“Even before the ink on the 1918 Armistice was dry, the Great War would spawn literally dozens of new conflicts across Eastern Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East.”

ON NOV. 11, 1918, the guns fell silent. After four years of unremitting bloodshed; the First World War was finally over.

More than 70 million soldiers from 32 countries had taken part in the struggle. The fighting, which spanned three continents and covered the world’s oceans, claimed between 50 and 100 million lives.

Few conflicts up to that point in history had been so bloody, costly or far-reaching politically. Between 1914 and 1918, ancient dynasties were toppled, mighty empires were beggared and the international order was reshuffled.

Not surprisingly, those who survived the tumult famously (if not hopefully) referred to what they’d just lived through the “War to End All Wars.” Sadly, world events would prove such optimism wrong; a second still-larger conflict would follow within a generation.

Yet even before the ink on the 1918 Armistice was dry, the Great War would spawn literally dozens of new smaller conflicts across Eastern Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East, many of which would continue to claim lives for years to come.

Here’s a summary of some of the more noteworthy wars, crises and revolutions that stemmed from the First World War.

Russia in Revolution

Tsar Nicholas II’s hold on power was already slipping when Russia mobilized against the Central Powers in the summer of 1914. Like most Europeans, Russians initially greeted the outbreak of war with enthusiasm, but ineptitude on the part of the empire’s military leaders coupled with food shortages and other hardships soon turned the population against the ruling class. By 1917, Russia exploded into revolution. Civil war followed as competing factions vied for control. The fighting lasted for years and engulfed much of the Eurasian landmass.

Although chiefly a conflict between communist Reds and the counter-revolutionary White Army, the fighting also drew in an international intervention force aimed at, as Winston Churchill put it, “strangling Bolshevism in its cradle.” As part of the campaign, troops from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Greece and Japan arrived in Russia by way of the Baltic, the Caucuses and the Far East. Unable to defeat the communists, coalition forces were withdrawn in 1920.

It didn’t end there. The Russian Civil War also spawned a series of smaller conflicts on the disintegrating fringes of the Tsar’s old empire.

Ukraine suffered years of instability following the collapse of Imperial Russia. Already on the battle lines of the Eastern Front of the First World War, the region descended into conflict involving a confusing mosaic of nationalist, anarchist and Bolshevik-backed factions. Amid the internecine bloodshed, the fighting drew in neighbouring states like Romania and Poland.

In 1918, war also erupted in the breakaway territory of Georgia as the newly established regime there fought a campaign to crush separatists in the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. The same year, Georgia would become embroiled in yet another clash, this time with its neighbour to the south, Armenia.

And that wasn’t the only conflict in which Armenia would find itself in the aftermath of the First World War. For two-and-a-half years beginning in the spring of 1918, the short-lived independent republic and its ally, known as Mountainous Armenia, would fight against the Ottomans and then Bolshevik-backed Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Strangely, a roving detachment of British, ANZAC and Canadian troops operating in the Persian theatre known as Dunsterforce would briefly find their way into the action during the during the August, 1918 Battle of Baku in support of the Armenians.

Finland in Flames

Finland, which had spent the previous 100 years as a Grand Duchy within Tsarist Russia’s orbit, experienced its own brief civil war in early 1918 following decline of the Romanov Dynasty. Fought between the German-backed nationalist White Guard and the Bolshevik-supported Finnish Reds, the five-month conflict was characterized by a series of fierce battles and bloody purges of opponents by hardliners on both sides. Tens of thousands perished.

The conflict was followed by a period known as the Heimosodat or “Wars for Kindred Peoples” in which nationalist militias fought a half-dozen or so campaigns over two years for control of territory in the Baltic that was inhabited by ethnic Finns.

Baltic Battlefields

During the same period, the Baltic republics launched three separate wars of independence.

The Latvian War of Liberation was a truly byzantine struggle that began a month after the 1918 Armistice and continued for nearly two years. It involved nationalist factions within the country, supported by remnants of the Imperial German Army, as well as Britain and France, fighting for independence from Bolshevik control.

Estonia also experienced conflict stemming from the tumult of 1918. Occupied by German troops until the moment of the Armistice, the Bolsheviks raced to take control following Berlin’s surrender on Nov. 11. Local nationalists resisted and continued the struggle into 1920.

Lithuania, which was under German control from 1915 until the collapse of the Central Powers, ended up fighting its own wars between 1918 and 1920. The first was a successful campaign against the Bolsheviks in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Later in 1919, a German anti-communist contingent known as the Western Russian Volunteer Army tried and failed to take control of the new republic.

Poland: The Birth of a Nation

Poland was another Eastern European state that exploded into existence in the dying days of the First World War. Stradling the borders of the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, nationalists inside the territory took advantage of the political upheaval of 1918 to declare independence and claim statehood. Over the next three years, the newly established republic would fight a series of wars to grab land and solidify its borders. Its opponents included Germany, Ukraine, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia. In 1920, Poland’s very existence hung in the balance when nearly a million troops of the Soviet Red Army swept into the country bent on spreading communist revolution throughout Europe. After being pushed back form the borders of the Baltic, Ukraine and Belarus, the beleaguered Poles made a final stand at the gates of Warsaw. As the Soviets massed for the coup de grâce, the outnumbered defenders launched a dramatic counter attack into the Russian flank, shattering the Red Army. The stunning reversal, which halted the Soviet invasion (and saved Europe), is virtually unknown in the West. But in Poland, it would be remembered as the “Miracle on the Vistula.”

The Break Up of Austria-Hungary

The year 1918 also saw the dissolution of the 50-year-old Austro-Hungarian Empire into a series of new nation-states. As expected, it was not always a peaceful transition.

Just 12 days after the Armistice, a conflict erupted in the regions of Styria and Carinthia in present-day Austria between ethnic Germans and Slovenes. Fewer than 1,000 were killed in the eight-month conflict, which eventually drew in forces from the newly established Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Hungary and Romania also came to blows after the former succumbed to a communist takeover in early 1919. Sandwiched between Bolshevik Russia in the east and the Hungarian Soviet Republic to the west, Romania set out to use its still-mobilized wartime army to drive the communists from Budapest. Realizing it was about to be invaded, Hungary launched a pre-emptive surprise attack. Romania quickly regained the initiative and by the summer had occupied most of its neighbour’s territory. The international community compelled Romania to withdraw its army the following year, by which point a new anti-communist government had taken power.

After the Ottomans

Already in a period of decline, the final Ottoman collapse was accelerated by the First World War. After capitulating to the Allies on Oct. 30, 1918, the empire went into a tailspin from which a number of conflicts were spawned.

Almost as soon as the First World War ended, violence blew up between Turkish forces and French units sent to occupy former Ottoman territories in Upper Mesopotamia and southern Anatolia under terms of the Armistice of Mudros and the Sykes Picot Agreement, the 1916 protocol that divided the territories of the Middle East among Britain and France. The fighting would flare up intermittently through 1921.

Turkish forces also fought a vicious three-year war against Greece beginning in the spring of 1919. Hostilities began after Athens landed an army along the western coast of Anatolia to claim former Ottoman territory promised to it by Great Britain. The invaders pushed deep inland, but their advanced bogged down following the Battle of Sakarya. While withdrawing, the Greek army carried out a scorched earth campaign that laid waste to cities throughout western Anatolia.

The fight against both Greece and France were part of a larger conflict known as the Turkish War of Independence, a deadly region-wide struggle led by nationalists aimed at establishing a new country out of remnants of the old Ottoman Empire. Fought in Anatolia, Thrace and Northern Mesopotamia, fighting would continue for four years and claim more than a half-million lives. The result was the modern state of Turkey.

Decolonization

It wasn’t only Europe’s defeated empires that suffered instability in the months and years following the First World War. Great Britain faced a number of uprisings in its colonies and territories, both close to home and abroad.

In the years after the war, British territories in Iraq faced repeated uprisings from Kurdish insurgents. It put down the first uprising and exiled the rebel leader Mahmud Barzanji to India for a year. Barzanji returned to mount an even larger revolt against foreign rule and to proclaim the Kingdom of Kurdistan, a short-lived autonomous state along the Iraqi-Persian border. A British campaign crushed the rebellion in 1924 after which Barzanji went into hiding. It wasn’t the only uprising against the British empire.

Three years after the 1916 Easter Rising, Ireland’s home rule movement exploded into open and sustained rebellion in May of 1919 as republicans sought to free the nation from British control. The violence only worsened as the year wore on, as Irish guerrillas embarked on a campaign of ambush and sabotage. The Blacks and Tans, a paramilitary arm of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) comprised largely demobilized British soldiers and First World War veterans, became infamous for their often-indiscriminate reprisals against local populations. The fighting reached a bloody crescendo in 1921, after which a peace accord was signed. The island was subsequently partitioned into the Irish Free State in the south, an autonomous dominion within the empire, and Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom.

The settlement, which angered many in the Free State, touched off the Irish Civil War, fought between the British-backed national army and anti-treaty republicans who sought to cut all ties with the United Kingdom. The new government succeeded in defeating the rebels after 10 months of fighting. In all, 4,000 perished in Ireland between 1919 and 1923.

Germany in Revolution

Although postwar Germany never descended into outright civil war following the Armistice, the instability stemming from the economic and political collapse of late 1918 touched off years of turmoil and violence.

The revolutionary Marxist Spartacist League launched a series of uprisings in the months after the war. Their goal was to topple the wobbly Weimar Republic and replace it with a Soviet-style regime. Held in check by the far-right nationalist militia movement known as the Freikorps, the Spartacists turned Berlin into a virtual battlefield in January of 1919, leaving 3,000 dead in 10 days of intense street fighting. Similar clashes took place in other cities across the country with hostilities breaking out once more in the German capital in the spring. In 1920, elements of the Freikorps launched their own takeover bid known as the Kapp Putsch. Although Germany’s government was forced to flee, the coup was defeated by ordinary Berliners who held a general strike to protest the takeover. Tragically, that wasn’t the end of Germany’s troubles.

Three years later, an obscure political party known as the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) would launch an armed uprising from a Munich beer hall aimed at replacing the government. Although it was crushed in a day, a decade later, that party’s leader, an Austrian firebrand named Adolf Hitler, would rise to power democratically, setting the stage for one of the worst tragedies of human history: World War Two.