Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Three of our buildup arc is Russia: Retreat, Revolution, and the New Empire.

If Germany is the story of a crown falling and a republic trying to stand upright in a storm, Russia is something else entirely. Russia is what happens when an empire doesn’t merely lose a war, but loses the right to command reality. It is the moment a state’s voice stops sounding like fate and starts sounding like a weak man pleading. And once that happens, the world changes shape fast.

The Russian Empire goes into the Great War carrying old weight—peasants and priests, palaces and poverty, a vast distance between the rulers and the ruled, a tradition of obedience held together by habit, fear, and the aura of the Tsar. But modern war is not polite. It doesn’t care about aura. It doesn’t care about prayers. It doesn’t care about dynastic myths. It cares about shells, supply lines, factories, railroads, and whether your soldiers believe the people sending them to die have any idea what they’re doing.

Russia bleeds early, bleeds often, and bleeds in ways that don’t produce “meaning.” That’s crucial. A society can endure suffering if it feels the suffering is purposeful and competent. But when suffering feels pointless and incompetent, it becomes political acid. And in Russia, the war becomes acid.

Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Two of our buildup arc is Germany: The Crown Falls, the Republic Bleeds.

The most dangerous moment in a collapsing empire is not the day it loses. It’s the day it loses and then must decide what the loss means. Because meaning is power. Meaning determines who is blamed, who is trusted, who is allowed to rule, and what violence is permitted in the name of restoration.

Germany in late 1918 is not simply defeated. It is unmade.

The Kaiser is gone. Wilhelm II falls out of history like a crown tossed into cold water. The monarchy that once felt like the natural shape of Germany suddenly looks like a costume that has been ripped off in public. And the country does not experience that as a calm transition. It experiences it as a shock. A nation that has lived inside imperial certainty is suddenly handed the unfamiliar problem of being responsible for itself.

The war ends, and immediately the war continues inside Germany.

The soldiers come home, but they don’t come home into gratitude and stability. They come home into hunger, inflation, unemployment, resentment, street violence, and a sense of moral vertigo. They come home to a political argument that is not polite, because the argument is fueled by grief and humiliation and fear. The argument is this: did we lose because we were beaten, or did we lose because we were betrayed?

Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode One of our buildup arc is 1918–1919: The Peace That Continued the War.

The first thing to understand about the armistice is that it doesn’t feel like victory in the bodies of the people who survived. It feels like the gun finally stopping after you’ve lived so long with noise that silence itself is suspicious. The world in late 1918 is not a relieved world. It’s a stunned world. A world of men trying to walk on legs that aren’t there. A world of women who have learned to dread the sound of footsteps at the door. A world where influenza moves through weakened populations like a second army. A world of ration books, debt, and cemeteries that become permanent architecture.

So when leaders speak of “peace,” they are already lying a little—not out of malice, but because the word is too clean for what exists. What exists is exhaustion. What exists is grief. What exists is fear that the whole structure of society might go down if pressure isn’t released quickly.

And then the leaders gather to write the future.

They arrive in Paris and they arrive with ghosts behind them. Not poetic ghosts—actual ghosts, in the form of the dead who now sit in every voter’s memory. Every government comes with an invisible crowd standing behind it: widows, parents, the wounded, men who survived and cannot sleep. That crowd is not interested in nuance. That crowd wants the suffering to mean something. That crowd wants the war to be justified after the fact. And this is one of the most dangerous forces in history: the demand that unbearable pain must be explained by a morally satisfying outcome.