ABSTRACT
It is commonly proposed that the Great War lasted for four years, from 1914 to 1918. But this is a Western perception (or even preconception), which unfortunately dominates to this day, obscuring the dramatic and lasting effects that World War One visited on Central and Eastern Europe. Paradoxically, this war is best remembered in Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, because the conflict on the western front removed none of these polities from the political map of Europe. On the contrary, the much longer and extremely mobile eastern front (including the related Balkan and Caucasian fronts) destroyed or dramatically overhauled all Central Europe’s polities. Furthermore, the Great War lasted much longer in this region. The two Balkan Wars of 1913–1914 were a prelude that almost seamlessly spilled over into the First World War across Central Europe, and the conflict was not over until the Russian Civil War petered out in late 1922, and the Turkish War of Independence a year later, in the summer of 1923. What is more, the follow-up population transfers, as the then legal instrument of ethnic cleansing was known, continued throughout the interwar period, effectively merging the Great War and World War Two into a single protracted conflict, which subsequently morphed into the Cold War. Central and Eastern Europe suffered an eight decade-long “hot” and “cold” conflict from 1912 until the end of communism in 1989. But even the last cesura does not mark any definitive end of this prolonged twentieth-century warfare; the Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988–1994), the wars of Yugoslav succession (1991–2001), and the Transnistria War (1992) were a post-1989 “hot spillover” that extended this dark century across the threshold of the twenty-first century. In many respects it has continued with the Russo-Georgian War (2008) and the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-).
