruited by the German Ukrainian activists, as well as the extent of their importance in planning strategic or tactical military operations at the front by the German command. The author of the article assumes that the most successful Ukrainian “turns” from captivity acted in the cause of revolutionizing Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire. It should also be noted that by agreeing to cooperate with the German military authorities, not all captive Ukrainians were guided by ideological motives. Some of them were driven by the desire to use this opportunity to accelerate their return home, and they were not a priori planning to collect and transmit intelligence to the Germans and to carry out the work of revolutionary content. Finally, a small proportion of Ukrainians who were sent home by the efforts of the Union of Liberation of Ukraine and the German authorities, joined the disintegration of imperial institutes at Ukrainian lands, and also took an active part in the Ukrainian state-building in 1917–1920.

تطورات رومانيا الداخلية وسياستها الخارجية أبان الحرب العالمية الاولى حتى احتلال بخارست (آب 1914 – كانون الاول 1916)

لارك ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
فهد عويد عبد
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Balkan Region ◽  
First World

The Balkan region in general and Romania in particular have witnessed major political developments during the First World War. Suffice it to say that the first outbreak of war began from the Balkans, namely Sarajevo, and ended in the Balkans, where the last peace treaties were signed with the surrender of Bulgaria on September 29, 1918. Years of War The Balkans were generally a theater in which the armies of the belligerents demonstrated their military capabilities. Moreover, in the same period, both sides of the conflict (the Axis Powers or the Wafd States) were struggling to obtain the support of the Balkans, including Romania, Sugary, political and economic, both on military operations or planed Supply issues or control over trade routes, and on the other side of Romania was seeking for its part to take advantage of the chance of war to the maximum extent possible to achieve the national dream of achieving political unity.

The East’s Eastern Front: The Ottoman–Russian Clash in the Great War and Its Legacies

2019 ◽  
pp. 096834451982733
Author(s):  
Michael A. Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

This article provides an overview of the neglected Caucasian front of the First World War and explores its impact on the overall course of the war and its legacy for the Middle East and Eurasia. By unexpectedly prolonging hostilities and leading the Russian empire to overextend itself, the conflict with the Ottoman empire contributed critically to Russia’s revolutionary crisis and collapse and thereby altered decisively the fate of the Middle East and Eurasia. The article places the Ottoman–Russian conflict in the context of the relentless growth of Western European military and economic might from the eighteenth century onward.

PARTICIPATION OF WOMEN OF UKRAINE IN MILITARY FORMATIONS IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR: CURRENT HISTORIOGRAPHY

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-52
Author(s):  
Mariia Huk
Keyword(s):  
Military History ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Participation Of Women ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Military ◽  
First World ◽  
The Way

The article is focuses on the study of the issues of participation of women of Ukraine in military formations in the First World War by modern Ukrainian historiography (1991-2016). Based on the topic, the author tried to solve the following research tasks: to identify which aspects of women's military history are within the interest of historians, to analyze the scale, character and level of research of the topic. The author found that the study of women's military history is gaining momentum. Historians are actively searching women's stories in the sources of those times; they are in the process of gathering information. They call military history “personal” because research on the subject is partially based on reports of the press about women volunteers and mainly on participants' personal documents, memoirs and letters. In the letters, women wrote about the way to the front, military life, a little about participation in battles, relations with soldiers; they also left information about each other. At the same time, each of the women had personal experience of war, own motives and results. Therefore, historians concluded that "this experience is quite difficult to summarize ". Modern researchers approach the study of women's stories not only in terms of heroism but trying to understand the causes and consequences of women's actions. The authors mention such main reasons as boredom of everyday life, escape from duties and national impulse. Inspired by the new fashionable views on life, the girls tried to escape from their everyday duties; they wanted to overcome social barriers and to prove that women were capable to cope with any work. The escape to the front was an attempt to change the way of life. Women who came to the front and participated in hostilities had to adapt quickly to difficult conditions and trials; they had to fight and to protect their own lives. The authors also analyze how society perceived the phenomenon of women in the war. Military commanders heroized their actions with the reason to raise the fighting spirit. However, the views of military men varied: the village guys welcomed and supported the girls; on the contrary, the men from the intelligent circle condemned women regarding them as competitors. Civil women believed that the girls had forgotten their traditional duty, they could have been more helpful in hospitals and doing charity. The author of the article also found that the participation of women in the military unit of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen was better studied. The researchers concluded that the Ukrainian women who lived in the Russian Empire supported the call in 1917 of the Provisional Government and Maria Bochkareva to form women's combat battalions. Women were motivated to go to the front by the same reasons as women in the ranks of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen: failures in love, the desire to escape from violence and humiliation in the family, domestic problems, the desire to avenge the dead relatives and loved ones. In big cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Poltava, the Ukrainian women willingly enrolled in the army. Anyway, the inclusion of women in the combat units of the army of the Russian Empire was found out fragmentary, there are almost no names and characteristics of the activity of the women's battalions. Only a few researchers pay attention to the messages in the then newspapers about escapes and the heroic deeds of girls in the war. These issues require the search of information and detailed study. The author came to the conclusion that most of the questions remain scientifically open requiring the search for information about women in the ranks of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the army of the Russian Empire for the generalization of information and creation of a coherent picture of the military service of women at the front of the First World War.

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