It is hard to see how societies can hold together under such circumstances. At the time it was thought that the Empire broke apart because of military defeat and nationalist agitation. These were undoubtedly important, but since 1915 the Empire had existed only as a sort of husk. Those who had most effectively bought into the idea of the Empire had been its young military elite, the aristocracy who spoke lots of the languages and cared about the structure as a whole and about the framework created by the Emperor, and these were mostly dead within months of the war beginning. The legitimacy of
...more
