Rises

Eastern Europe Rises

Part 3 of my Eastern Europe series

(~10000 words, reading time: ~40-45 minutes)

“If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.”

Otto von Bismarck

In 1800, the nations and peoples of Eastern Europe ruled over by four foreign empires. By 1918, the empires were gone, and Eastern Europe was free. How did it happen? How did the long 19th century shape the region? What marks did the bloody paths to independence leave that we can still see today? Why are their two Serbias, two Romanias, two Albanias, and two Bulgarias today?

Prologue 1: On Nationalism

Before we get into this, it’s good to remind ourselves that the 19th century is the century of nationalism. But what is nationalism? Understanding it is critical to understanding the social processes that drove the events you’re about to read – and why Eastern Europe was so special.

Let’s start with this quote (thanks goes to Anastas Tenev for making me aware of it):

“Oh, you unwise moron! Why are you ashamed to call yourself a Bulgarian and why don't you read and speak in your native language? Weren't Bulgarians powerful and glorious once? Didn't they take taxes from strong Romans and wise Greeks? Out of all the Slavic nations they were the bravest one. Our rulers were the first ones to call themselves emperors, the first ones to have patriarchs, the first ones to baptise their people.(...) Why are you ashamed of your great history and your great language and why do you leave it to turn yourselves into Greeks?"

This was written by a guy called Paìsiy Hilendàrski in 1762 in his book Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya [Slavic-Bulgarian History]. It is viewed as the beginning of the Bulgarian National Revival.

So what is nationalism? If we start from quotes such as this, we can view it as an act of self-expression, a kind that has to do with glorifying one’s country, or, well, nation.

But what is the nation? We kind of know what the country is, the country had been the kingdom, personified in the king. The King of England was equal to the country of England. The nation is more tricky. Back in feudalism, the nation was all the people swore to serve the king. The nation of Hungary had been all the nobles who, by birth and station, held positions of power in the kingdom and would fight for it. But then absolutism happened and the kings made the nobility inessential. The kings ascended from just the top of the feudal hierarchy to almost divine status. But then the English and French revolutions happened and some kings’ heads were cut off. And then when the nobility held no independent power and divine kings were lawfully executed by their subjects, what remains? The country becomes abstract, and the people loyal to that abstract become the nation. If by the chance of history, that country that had been very much a feudal entity in all its existence happens to align with some sort of ethno-linguistically homogenous territory, great! We can base our shared identity on the language we speak and how our tribes arrived where they are now! If not, well, then we might have problems.

Which brings us to the second definition of nationalism, which is a system of power. How do the leaders of countries, these leftover remnants of feudalism, stay in power and get things done? Well, they use nationalistic expressions to keep their people loyal to the abstractions they like. This we can call top-down nationalism. And if you happen to be dissatisfied with a government that is not from your nation ? Well, then you can use nationalistic fictions to organize a resistance against it. We can call this bottom-up nationalism.

In the case of Eastern Europe, as Paìsiy’s quote also reflects, the rulers are foreigners, and the abstract nations that the people can be loyal to are all bygone feudal entities. But that’s about to change. The bottom-up nationalism will prevail over empires and the region’s polities will transform into nation-states all competing for the same territory. And when that happens, a more problematic side of nationalism will emerge, one that produces bitter competition over resources, territory, people, and narrative. By the end of this episode, the quote that describes Bulgarian nationalism best is the one spoken by Tsar Ferdinand on the eve of Bulgarian entry into the First World War:

“The purpose of my life is the destruction of Serbia”.

Prologue 2: Four empires, four models, four points of conflict

As we left things at the end of the previous episode, Eastern Europe was ruled over by the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars pretty much left this power balance intact, which was later formalized in the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna. Each of the four had their own traditions, forms of government, strategic challenges, and ways of controlling its subject population. Here’s a brief rundown of who they were and what their situation was in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars.

The Austrian Empire was the second largest power of Europe in terms of territory and population after Russia. It ruled over a highly ethnically diverse population of Germans, Hungarians, Slavs of many flavors, Vlachs, Italians and many, many more. Its mandate for doing so was strictly feudal, with the emperors in Vienna collecting titles like they were candy, the Kingdoms of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Veneto, Galicia, and a whole lot of duchies under their belt. With France mostly unsubscribing from religion and Spain being a total mess in the wake of Napoleon, Austria was the largest uncontested Catholic empire.

While the Viennese court tried again and again to centralize authority, their efforts were frustrated by the powerful Hungarian, Czech, and Polish nobility, the burghers of Bohemia, Upper Hungary (Slovakia) and Transylvania, as well as the heavily armed population of border guards, Slavs, Vlachs, and Székelys along their southern frontier with the Ottoman Empire. Yet, the greatest concern of the Habsburgs, for now, was actually with the empire’s Germans. With Napoleon dissolving the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of (bottom-up) German nationalism and republicanism, the Austrian Empire was facing a loss of its influence in Germany and calls for reform in its own core territory.

The greatest success of the Austrian Emperors was the creation of a loyal class of soldiers and statesmen of all ethnic backgrounds. Socialized in the training grounds, cafes, opera houses, and ballrooms of Vienna, these men bowed to imperial majesty and served the empire’s interests faithfully, while their ethnicity allowed them to keep tabs on the bottom-up national movements of the empire’s minorities. Austria’s greatest questions for the century was whether it will focus on becoming a Germanic Empire by taking charge of German national movements across the German Confederation, how it will break out of the economic standstill it forced itself into by failing to reform a feudal society (most of the empire’s commoners were still serfs), and how it will maintain its position in the European balance of power amidst rivals who are about to tap into the unifying power of top-down nationalism.

The Ottoman Empire in the 19th century evokes images like the “sick man of Europe”, but in the early century, the empire only had three acute problems. Whether they’d become chronic ones was still to be decided. Its form of government that had been efficient and revolutionary in the 14th century was now much more decentralized and much weaker than its counterparts’ as the once loyal autonomous Pashas that could be rotated at the sultan’s whim were now a lot less rotatable and a lot less loyal. Its economic supremacy was long gone due to it being the relative loser of the Columbian exchange and missing out on the early wave of industrialization that swept Europe. Its military was gradually becoming less and less capable as the once-elite Janissary corps was now a bloated and backwards special interest group with guns who fought against the sultan just as much as for him and opposed any reform.

With these three disadvantages creeping up on them, the Ottomans’ grip on the parts of Eastern Europe they were occupying was loosening. While in Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia, they had managed to convert/colonize most of the population to Islam after centuries of occupation, the rest of the Balkans were policed with the usual combination of carrots and sticks, bribes and violence at the Pashas’ whims. But as the problems of the court worsened, so did the Ottomans’ attention on effective governance of the occupied territory begin to wane.

The empire had two major advantages: First, as long as they controlled Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean, they had a secure source of income and stable communication lines across their empire. Second, the empire was too big to fail for the rest of Europe; foreign powers interested in global stability, mostly Britain and France, kept propping up the Ottomans and keeping the wolves, that is to say, Russia, away. Their primary challenge on the outside was a rising Russia that had a vested interest in the failure of the empire, and a heavily armed domestic population of Greeks, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians on the inside, with centuries of grievances and fighting experience in the region’s many mountains.

The Kingdom of Prussia was the model of constitutional neo-absolutism throughout the 18th century, and it preserved much of this character for the 19th. While it was militarily humbled in the Napoleonic Wars, it ended up gaining large territory and influence in Germany and the rest of the world, participating in the Congress of Vienna as a Great Power. Yet, as ever, the greatest threat for Prussia was its small size compared to its neighbors, Austria, Russia, and France.

In this small state was embedded the Grand Duchy of Posen, the territory that Prussia had carved out of Poland with a majority Polish population, with Silesia and Pomerania also having a substantial number of Poles. Their short-term solution was Germanization, the slow and mostly non-violent cultural erasure of Poles and colonization of their territory. The more long-term solution for the problem of Prussia’s small size is what you already know: taking a leading role in forming a German superstate. With that came another great peril in the form of republican sympathies that have infected Germany ever since the French occupation, something that only got stronger and stronger with each revolution that broke out in Paris (of which there would be several). The question for Prussia was whether it would be able to contain its Polish subjects, attain more power within the German Confederation, whether doing so would change its absolutist system of government, and how a Prussian-led Germany would fit in the new balance of power in the world.

The Russian Empire was a special mix of feudal backwardness and a wannabe but not-really-there enlightened absolutism. The Russian Emperor reigned supreme and those in court who disagreed with him quickly found themselves deported to Siberia. The overwhelming majority of Russia’s commoners were serfs and despite growing territorially, Russia’s per-capita production and standards of living haven’t increased for over a hundred years. Still, by moving its western border all the way up to Germany, by maintaining a large army that took the brunt of the burden in defeating Napoleon, and by building their capital city of Saint Petersburg up to European standards, Russia could present itself on the world stage as a European Great Power, in some ways, the greatest of them all. Internally though, the Russian Empire was a place that in no ways satisfied the contemporary chauvinistic definition of a “civilized Europeanness”. The conditions of Russia’s serfs in the 19th century were horrifying, comparable only to the slaves of the Americas and the Islamic world.

While Russia's Emperors and ruling class were German, they embraced Russian culture and Eastern Orthodoxy to institute a form of top-down nationalism. At the same time, Russification of Eastern Europe didn’t begin yet. Finland was mostly left alone. The Baltic peoples were ruled over mostly by the local German lords, leftovers from the German expansion waves of the 12th century and the Northern Crusades who enjoyed a great degree of freedom. Poland was formally a fully autonomous kingdom in personal union with Russia even though it looked like the Russian Emperors might not honor the promises they made in the Congress of Vienna to preserve this. The Cossacks, the steppe riders of Ukraine, after their rebellion was crushed, were employed by the court as its deadliest and cruelest weapons. Some colonization occurred in Southern Ukraine with the foundation of several new Russian cities on the Black Sea coast, as well as in Siberia and Central Asia, the destination of a continuous flow of colonists and dissidents pushing the frontiers of the empire further and further east.

The greatest strengths of the empire were its sheer size, able to project land power from Germany to China, as well as its political centralization, allowing the emperors of Russia to mobilize the country without much internal opposition. Its greatest weaknesses were its institutional backwardness and its relative isolation from the world’s trade: Saint-Petersburg’s ports froze up for a large part of the year and were locked behind the Danish straits. The northern seaboard’s ports froze up for most of the year so Russia had to route a large amount of its trade through the Black Sea and the Bosporus. Having 40% of your trade at the mercy of a rival foreign power was a huge risk for the Empire. The greatest questions for Russia were whether they’d be able to implement social and economic reforms, whether they’d be able to secure proper trade ports and whether its suppressed peoples, Russian or otherwise, would tire of economic stagnation, lack of political freedom, and imperial oppression.

The story of the Eastern European nations’ independence is also a story of how these four empires failed to hold on to their conquests. From this short introduction, it becomes clear that the four empires were not only opposed by their Eastern European or other minorities, but also by each other. Austria and Prussia were vying for influence in Germany. Austrians and Ottomans were carefully watching each other in suspicion along the edge of the Balkans, a border they’ve spent 300 years fighting over. Russians were eyeing up the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and doing everything to make life harder for the Ottomans. Russia and Prussia, two land-based absolutist empires with very different strategic situations, suddenly found themselves neighbors in Poland and began to realize that their interests are no longer in alignment. The flashpoints between these four empires would bring about a World War that would end up destroying all of them. As the empires marched towards their annihilation, the peoples of Eastern Europe got a chance to take their fates into their own hands.

Act 1: The first cracks in the European order of the Congress of Vienna (1815-1848)

Serbian independence

The Ottoman Empire initially wanted nothing to do with the Napoleonic wars. Back in the late 18th century it fought against Russia, got its butt kicked, and lost what is today Southern Ukraine to them. Russia extensively colonized the formerly Tartar territory with Moldovans, Ukrainians, Russians, and Germans, founding, among others, the city of Odessa. At the same time, the Ottomans fought the Austrians along their long military frontier. The Austrians found support from ethnic Serbs and briefly pushed the Ottomans out of Serbia itself, during which they established the Serbische Freikorps, a volunteer militia of ethnic Serbs fighting against Ottoman rule. After the Austrians withdrew, many members of the Freikorps were pardoned and were allowed to stay in Serbia while the Janissaries, who had abused the Serbs so much so that they sided with Austria, were exiled. A laxer form of Ottoman rule returned with Serb nobles/village chiefs, the knezs electing their own chiefs, the Ober-knezs, responsible for a district of several villages, to oversee taxation and liaise with the governing Pasha. It was an ok deal for the Serbs.

That might have been the end of the Serbian independence story if not for a rebel Ottoman Pasha who seized control of the Iron Gates of the Danube. Renouncing his allegiance to the weakened Sultan, he collected the exiled Janissaries and other renegades of the empire to raid Wallachia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. He brought a time of terror that the region hasn’t seen in a long time. The Sultan was powerless to act against the Janissaries, so he did a 180, made peace with the rebel Pasha, and the Janissaries were allowed to return to Serbia. The terror didn’t stop, it was only legitimized. The Janissaries murdered the legit Pasha, took over Serbia entirely, and in January 1804, organized a massacre of 72 knezs, mounting their heads on spikes in the hopes of cowing the populace.

Instead of cowing the Serbs, this event triggered a broader uprising. Headed by a former Freikorps officer, Đorđe Petrović, known to history by his nom de guerre, Karađorđe [Black George], the Serbian rebels defeated the renegades and demanded autonomy for Serbia, a similar status that Wallachia and Moldavia have been enjoying. The sultan’s response was to order a jihad against the new Serbian state, but the Serbs proved resilient. In 1806 they won a string of victories, liberated Belgrade, and violently expelled all Muslims from Serbia. The Serbs now wanted full independence.

Things took a turn for the even worse for the Ottomans when war broke out with Russia. One of the many concessions that Russia had won from the Ottomans back in the 18th century wars was that it was recognized as the protector of the Orthodox minorities in the Ottoman Empire. This meant influence in the Danubian Principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, and, which will prove important soon, a permanent casus belli against the Ottomans whenever they decided that Constantinople was being too rough with its minorities. The Sultan now wanted the pro-Russian governors of the Principalities out, and so when Napoleon beat Austria and Russia at Austerlitz, he invaded the Russian-held Romanian territory on French encouragement and proclaimed the aforementioned jihad against Serbia. Unfortunately for him, the Russians once again dished out a massive beating on them and in the 1812 Treaty of Bucharest the Ottomans were forced to cede half of Moldavia to them, the territory we now know as the Republic of Moldova. This will also be important later.

When Napoleon did an oopsie and invaded Russia, the Ottomans were able to rebound. They brutally suppressed the Serb rebels, retook Belgrade and in true medieval fashion, raped the women and sold the inhabitants into slavery---their revenge for the Serb’s treatment of the city’s Muslims, itself a revenge for terror, and so on, and so on… Up to a quarter of Serbia’s population fled to the Austrian Empire, their property (re)taken over by Islamized Serbs and Albanians.

In the spring of 1815, the fighting resumed. With the zealous Karađorđe temporarily detained in Russia, the Serbs rallied around the craftier Miloš Obrenović. Miloš was elected Prince and offered the Ottomans the same deal that Karađorđe had in 1804; autonomy within the empire. To sweeten the deal, he later sent them Karađorđe’s head whom he had killed in 1817. With Napoleon defeated and an ever-hungry Russia victorious, the Sultan saw no reason to try his luck again and accepted. Prince Miloš became the absolute hereditary ruler of a fully autonomous Serbia, a nominal subject of the Ottoman Empire. That autonomy would only get stronger as the Ottoman Empire continued its decline.

Once Serbia got its independence it got to state-building, turning the prevailing bottom-up nationalism into a top-down one. This effort was facilitated by Vuk [Wolf] Stefanović Karadžić, who, after much research, decided that "Serbian is spoken most purely and correctly in Herzegovina and in Bosnia” [his own dialect] and standardized the Serbo-Croatian language. This paved the way for all forms of nationalism to be produced in a way that could be understood from Zagreb to Kosovo.

Revolt in Romania

The next blow to Ottoman rule in the Balkans came 4 years later. The Russians cranked their attempts to destabilize the Ottomans up to another degree and sought to engineer a broader uprising in the Balkans. Their ally for this, some might say tool, had been the Filiki Eteira (‘Society of Friends’ in Greek), a secret society of Greeks who sought independence from the Ottomans. Founded in 1814 in Odessa, the group attracted Greek intellectuals from throughout the Greek diaspora around the Aegean and the Black Seas and influenced the revolutionaries of other nations, such as the aforementioned Karađorđe. Their efforts brought fruit in 1821 with the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. The fighting was long and particularly brutal; the Ottomans used troops of Muhammad Ali, the Albanian-born Pasha of a semi-autonomous Egypt, and they again dished out some good-old medieval treatment of the populace. This triggered an international outrage and the intervention of Britain, France, and (unsurprisingly) Russia that eventually won the war for the Greeks. But the Anglo- world is fairly aware of this conflict as Lord Byron adventured and ultimately died there, so I won’t write too much more about this.

My story is actually about the Romanian front, which was only a side show to this whole affair. The Filiki Eteira wanted to make sure the Greeks were not alone in the fight and tried to incite the entire Balkans to revolt against the Ottomans. However, the Greek elites didn’t seem to understand just how unpopular they themselves were with the other peoples of the Balkans. To understand this, note that even centuries after the Eastern Roman Empire fell, Greek dynasties retained prominent roles within the Ottoman Empire. They oversaw the center of Orthodox faith in Constantinople that continued to operate more or less freely, and, case in point, they governed the Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. This is Romania’s Phanariot period, named for Phanar, the then-Greek quarter of Constantinople, today’s Fener. By this time, Greek rulers have lorded over Romanians under the Sultan’s mandate for centuries, increasingly influenced by Russia.

The Greek influence in Romania pushed it over the edge and a popular uprising began in Wallachia against the ruling elites (Greeks, Ottomans, and the Romanian Boyars) in 1821 under Tudor Vladimirescu, a veteran of the Russian army of the war of 1806-1812. At the same time, an army of Greeks under Alexander Ypsilantis, the leader of the Filiki Eteira and former officer of the Russian army, crossed from Ukraine into Moldavia, gathering Romanians under his banner and promising them the support of “a great power” (*wink-wink*). Vladimirescu and his veteran pandurs (light infantrymen) occupied Bucharest and most of Wallachia, the Filiki Eteira occupied Moldavia and the rest of Wallachia. It seems, however, that Ypsilantis jumped the gun and the Russians had no intention of intervening at the time. Without their support, and with the infighting of the revolutionaries, the Ottomans had no trouble crushing the uprising.

The Romanian uprising of 1821 is less interesting for what it accomplished than for what it revealed. It showed Russia how unpopular the Greeks were, forcing them to think of alternative ways to exert influence in the region. Case in point, it turned out that the bottom-up movement of Vladimirescu had little in common with the top-down one of Ypsilantis. Both had little in common with what the boyars, the Romanian nobility, wanted at the time. Romanian commoners ended up fighting the tax-exempt boyars. Greeks, left by the Russians to fend for themselves, began pillaging the country and were opposed by Romanian commoners and nobles alike. Vladimirescu even ended up cooperating with the Ottomans, so long as they promised to get rid of the Greek ruling class and, in a funny reversal, grant Wallachia a status similar to Serbia, as vassal to the Sultan with their own elected prince. The Filiki Eteira found out about this and captured, tortured, and murdered him, after which Vladimerscu’s movement evaporated, while Ypsilantis’ was left without popular or outside support. The Ottomans entered in force and staged a bloody campaign of retribution, sacking Bucharest and Târgoviște again in medieval fashion.

Yet, the uprising wasn’t completely without results. The Phanariotes were deprived of their power in Romania and, after centuries, the two principalities would have ethnically Romanian voivodes. One of the biggest hurdles for the organization of Romania’s national movements was gone as instead of the Hellenic influence, Romania’s elite was free to align itself to Russia, or even the west. For now, however, alternating Ottoman and Russian occupation and taxation remained.

The first Polish uprising

The next isolated Eastern European attempt to reset the Congress of Vienna came in 1830, by the Poles. Back in 1815, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, kind of like the Donald Trump of his time, threatened the rest of the European Great Powers with war if he couldn’t have Poland. The others really wanted to restore an independent Poland but really-really didn’t want to have yet another major war, so they agreed to grant Poland to Alexander under the condition that he doesn’t merge it to the Russian Empire and instead rules as a constitutional monarch. Alexander agreed and held to his word. For about five minutes. Soon after the Congress of Vienna disbanded, Poland, despite having the world’s most progressive constitution on paper, was ruled by Russia in all but name, and was thus subject to Russian-style repression marked by secret police and censorship.

The spark to ignite Polish resistance to occupation came in 1830 where a minor revolutionary wave shook Europe. The Russians, playing the policeman of the continent, wanted to put down the revolutions in Paris and Brussels by using the Polish army; a blatant violation of the Polish constitution. The Polish officers rebelled, joined by partisans in Lithuania and Ukraine, and appealed for foreign support which didn’t come. Europe’s leaders were in fright of the revolution, fearing another Napoleon and didn’t wish to weaken or antagonize Russia. Poland fought alone against desperate odds and was defeated, its autonomy further curtailed. The war triggered significant Anti-Polish sentiment in Russia, exemplified in the writings of Gogol and Pushkin, that would increase with each new uprising and end up bordering on racial hatred by the time of the next century.

The independence movements of Serbia and Romania were, in part, byproducts of imperial infighting between the Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. The Polish War of Independence was different. It was the first time the people of Eastern Europe expressed explicit rejection of the European post-Napoleonic order. It would not be the last. But these three movements had one thing in common: they all taught the empires the power of nationalist resistance against their rule. The Polish nobility and middle class in both Prussia and Russia were now subject to a level of marginalization that the empires simply didn’t find necessary before. Poles became second class citizens in their own cities as Germans and Russians sought to eliminate their national sentiment by limiting the influence of the Polish intelligentsia. Russia took another lesson to heart. Before, their attempts to subvert Ottoman influence in the Balkans focused on what they called the “Greek project”: restore the Eastern Roman Empire with Greek leadership and Russian guidance, the two united by their Orthodox religion. The cities they had founded on the Black Sea shore, Kherson, Mariupol, Melitopol, Sevastopol, Odessa, and so on, all received Greek names and were cultivating the Greek diaspora that Russia intended to rule in the Balkans with. Very soon, however, they’d have a different project, a Slavic project, seeking to run the Balkans, as well as their own empire, much more directly.

Act 2: The European Realignment (1848-1871)

The Springtime of Nations, liberalism and nationalism ascendant

The crack in the empires’ armor finally broke in 1848. A chain of dominos began to fall end, by 1871, the map of Europe was very different from the ones agred in 1815 -- although many of the guiding principles remained. First, a revolution broke out in Paris, which was followed by the largest wave of liberal nationalist uprising in Europe yet. Its most well-known effects were felt in France, where it caused the final collapse of the Bourbon dynasty, in Germany, where it came close to bringing unification under a liberal government, and in Italy, which sought to free itself from Austrian yoke.

Established nationalities in Eastern Europe tried their luck again to achieve independence. The Polish Uprising of 1848 against Prussia in the autonomous province of Poznan was basically a mini-version of the 1831 uprising against Russia. The Prussians crushed the rebellion and curtailed Polish autonomy. In Moldavia and Wallachia, nationalists and liberals rose up against landowners and foreign influences but were opposed by the boyars, Russians, and the Ottomans. The revolutionaries were likewise defeated and both principalities came once again under Russian occupation.

At the same time, 1848 also saw the birth of new national identities. In Prague, the first Slavic Congress was called. For the first time in history, the largest minority of the Austrian Empire (not to mention, the largest ethnic group of Europe), Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovaks, and Slovenes had found a voice and they spoke against both Austria and Russia (Slavic Russia!). Although they didn’t manage to agree on anything meaningful (some of the organizers of the congress had been part of the aforementioned Habsburg military elite who counseled obeisance to Vienna), they finally started talking to each other. In Ruthenia, the Supreme Ruthenian Council was born, demanding imperial support against their Polish feudal overlords, the rights to use the Ukrainian language, and unification with Russian-held Ukraine. Obviously none of that would happen for a while, but the national dialogue and consciousness has officially begun. They decided to adopt the ancient Ruthenian colors of blue and yellow in two stripes to create the flag of Ukraine, a nation that would not become independent until 1991.

The case of Hungary was a more advanced version of rebellion; here, an old and established but historically disunited nation has managed to come together from top to bottom. In an unexpected turn, the nobility meeting in Pozsony (the future Bratislava), the liberal intelligentsia protesting in Pest, and the landless serfs grumbling all over the country, joined forces. The presently overwhelmed Austrian government capitulated to their demands, creating an autonomous Kingdom of Hungary with a liberal constitution. Serfdom was abolished, feudal institutions closed, noble privileges limited.

Austria managed to deal with their problems in their German, Bohemian, and Italian provinces and came back to sort out Hungary. However, they only managed to fight to a standstill in the Hungarian War of Independence. They had to resort to calling in Russia, the Gendarme of Europe, to save their empire and restore a semblance of European order. Russia happily obliged, invaded Hungary in 1849 and ended the Springtime of Nations with the anciens régimes victorious but their model of power heavily dented.

Notably, some of the non-Hungarians of Revolutionary Hungary, Serbs, Croats, Vlachs, (Slovaks in smaller numbers) fought against Hungary whom they saw as their more direct overlord. And while the rest of 1848-1849 was more or less gentlemanly, these uprisings were not. The genocidal brutality of the Romanians and Serbs and the heavy-handed reprisals of the Hungarians were the harbingers of future horrors as the peoples of Eastern Europe were figuring out how to solve their overlapping claims and deal with the ethnically mixed populations. The Slavs and the Vlach were promised help and rights by Vienna, only to be betrayed by the Austrian court and pushed under centralized governance from Vienna once the war was over. This was the last time the Habsburg court could rely on these ethnic minorities in a time of crisis.

Hungary joins the empires

It was in this victorious but vulnerable position that Austria’s fortunes turned for the worse. When Britain, France, and Sardinia-Piedmont teamed up with the Ottoman Empire just a few years later in the Crimean War, Russia called in the favor in return for saving the Austrians. Vienna, faced between two bad choices -- either fight against the allies or fight against Russia in a war they had no interest in -- picked the worst one: they mobilized against Russia to tie down most of its army (going as far as occupying the Romanian Principalities themselves), pissing them off in a major way. However, they didn't actually declare war, nor fight the Russian army, which was a huge annoyance to the allies.

This led to Austria being isolated diplomatically for the next decade or so, during which time they lost two major wars (against Italy(x2), France, and Prussia), their provinces in Italy, and their influence in Germany. With Austria on the brink of destruction again, the imperial court was forced to placate the still-grumbling Hungarians, leading to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.

Austria-Hungary, as the empire began to be known, is a very misunderstood entity. In most meaningful ways, it was two separate, sovereign countries. Technically it was a ‘real union’, a form of personal union where some institutions are shared between the constituent entities, but unlike most such unions (such as Poland-Lithuania, Denmark-Norway, or Great Britain and Ireland, it was truly a partnership of equals with all the stability and dysfunction that such arrangements produce. Hungary joined the winning side – or so they thought – then extended a deal to the Croats in the Hungarian-Croatian Compromise of 1868 – the last time the Kingdom of Hungary showed any courtesy to its minorities.

The birth of Montenegro and Romania

There were several more fallouts of the Crimean War. As this huge struggle of the Great Powers was going down, a tiny and insignificant Bishopric in the Balkans that had never been important enough for the Turks to conquer properly, managed to unite the tribes around Mount Lovćen, also known as the Crna Gora [the Black Mountain], and reorganized itself into a secular state under Danilo, the first Prince of Montenegro. In 1858, the Ottomans came to sort out the fledgling state but were soundly defeated. In the peace negotiations, the Great Powers recognized Montenegrin independence and compelled the Ottomans to do likewise, with the Principality being enlarged to cover almost two Luxembourgs’ worth of territory and further stirring hopes of South Slavic self-determination against the Ottomans. Montenegro became the first proper constitutional monarchy in Eastern Europe.

Sensing Ottoman and Russian weakness, in 1859 the Wallachians and the Moldavians rallied behind Alexandru Ioan Cuza, a veteran of the 1848 Wallachian revolt, who became Prince of the two Romanian Principalities, de facto unifying them. Russia and the Ottoman Empire, currently at the mercy of the western Great Powers were forced to accept the fait accompli, the western Great Powers gave the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug, and an independent Romania was born. The new country quickly began to look west, trying to make friends with France. They copied the French constitution, administration, and even the language in order to re-latinize Romanian and purge Slavic and Greek influences in an effort to assert a distinct identity in the Balkans. They retroactively wrote their people’s history, solving the problem of lacking any written sources of their people’s origins rather elegantly: by outright fabrication. The Chronicle of Huru became the first shot fired in the still ongoing war surrounding Romanian origins and the historical legitimacy (whatever that means) of their territory. The truth of when and how they arrived there remains unknown to this day.

Polish rebellion, Russian goes full dark-side Empire

Yet another fallout of the defeat in Crimea was a wave of Russian reforms. After the loss, Russia was forced to sit down and really think about its future and by the 1860s the Tsar (guided by his German aunt) brought on a series of liberal reforms. On the one hand, came the abolition of serfdom. This had a long-run effect as Russian economic power and prosperity would finally, gradually begin to rise.

On the other hand came a brutal repression on the empire’s minorities, an intensification of Russification, its ethnic cleansing project.  In the more lenient north, Russia banned the use of Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and the Baltic languages and imposed the Cyrillic alphabet across the empire (yes this was the lenient part). The waves of repression were both a cause and a consequence of the largest Polish(-Lithuanian) uprising of 1863-1864.

After crushing it, the Russians made it their business to destroy every one of their minorities, especially the distinct and long-standing facets of Polish society. The primary methods were the transportation of the intelligentsia to Siberia, the economic deprivation of the szlachta, who, for all their faults, were the primary keepers of Polish tradition, and the institutional erasure of religion and language. A military governor summarized the latter policy as “What the Russian bayonet didn’t accomplish, the Russian school will”.

In resistance, the Polish and Lithuanian educators went underground. Throughout the rest of Russian occupation, teachers kept the languages alive and created smuggling circles of books. Most famous of them are the Lithuanian book carriers who had arranged for the printing of over 3 million copies of books and smuggled them into the Russian Empire, rendering their language ban a complete failure. Just as notable is the Polish Flying University, a network of learning throughout Poland. One of the students of the Flying University was a woman named Maria Skłodowska, who later emigrated to France, married a French guy called Pierre, did some physics and chemistry, and won Nobel Prizes in both. She named one of the new elements she discovered 'polonium', hoping to raise awareness about the oppression of Poles within the scientific community.

While Russian treatment of Polish and Baltic minorities was quite brutal for its time, it was nothing compared to what Russia had in store for the less “civilized” south. The problem with indoctrination, you see, is that peripheral, small-scale societies with no tradition of formal education, are generally quite resistant to it – you can’t learn Russian in school if there are no schools. The Russian solution to the problem of minorities in the strategically important Black Sea and Caucasus regions was thus their direct physical destruction. This culminated with the Circassian Genocide, the absolutely savage eradication of the peoples living by the Black Sea seaboard and replacement by Russian settlers (with up to 2 million killed and 97% of Circassians gone, this one ranks fairly highly among the most heinous crimes against humanity ever by the way). The Russian approach to empire finally reached its ultimate form here and would change very little over the next one and a half century, even if the name did.

Act 3 - The Twilight of the Empires (1871-1918)

The Germanization of Poland and the Polonization of Germany

In 1871, Prussia completed its unification of Germany, creating a new superpower in the center of Europe. With the Prussian nobility, military, and culture becoming dominant in this new superstate, so did the new Germany inherit the Prussian phobia towards its Slavic subjects.

Under Bismarck, the brand new Germany began its Kulturkampf, a violent crackdown against the rallying point of the enemies of Prussian autocracy, the Catholic Church. On top of being a hallmark of Austrian influence in Southern Germany, members of the Catholic clergy in German-occupied Poland have been the principal keeper of Polish traditions. The churches were platforms of Polish self-expression and the monasteries the only possible centers of Polish learning. Bismarck wanted them all gone and instituted a series of repressive laws against them. Hundreds of Polish clergymen were arrested or exiled.

It wasn’t enough. Bismarck et al. decided to gradually eliminate the Polish minority entirely. Poles were banned from building houses and in 1885, the Prussian Settlement Commission was formed. Its task was to buy up Polish land from impoverished landowners, make the lands workable and give it to ethnic Germans. On paper, this was a brilliant idea, taking advantage of the relative poverty of Poles (whom the Prussians always have regarded as “slovenly trash”).

In reality however, as any economist would have predicted, the commission was as comically unsuccessful as it was evil. The German Empire spent over a billion marks of German money to fund landowners in Poland. The Poles even started trolling the commission by bidding on their own lands and increasing prices yet further. From this money the Germans were able to relocate a grand total of about 20,000 families, which did in no way compensate for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who fled the more economically backwards east to the blooming west or the even more blooming Americas. Many Poles arrived from Russia and Austria whom the Germans were desperately trying to deport back.

The village of Golenhofen, a model colony in Poznań/Posen province built as propaganda by the Settlement Commission to inspire German migration. The village architecture is a bland mix of styles from all over Germany and painted in the imperial colors of black, white, and red.

Ironically, this period saw a lot more voluntary Polish migration to the west of Germany and by the 1910s, 300,000-500,000 of them worked in the Ruhr valley’s coal mines and steel plants. They demanded Catholic masses in Polish and left their mark on the region in their numerous sports and worker organizations. By 1905, the German and Polish working class were protesting and striking together.

But as Poles spread through the empire, so did the phobia against them. It was no longer a sentiment exclusive to the Prussian leadership. Germany was losing hundreds of thousands of people to the US and had received more and more Poles from the east. The spectre of Slavification loomed and Germany just learned the hard way that government-sponsored interventions that go against market forces are doomed to failure. Solving the Slavic question in a way that keeps their “Germanness” intact will require harsher measures.

The Great Eastern Crisis: the party begins in the Balkans

In the 1870s, the Ottoman Empire’s economy imploded. The empire, already suffering from overspending (maintaining ridiculous luxury for the sultan and his court as well as a pointlessly oversized navy), a foreign debt spiral (through British and French banks to the Rothschilds, whip out your favorite conspiracies), and missing out on the productivity increases of the industrial revolution (whip out your favorite protectionist arguments as the Ottomans’ kept their tariffs low due to British pressure), was first hit by a drought and then a flood. By 1874 the famine-ridden empire defaulted on its debts and taxes were raised. All this, made worse by the violent nature of Ottoman tax farming in the Balkans (bad looking men come to your village and take your things, sometimes killing or raping too), ignited a series of uprisings.

It was started by the Christian population of Herzegovina. Then, a string of uncoordinated revolts popped up in Bulgaria, all of which drew in the Ottomans’, for the period, unusually and unnecessarily violent response. The bloodshed, especially in Bulgaria, was so bad that British public opinion kept the government from supporting Istanbul, its natural ally against Russia, and the Ottomans were left to fend for themselves. Declarations of war from Serbia, Montenegro, and finally, Russia followed.

The Ottomans lost the war, but they didn’t lose as badly as perhaps people expected. They held out for a year before losing control over the Balkans. During that time, Russian finances, never stellar, went to shit and public opinion against the Ottomans calmed down. The Great Powers called an emergency meeting in Berlin to arbitrate the peace before the Ottomans could implode completely. The main things to consider were multilateral solutions to ethnic disputes (the first of many), and, much more saliently, the strategic balance between the Great Powers in the Balkans.

On the former side, the full independence of Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia was proclaimed (the latter also became a Kingdom soon after) the Ottomans finally forswearing all claims of (long-defunct) overlordship and an independent Bulgaria was created. While this doesn’t seem impressive, let’s take a moment to appreciate this: after four centuries of systematic erasure and complete exclusion from the Balance of Europe of 1815, four Eastern European nations received the same recognition as any other European country. Montenegro grew to double its size (now amounting to four Luxemburgs), Serbia grew by about 25%. And as we appreciate this, let us take note of one of the first things the victorious Serbs and Montenegrins did with the territories they took: they violently expelled all Muslim “colonizers”, Albanians in particular. The Albanian population of Montenegro and the newly acquired Serbian province of Niš was pushed south into Kosovo which thus came to have an Albanian majority. This will become important later.

The other stipulations of the treaty were to find a way to appease a tired, but hungry and ultimately victorious Russia. The challenge was to do this without replacing Turkish domination of the Balkans with a Russian one, something that was a no-no for pretty much everyone attending. For this reason, the historical territory of Bulgaria, a nation that everyone assumed would be a Russian ally or satellite, was partitioned in four. The Bulgarian-majority territory of Eastern Rumelia was made an autonomous Ottoman territory. Macedonia remained in Ottoman hands for reasons I’ll explain in a bit and would never join Bulgaria. The territory along the Black Sea coastline up to the Danube, called Northern Dobruja, was given to Romania in compensation as another slice of Romania (who was neutral by the way) was awarded to Russia (with friends like these…). The remainder became the newly independent Principality of Bulgaria.

The territory of Bosnia was given as condominium to Austria and Hungary which occupied it for the next forty years. This act is typically mentioned in history books the same way as I just did in the previous sentence, but that omits that Austria and Hungary actually had to conquer and subdue the territory in a military campaign from Bosnian Muslims loyal to the Ottoman Empire. Austria-Hungary also stationed troops in the Sanjak Pass, a territory between Serbia and Montenegro, confirming their separation. The point of all this was to allow a potential Austro-Hungarian army through the pass and Ottoman Macedonia an easy march to the port of Thessaloniki and the Dardanelles to counter any future Russian push through Bulgarian territory. 

Balkan realignment: Crises in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia

The Congress of Berlin gets a bad rap because it was an imperial conference where Great Powers decided upon the fates of others and Great Powers deciding upon the fates of others is a no-no. However, it must be said that no such conference occurred again and we’ll all see how that turned out. And in the meantime, it solved a lot of short-term problems. None of Austria-Hungary, Russia, or the Ottomans could really upset the strategic balance and the Ottomans were committed to reform their shitty ways of governance. Serbia came to be an Austro-Hungarian ally (formalized in 1881) while Bulgaria became a Russian one but without outright domination or occupation.

Bulgarians, as it turned out, really didn’t like the idea of being divided in four pieces. Russia signing off to this soured the relationship between protector and protectee. At the same time, the Bulgarians of Eastern Rumelia weren’t fond of continued overlordship of the people who treated them so brutally just recently. The obvious thing happened, independent Bulgaria funded separatist groups in autonomous Eastern Rumelia who overthrew the local government and proclaimed unification with Bulgaria. But then things took a weird turn. On the one hand, the Ottomans signed off on this deal without much resistance. At this point they knew better. On the other hand, Russia, who should have been happy for its Slavic ally’s gains, was furious at Bulgaria for acting independently.

Austria-Hungary, believing all this a Russian plot, vehemently opposed Bulgarian unification and set loose the Serbians to cut Bulgaria down to size. The Serbo-Bulgarian war followed, the first war between independent Eastern European states for centuries. The Bulgarians wiped the floor with the Serbians in short order but before the war could escalate, Austria-Hungary and Serbia realized the Russians were just as scared by Bulgarian aggrandizement as they were. They quickly made peace and supported a truly independent Bulgaria.

The Russians were mad. They abducted Alexander, the Prince of Bulgaria (nephew to the Russian Tsar) and essentially forced him to abdicate but the only thing they achieved was get the pro-Austrian Prince Ferdinand on the throne (who soon after declared himself Tsar of Bulgaria). The Russians then withdrew all their ministers and advisors from Bulgaria and the alliance between the two was dead.

During all this time, the Austro-Hungarians were trying to manage Bosnia and Herzegovina. The region’s Hungarian administrator decided to cultivate a separate Bosniak identity: neither Catholic Croatian (the Hungarians had no intention of letting the territory merge with the autonomous Kingdom of Croatia), nor Orthodox Serb (Serbian separatism was a no-no), nor Muslim Turkish (and so was Ottoman separatism). This was a complete failure and the region’s politics remained divided along religious lines in no small part due to the nationalist aspirations and influences of Serbia, Croatia, and the Ottomans.

By 1905 with the death of the administrator, the policy was discontinued. In 1908 the Ottoman sultan was overthrown by the Young Turks, a Turkish nationalist group who began to implement reforms. Fearing the Ottomans would receive newfound momentum and they would come for the territory, Austria-Hungary then proclaimed the annexation of Bosnia. In exchange, they pledged to arrange free Russian passage in the Bosporus and toyed with the idea of creating a South Slavic state within the empire, expanding the Dual Monarchy into a Triple one. The former failed for external reasons (Britain in particular had no interest in letting Russian ships move freely), the latter failed for internal reasons (Hungarians in particular had no interest in sharing power with Slavs), so in the end Austria-Hungary just ended up absorbing Bosnia with no compensation or reform, upsetting pretty much everyone from Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Saint Petersburg. That will become important soon.

But in the meantime, another Austro-Hungarian setback in their Balkan domination was a coup in Serbia. The country, since its independence, remained divided between the dynasties of the two great revolutionaries, Obrenović and Karađorđe. Broadly speaking, the former were pro-Austrian, the latter pro-Russian. In May 1903, pan-Slavist officers belonging to the terrorist group the Black Hand captured and brutally murdered the king, the queen, the queen’s family, the prime minister, and the king’s adjutant, ending the Obrenović dynasty. In his place came a new ruler from the Karađorđević family who, learning from the predecessor’s example, pretty much let the Black Hand run the country. Serbia from then on charted an independent foreign and economic policy for which Austria-Hungary punished them by banning Serbian pork from their markets in what came to be known as the Pig War. Serbia, now in the hands of nationalists, looked to expand to South Slavic territories.

As all this was going down, the Muslims of Albania formed a coalition known as the League of Peja and began fighting small-scale wars against Montenegrin encroachment. At first they were fighting to preserve Ottoman order over their lands, but later, both the Ottomans and the movement itself took a nationalistic turn and the Albanians began a low-level insurgency against the Turks as well. Them, and the Bulgarians and Greeks of still-Ottoman Macedonia (the Bulgarians founded their own terrorist organization, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization or IMRO) made sure that fighting never really died down in the Balkans.

Russian revolution and reform

As you’ll note, Russian behavior in the Balkans has been uncharacteristically passive since the Congress of Berlin. This is mostly explained by the fact that during the twilight of the 19th century, the Russians were busy in the Far East, taking territory from China that’s larger than all of France, Germany, and Italy combined (something that may become important soon in real life). In 1904-1905, however, they suffered a costly and humiliating defeat from Japan and, once again, their finances were in the shitter.

This triggered a full revolution in Russia and the empire survived by the skin of its teeth. 50 years after the last major reform of the 1860s, workers and peasants demanded an end to the autocracy and improved living conditions. Once again, the minorities, Poland in particular, made a bid for independence. Unfortunately for them, the Russian military, while largely sympathetic to the demands of the Russian working class and peasantry, found no love for Polish ambitions.

With the military supporting reform but cracking down against secessionism, the empire was preserved but the Tsar was forced to ease on the autocracy. In 1906 a constitution was drafted guaranteeing representation in the newly created Duma. The Russians however, were doing exactly what the Austrians did in 1848. The constitution was a sham, the Duma just theatre, and they didn’t appease people for long.

Where the reforms really worked was the army and logistics network. Fueled with a few really strong years of economic growth, the Russian Empire sought to undertake a massive increase of their professional army and reduce its overlong mobilization and deployment time. The change was planned to be so drastic and so rapid that even its spectre was enough to give nightmares to the German leadership. The Germans, who, due to emperor Wilhelm II, the Donald Trump of his time, were in the midst of an idiotic and losing naval arms race with Britain, abandoned it and instead began drafting an idiotic plan to cut Russia down to size on land.

Austria and Hungary, reform and reaction

The Habsburg Dual Monarchy is tricky to understand and most people just chalk up its problems to something along the lines of “being a multi-ethnic empire in an age of nationalism”. And while there’s certainly a lot of truth to this, it misses some interesting and important points.

First, Austria and Hungary were two separate entities and pursued their internal policies independently. Austria (ruling over Bohemia, Slovenia, and Galicia) pretty much let its minorities do whatever and those minorities were fairly happy. In 1848, Czech National Revival figure František Palacký had said “If Austria didn’t exist, it should be invented”. The Austrians allowed every minority in their Parliament and they could speak their own language, something which resulted in absolute hilarity as there was no translation and the debaters couldn’t understand each other. The Czechs found this so funny they trolled Austrian politicians by reading their dinner menus to them. The reason this didn’t really matter for the running of the state is that (a) Austria was still pretty much run by the Emperor and his circle and (b) since when did anything matter that was ever spoken in any Parliament?

Hungary was a different animal. The social ambitions of 1848 were gone and the country was back to being a neo-feudalist oligarchy, the politics dominated by the nobility. At the same time, Hungarians were kind of pissed at the minorities for siding against them in their independence war (as well as the genocidal brutality they showed), and, much like the Germans, developed a phobia against them. The result was a heavy-handed attempt at Magyarization. Any district or village with even a 20% Hungarian-speakers (and the definition for this was quite broad) was required to run education in Hungarian only. To be fair, this was nothing like the Russification or even Germanization campaigns, it was more akin to the much more successful French, British, or Spanish attempts to homogenize their country. Still, it’s quite understandable that the minorities weren’t fans of this. I especially note that the Hungarians took this approach even to the Slovaks who did in fact side with them back in 1848-1849, beginning a bitter and completely avoidable rivalry.

The real problem for the Dual Monarchy was that their foreign and military policy was decided jointly and the two halves really couldn’t find common ground anywhere. It got so bad that Britain, which was a naval power with a minimal standing army, would end up spending almost double that of Austria-Hungary, a supposed continental powerhouse, on its army. Any larger-scale administrative reform was similarly blocked: attempts to extend the Dual Monarchy into a Triple One with a South Slavic component, or even a United States of Austria, were blocked by the Hungarians who were afraid of the Austrians trying to use the minorities against them again.

Relationships are like sharks. They either move forward or they die. Austria-Hungary couldn’t move forward. The result was stagnation and all the frustration that comes from it. While the Hungarian nobility was, as ever, comfy in their privileges, the Austrian leadership got ever more restless to act. By the 1910s, the leadership was desperate to do something, anything, to revitalize the empire. Conquest? Administrative reform? Conquest and then administrative reform? Sure, whatever, just let’s do it. Surely it will revitalize the empire and increase its prestige?

So it’s really the majorities of the empire that were its problem, rather than its minorities. Slavs, Italians, and Romanians, especially in the Austrian half, were more or less okay with how things were going. The only way to mess up this relationship would be for the Austrian-Hungarian leadership to order these people to go kill and be killed by other Slavs, Italians, and Romanians. Which of course is exactly what they would order them to do.

The World goes to War

In 1911, it was the Albanians’ turn to revolt against Ottoman rule. By 1912 they achieved independence and were nearing international recognition. Smelling blood, Serbia and Bulgaria buried the hatchet, teamed up against the Ottomans, and in secret treaties, partitioned the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe: Kosovo and Albania would go to Serbia, Macedonia would go to Bulgaria.

Reality turned out to be different. While the newly formed Balkan League, joined also by Montenegro and Greece, was victorious, the Great Powers supported Albanian independence and told Serbia to keep their hands away from it. At the same time, Macedonia ended up being occupied by Serbia and Greece. When the Bulgarians asked them nicely to hand it over, they politely declined.

Feeling somewhat disappointed, Bulgaria, who had fancied itself the “Prussia of the East” and thought itself up for the challenge, attacked its former allies. It got its ass handed to it and was invaded from all sides. The Ottomans, seeing their enemies were fighting each other, took back some territory. The Romanians saw the Bulgarians’ backs were turned and joined the beatdown, yoinking Southern Dobruja. The end result was an independent Albania, an enlarged Serbia who walked away with the Sanjak Pass, Kosovo, and most of Macedonia, and finally, a very frustrated Bulgaria, whose ambitions of taking over Edirne/Adrianople, Macedonia, and the whole Aegean Seaboard were firmly dashed.

However, the real losers of the war were the Muslim civilians of the territory. Just like after 1878, the victorious Balkan nations took to “decolonializing” the region. The disorganized Ottoman military could do little to help the populace. The victims were in the hundreds of thousands. The Ottoman overlordship of the Balkans that began in blood, was kept up by blood, finally ended in yet more blood. But never of those who actually deserved it.

Russia was jubilant, Austria-Hungary furious. Serbia ascendant looking for more expansion, Bulgaria frustrated looking for payback. Germany was vary of Russian dominance, the Ottomans were humbled. Nobody was satisfied or sated: as ever, the victors looked for more, the loser looked for revenge. The empires and newly formed nation-states were all hungry to take the next opportunity to crush their opponents once and for all.

You all know what happened next. The Serbian Black Hand struck again (this time not their own monarch), an apocalyptic war followed that killed 5-10% of Eastern Europeans, and the four empires were finally destroyed. When the weapons on the western front finally fell silent in November of 1918, like a bubble popping, the occupied peoples of the region, Belarusians, Bosnians, Czechs, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Ukrainians, together with the already independent but never truly free Albanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Montenegrins, Romanians, and Serbs, suddenly found themselves atop the ruins of their world wrecked by war, and, finally, without their imperial masters.

As the concert that had been composed in Vienna in 1815 finally ended, a game of musical chairs began that not all Eastern European nations would survive in the next decade. What awaited those who did would be just as bad another decade later. In the next episode, the peoples of Eastern Europe will have to deal with the next attempt at their erasure, this time, by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

January 25, 2026.

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