The Collapse of Four Empires, 1917–1923: How the Old Order Ended

In 1914, four dynasties ruled most of central and eastern Europe and the Middle East: the Romanovs in Russia, the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans in Constantinople. By the end of 1923, none of the four still reigned. Their emperors were dead or in exile, their monarchies had been abolished or left without a monarch, and their territories had been divided among republics and new or enlarged states.

The four collapses are often told as one story, and they were connected: all four empires fought the First World War, and defeat or exhaustion broke each of them. But each fell in its own way and at its own pace, from Russia's sudden abdication in March 1917 to the slow, contested end of the Ottoman state in 1922 and 1923.

This deep dive takes them in the order they fell, then asks what they had in common and where historians disagree. (The revolutions inside Russia in 1917 are a large subject in their own right; here the focus is on the end of the empire itself.)

Russia: the first to fall, 1917 and 1918

Nicholas II had ruled since 1894, and from September 1915 he was also commander of the army. Siobhan Peeling's entry on the tsar in the International Encyclopedia of the First World War explains that taking command identified him even more closely with the war's losses and economic dislocation, and removed him from the capital as unrest grew.

By February 1917, crowds in Petrograd protesting bread queues and calling for an end to the war and to autocracy were joined by soldiers of the garrison. Nicholas could not rely on a parliament he had repeatedly prorogued, and conservative pillars of the regime had begun urging concessions. On March 15, 1917 (March 2 in the calendar Russia then used), he signed an abdication in favor of his brother, who declined the crown, ending three hundred years of Romanov rule. The family was later moved to Siberia and then to Ekaterinburg, where, as Peeling puts it, "whether on orders from the party leadership or local initiative, they were executed."

The empire's territorial collapse followed. After the Bolsheviks took power in November 1917 (October in the old calendar), they opened peace talks with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. Susanne Schattenberg's entry on the treaty records that on March 3, 1918, after the talks broke down and Germany launched a new offensive, Lenin accepted a "dictated peace" that deprived Russia of eighteen provinces and nearly 30 percent of its prewar population.

Why did the Russian monarchy fall? Peeling's summary is blunt: "Historians dispute the relative importance of modernisation, the autocratic system, wartime dislocations and Nicholas' personality in the monarchy's collapse." Optimists such as Arthur Mendel have pointed to economic growth, the Duma, and agricultural reform as signs that Russia might have evolved into a prosperous democracy without the war. Pessimists such as Leopold Haimson emphasized deep social divisions and weak constitutional foundations as evidence of looming disintegration.

Germany: revolution and abdication, November 1918

Germany's empire ended in a matter of days. Florian Altenhöner's account of November 9, 1918, describes revolutionary unrest that began in Kiel and spread across the country. On November 7, the monarchy in Bavaria fell and a republic was proclaimed in Munich.

In Berlin on November 9, a general strike brought workers and then soldiers into the city center, and by afternoon the revolutionaries controlled the capital. Chancellor Prince Max von Baden, after pressing the hesitating Kaiser to abdicate, published the news of an abdication "without any official authorisation" and, in an unconstitutional act, handed the chancellorship to the Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert. At 2 p.m., Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German republic from a window of the Reichstag; at 4 p.m., Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a "free Socialist Republic" from a balcony of the Berlin city palace. Altenhöner counts eight deaths that day, most from panicked shooting in the evening.

Wilhelm II crossed into the Netherlands on November 10 and formally abdicated eighteen days after leaving for the border. The armistice of November 11 ended the fighting in the west, and on June 28, 1919, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles.

How Germans understood November 1918 was contested from the start. Altenhöner notes that after 1918 the political right identified the revolution with collapse and defeat, while the Communist Party saw it as a failure to build a socialist state. With no shared view of the revolution, the republic chose a different date for its national holiday: August 11, Constitution Day, marking the day in 1919 when President Ebert signed the new constitution.

Austria-Hungary: dissolution from within, October and November 1918

The Habsburg monarchy did not so much fall as dissolve. Pieter Judson's article on Austria-Hungary in the war describes a harsh military dictatorship in the early war years and catastrophic shortages of food and energy. Hungary, which had exported over 2 million tons of grain a year to Austria, could barely spare 100,000 tons by 1916, and the Allied blockade cut off imports.

The young emperor Charles, who succeeded Francis Joseph in November 1916, tried to change course. Robert Rill's entry on him describes secret peace efforts and a plan for a federal constitution. On October 16, 1918, Charles issued a manifesto to federalize the Austrian half of the empire. It backfired. As Judson explains, it seemed to authorize national councils to take control of their own regions, and they did.

The sequence was rapid. A national council of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs had already declared itself in Zagreb on October 5. Polish nationalists formed a council in Cracow on October 11, Romanian nationalists one in Vienna on October 17, and German-speaking deputies a provisional national assembly for German Austria on October 21. On October 28, the Czech National Council took control of Prague and confirmed the proclamation of a Czechoslovak state. In Budapest, demonstrations at the end of October brought Count Mihály Károlyi to power, and his government ended the 1867 settlement with Austria.

Austria-Hungary signed an armistice on November 3. On November 11, Charles withdrew from participation in state affairs, but, Judson stresses, did not abdicate. The next day, German Austria was proclaimed a republic. Charles went into Swiss exile in March 1919, twice tried to regain the Hungarian throne in 1921, and died on Madeira on April 1, 1922. The Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria followed on September 10, 1919, and the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary on June 4, 1920.

This is where the historiography has moved most. Judson writes that historians "conventionally" linked the monarchy's end to its supposed inability to manage hostile nationalities, a view that treated the war as speeding "an inevitable downfall that was foreseeable in 1914." But, he continues, "most historians today are less willing to attribute the monarchy's collapse purely to issues of national conflict," and instead analyze it in terms of the social and political crises of total war, much like the crises that shook other wartime states.

The Ottoman Empire: partition, resistance, and abolition, 1918 to 1923

The Ottoman collapse took longest. James Ryan's entry on the Armistice of Mudros explains that the leadership of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress resigned on October 8, 1918, and that at the end of October an Ottoman delegation signed an armistice with a British-led Allied delegation aboard HMS Agamemnon off the island of Lemnos. (The exact day varies by source: the Library of Congress country study gives October 30, 1918, while Ryan's entry gives October 31.) Seven of its first nine clauses established Allied control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles. Allied occupation of Constantinople began informally on November 13, 1918, and officially on March 16, 1920.

The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on August 10, 1920, set out a partition. According to Ryan, it left the Ottomans a rump state in northern Anatolia with Constantinople as its capital, internationalized the straits, ceded eastern Thrace and the area around Izmir to Greece, gave Italy a sphere of influence around Antalya, created an Armenian republic in eastern Anatolia, and formalized the mandate system in the Arab provinces, with France in Syria and Lebanon and Britain in Transjordan, Mesopotamia, and Palestine.

Sèvres soon collapsed. A national resistance movement in Anatolia led by Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) defeated the Greek army; the country study describes the decisive Turkish drive of August and September 1922 and the Armistice of Mudanya that October. The Library of Congress's country study of Turkey records that in November 1922 the Grand National Assembly separated the offices of sultan and caliph and abolished the sultanate, declaring that the Ottoman regime had ceased to govern Turkey when the Allies seized the capital in 1920. Sultan Mehmed VI went into exile on Malta, and his cousin Abdülmecid was named caliph.

The Treaty of Lausanne, signed on July 24, 1923, replaced Sèvres. The country study notes that Turkey was the only power defeated in the war to negotiate with the Allies "as an equal." The capitulations, privileges that had placed foreigners outside Ottoman law, were abolished, and Turkey and Greece agreed to a compulsory exchange of minority populations. On October 29, 1923, the Grand National Assembly proclaimed the Republic of Turkey, with Kemal as president and Ankara as its capital.

What the four collapses had in common

All four empires were broken, in different ways, by the strains of a long war. Military defeat, hunger on the home front, and collapsing political authority recur across the cases above. All four also faced the same question at the end: what would replace a dynasty that had held together many peoples, languages, and religions?

The peacemakers' answer, at least in Europe, was national self-determination. Alan Sharp's assessment of the Paris settlements is sobering. Every new state, he writes, was dissatisfied with its frontiers, and the region's "ethnic kaleidoscope" meant that "none was a truly national entity, each containing minorities that were resented and feared." The peacemakers built a system of minority protection and handed responsibility for it to the League of Nations.

Where historians disagree

There is no single verdict on why the empires fell, and the debates differ by case. For Russia, historians still argue over whether the monarchy was doomed by deep structural problems or brought down chiefly by the war. For Austria-Hungary, the older view of an empire of hostile nationalities bound to break apart has given way, in Judson's account, to an emphasis on the specific strains of total war. For Germany, the meaning of November 1918 was a political battleground from the moment it happened. For the Ottomans, the five years between armistice and republic mean the end can be dated in several ways: the armistice of 1918, the occupation of the capital in 1920, the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, or the republic of 1923.

What can be said with confidence is that by 1923 the political map of a vast region had been redrawn, and that the successor states inherited both the institutions and the unresolved problems of the empires they replaced.

Key takeaways

• The Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Ottoman dynasties all lost power between March 1917 and November 1922, and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in October 1923.
• Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 stripped Russia of nearly 30 percent of its prewar population.
• Germany's monarchy ended in the revolution of November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice.
• Austria-Hungary dissolved in October 1918 as national councils took power, and most historians no longer see its fall as simply the result of national conflict.
• The Ottoman sultanate was abolished in 1922, and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 replaced the partition plan of Sèvres.

Sources

• Siobhan Peeling, Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin (2014)
• Susanne Schattenberg, Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin (2014)
• Florian Altenhöner, Berlin, 9 November 1918, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin (2019)
• Pieter M. Judson, Austria-Hungary, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin (2021)
• Robert Rill, Charles I, Emperor of Austria, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin (2015)
• James Ryan, Mudros, Armistice of, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin (2021)
• Alan Sharp, The Paris Peace Conference and its Consequences, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin (version 1.2, March 17, 2026)
• Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, Turkey: A Country Study (1996)