Authors

Samuel Foster¹;  ¹ University of East Anglia, UK

Discussion

The Russian revolutions of 1917 have long commanded a pre-eminent position in historiographies of the First World War. However, while the consequences for the Eastern Front and Caucasus campaign, and socio-political reverberations in the west, have drawn considerable attention, its impact on other military theatres has remained underexplored. This paper will consider how the collapse of Tsarism was received in the context of the Triple Entente's ongoing military operations in south-east Europe, centred on the heavily fortified front established in Greece’s Aegean Macedonian territory in the autumn of 1915. Under its increasingly authoritarian French military leadership, the Entente presence morphed into a quasi-colonial occupation characterised by wartime paranoia, extensive interference in Greek politics and a medical obsession with combating malaria and other diseases.     

Despite a lengthy history of political, military and cultural entanglements in the region, Russia’s contribution to the Balkan theatre was both minimal and tarred by St.Petersburg’s unwillingness to commit resources to the wider Entente war effort. Even the arrival of two brigades from the Russian Expeditionary Force in mid-1916 was itself met with suspicion regarding the new personnels’ political allegiances. The Bolshevik seizure of power brought these pervading suspicions to a head amidst fears that the campaign’s Russian contingent was now a vector for ‘revolutionary contagion’ and prompting some of Europe’s earliest mass counter-revolutionary measures. Rather than some ‘sideshow’ to developments in France and Belgium, Macedonian would reemerge as an early frontline in what Jay Winter terms the ‘Second Great War’ of 1917 to 1923.