ABSTRACT
On 11 November 1918 the First World War ended with the signing of the armistice agreement. The Hohenzollern and Hapsburg Empires were toppled not by socialist revolution, as Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolsheviks had prophesied, but by military defeat. The Soviet government annulled the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and ordered the Red Army to recapture the ceded territories. Winston Churchill called on the former allies of Russia to help the Whites in the Civil War to fight the Red Bolsheviks, but the Western democracies, exhausted by four years of bloody conflict, had no desire to enter another war. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau called merely for a cordon sanitaire around the Soviet state, perceiving Bolshevism as a kind of plague threatening mankind.
