Habersack, Sabine - Puşcaş, Vasile - Ciubotă, Viorel (szerk.): Democraţia in Europa centrală şi de Sud-Est - Aspiraţie şi realitate (Secolele XIX-XX) (Satu Mare, 2001)
Teodor Pavel: Wold War I and Revolutionary Options in Central-Eastern Europe: the Project of the "Insurrection" of Romania at the End of the Year 1917
Prof. Dr. Teodor Pavel Romania WORLD WAR I AND REVOLUTIONARY OPTIONS IN CENTRAL-EASTERN EUROPE: THE PROJECT OF THE “INSURRECTION” OF ROMANIA AT THE END OF THE YEAR 1917 At the breaking up of the I World War in the two belligerent camps took place a coalization of the social and political forces round their governments and sovereigns. The social-democrats entered in their quasi totality into this “Holy Union” for the defence of their mother country This tiring war with its victims, destructions and sufferings caused by its first three years changed the atmosphere and the attitudes. “The Holy Union” of the first month is gradually destroyed. Under the pressure of the suffering population, the social-democratic parties abandoned the “national-union” governments and launched themselves into a more and more efficient anti-war propaganda. The pacifist movement coordinated by the social-democratic groups from France, Italy and Germany registered, even from 1915, the “Zimmerwald Moment” from Switzerland, when the radical leaders of the Socialist International pretended peace negotiations. At the end of the following year (1916), Emperor Carol I of Habsburg, Pope Benoit XV and the American president Woodrow Wilson formulated peace initiatives. But more virulent than in any other places was the pacifist movement in Russia, where it facilitated the overthrowing of tsarism in February-March 1917. The pacifism of the social-democrats offered reasons of suspicions in the epoch. Being accused of “defetism” and “collaboration with the enemy”, they were often imprisoned and punished. The new Italian government led by Orlando arrested the socialist militants accusing them of entering into a contact with the enemy. In France, the omnipotent Georges Clemanceau purified the administration and the politics of the pacifists whom he discredited and discouraged by executing some “traitors of the 1 1 Serge Berstein, Pierre Milza, Istoria Europei, vol. IV, Iaşi, 1998, p. 326.
