ABSTRACT
The Russian revolution resembles the French revolution and also, with rather wider differences of detail, the English Puritan revolution in that all three showed rapid and violent transitions from traditional monarchy to parliamentarism, from parliamentarism to dogmatic idealism, and from dogmatic idealism to a dictatorship which might still pay lip-service to idealism, but was in essentials a dictatorship of efficiency and common sense. Italy had entered the first great war from motives entirely different from those actuating Britain, France, and Russia. It has often been remarked that Ludendorff, the Chief of Staff of the German armies of the western front, signalled to his government that all was up, in the autumn of 1918, before in fact the armies under his command had been decisively defeated. 'The Succession States' was a term which came into common use to describe the new states formed out of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.
