In the case of Russia, the existence of a relationship between lost war, revolution, and Civil War is obvious. Unlike the German case, however, it has not been investigated in any detail. The Great War is often seen as the ‘forgotten war’ in the shadow of the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918–21. Inspired by George Mosse’s work on Germany, this article investigates the connections between these conflicts. It argues that it is not easy to reconstruct the direct linkages between the fronts of an industrialized war to the violence of revolution and civil war. Rather, enduring traditions were transferred, transformed, and radicalized: the style of rule, the result of an absent political and patriotic consensus between the heterogeneous communities of communication, and dispositions to violence among the decisive sectors of the population, not only the soldiers and the revolutionaries, but also the peasants and workers longing for an egalitarian and just economy. The main role of the war was that it destroyed the old state and set these pre-existing violent tendencies free, which began to feed on themselves.

The Crucible of the First World War. What the Bolsheviks learned from the «imperialist» war Even before 1914, deep ethnic and social tensions in Russia resulted in violence. Labor militancy, revolutionary terrorism and tsarist anti-revolutionary repression, and, not least, anti-semitic pogroms in the countryside were typical forms of violence. When civil war broke out after the Bolsheviks seized power, violence on the left and the right reached unprecedented levels. Pre-war conflicts were recast in ideological terms, and the new regime removed all limits on violence in theory and practice. The Bolsheviks enforced their claim to power through comprehensive forms of repression, ranging from military requisition and recruitment under the threat and use of force to mass executions. Their enemies responded in kind. In addition, the regime propagated a world-view marked by a sharp dichotomy between friend and foe, and it erased all references to its own acts of violence from the memory of the civil war. All this paved the way for Stalin's murderous policies.

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