A hundred years ago this month, on April 6, 1917, the United States declared war against Wilhelmine Germany. Two pivotal events, dire in their execution and pernicious in their consequences, bracketed U.S. entry into the First World War: the Russian Revolution of March 8, 1917, resulting in the abdication of Czar Nicholas II; and later that year, Vladimir Lenin’s nearly bloodless coup d’état against the newly formed Provisional Government, an event ever since immortalized as the October Revolution. The ruinous burdens of fighting an unwinnable war, increasingly crippling social unrest, the despoiling of the norms of civic order, and disintegration …read more
Source: The American Conservative
