World War I

World War I is presented as a rupture whose force lay in the collapse of what people had considered unthinkable. Invoking Freud, the book describes it as the war that people had refused to believe would happen. The phrase makes disbelief part of the event’s historical meaning: the shock was not simply that war began, but that an unimaginable catastrophe became reality.

The War as Traumatic Rupture

The book says that World War I had a traumatic impact surpassing even that of the Second World War. Its explanation turns on the sudden breach between expectation and fact: in 1914, “the war in which we had refused to believe broke out.” The war thus serves as a defining instance of an event that exceeds prior expectations and leaves those expectations unable to contain what has occurred.

The Revolutionary Years That Followed

The book’s broader historical account places the Russian revolutionary years of 1917 to 1921 in a society-wide state of emergency. The subsequent New Economic Policy consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of the social fabric—the great majority of peasants, artisans, and intellectuals—basically intact. This sequence gives the years after World War I a distinct shape: emergency and political upheaval were followed by consolidation, not yet by a complete remaking of social life.

From Revolutionary Confinement to Social Transformation

The later transformation of Russian society belongs to a further stage, not to the war itself. The book identifies the push beginning in 1928, and especially the years from 1928 to 1933, with the liquidation of peasants as individual owners and the replacement of the old intelligentsia by a new one. It interprets forced collectivization and industrialization as revolutionary energy turned inward after the revolution remained confined to the Soviet Union; the failed attempt to export revolution by military means had come at the end of the civil war in 1920. Read in this longer chronology, World War I marks the traumatic rupture preceding a contested revolutionary sequence, whose later turns the book treats as transformations in their own right.