What is socialist revolution? And where is Central Europe? Here we have at the very beginning two questions which it is impossible to answer within the limited space of this chapter. Our task is to deal with revolutions which claimed to be socialist, though we must keep in mind that there were also socialist elements in those revolutions in this region which are generally labelled nationalist or ‘bourgeois’. We should also remember that the socialist revolution in Central and Eastern Europe also had to accomplish what earlier attempts to copy the great French Revolution had failed to carry through.

‘Central Europe’ really existed only from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Prussia, Poland and the Habsburg monarchy had vast, backward, feudal agricultural areas, but the state, Church and cities were Western European; or, at least these institutions aspired to be Western European. The slowness of industrial and mercantile progress kept the region overwhelmingly agricultural; the state, balancing a weak urban population and an archaic feudalism, realized itself most naturally in an absolute monarchy based on an aggressive nobility and an army always ready to annexe any weaker neighbour. This last quality led to the creation of impossible national mixtures within state borders which were themselves changing at a time when in other parts of Europe states were being reformed on a national basis.

‘It was symbolic that over the grave of Poland stood the three greatest figures of “enlightened absolutism” – Frederick II, Catherine the Great and Joseph II’, wrote the Hungarian historian J. Szücs.

After Poland had disappeared from the maps (though not from Central Europe), Turkey had given up her Balkan pashalics one after the other, and Prussia had succeeded in liberating other German lands from French and other Western influences, the political entity of Central Europe slowly faded away.