Russia's 1917 revolutions have long commanded a pre-eminent position in historiographies of the First World War. However, while its consequences for the Eastern Front and Caucasus campaign, and socio-political reverberations in the west, have drawn considerable attention, its impact on other military theatres has remained markedly underexplored. This paper will consider how the collapse of Tsarism was received in the context of the ongoing military campaigns in south-east Europe, centred on the heavily fortified front established in Greece’s northern Macedonian territory in the autumn of 1915. It will consider, in particular, how the Russian Empire’s collapse saw its military presence in the Balkans transformed into an increasingly vulnerable political minority at the mercy of the front’s French-dominated, military leadership.
Despite a lengthy history of political, military and cultural entanglements in the region, Russia’s contribution to the Balkan theatre was both minimal and tarred by Petrograd’s unwillingness to commit resources to the wider Entente war effort. Even the arrival of two brigades from the Russian Expeditionary Force in mid-1916 was itself met with suspicion regarding its personnels’ political allegiances. The Bolshevik seizure of power brought these pervading suspicions to a head amidst fears that the campaign’s Russian contingent was now a vector for ‘revolutionary contagion’ and prompting some of Europe’s earliest mass counter-revolutionary measures. Rather than a ‘sideshow’ to developments in France and Belgium, Macedonian emerged as an initial frontline in what Jay Winter terms the ‘Second Great War’ of 1917 to 1923.
