The Revolutions in Russia had different impacts on the belligerent nations in the First World War. While the victorious Entente countries soon returned to parliamentary government the monarchies of the Central powers were swept away by revolutionary uprisings. Although expectations of a German Red October were soon disappointed it is worthwhile paying attention to long-term effects the Russian Revolution might have had on Weimar Republic’s liberal democracy. The paper examines three levels of change including political institutions, the economic and social order, and the demographic structure of the German population. The year 1917 was a turning-point for the monarchies in Germany and Austria. When the Social Democratic Party refused to give further approval to war loans this signaled the end of the national war consent which the Emperor had proclaimed in August 1914. An informal political coalition of the "parliamentary left" which included the catholic Centre Party, Left Liberals and Social Democrats had agreed on a resolution in the Imperial Diet announcing to the world that Germany should declare its will to conclude a peace without annexations and reparations. The so-called Friedensresolution of July 1917 openly referred to the Soviet of Petrograd which had earlier in the year proclaimed a fundamental rupture with the conventional logic of fighting and waging war. When the German Supreme Command ignored the parliamentarian majority’s initiative by submitting Russia to a dictatorial Peace and intensified its useless war efforts, the public opinion in Germany lost its faith in the military and political leadership of the monarchy. News about the Revolution in Russia aggravated the growing discontent in Germany but it can hardly be claimed that the constant loss of popular loyalty was due to the propaganda war the Bolsheviks staged against imperialism. It was not the suspected "stab-in-the-back" (Dolchstoss) led by revolutionary elements of a treacherous Homefront but the failed Siegfrieden strategy which led to the collapse of the monarchies. So, if we want to reason about impacts of the Russian Revolution we have to look beyond the political turnover in Germany 1918 and take a long-term perspective. 1. The complete failure of the military and political leadership made constitutional reforms including the enfranchisement of the mass population indispensable but the October-cabinet’s sudden turn-over to a republican order came too late. Mutinies in the army and in major factories broke out leading directly to the German November Revolution. Spontaneous, grass-roots councils of soldiers and workers were spreading all over the country. Scholarship agrees that the German Soviets or Rätebewegung should not be seen as a revolutionary alternative to parliamentary democracy but as a means of political control to secure the transfer of power to the parties of the working class. However, this explanation doesn’t consider enough the Räte’s commitment to the Russian soviets which they perceived as a strong symbol of the Revolution showing that the working class was prepared to seize power and establish a participatory model of workers democracy. I would maintain that the independent Räte movement was a transfer of revolutionary experience from Russia to Germany and when they referred to the Soviets they were demonstrating solidarity. However, revolutionary Internationalism soon faded away as the soviets were subordinated to the "iron discipline" of the centralized Bolshevik party-rule. Whereas the soviets became virtually powerless, in Germany the Betriebsräte survived as an instrument of participatory democracy in industrial working relations. The so-called "Paritätische Mitbestimmung" (Equal Participation) until today remains a basic institutional pillar of the Social Market Economy of the Federal Republic. 2. Although the origins of the national welfare state go back to the last quarter of the 19th century there can be no doubt about the importance of social legislation following the First World War. Total war meant heavy casualties, broken lives and financial losses also for families at home. War victims had to be compensated for enduring sacrifices. The obligation to care for the masses of war veterans, disabled, widows and orphans, refugees and displaced persons led to a vast extension of state allowances, pensions and other sources of material relief. Social Security thus was basically a material compensation for the war commitment of European populations. But the strong demand for social improvement has to be interpreted in close relation to the rising force of working class movements all across Europe. It is evident that when industrial strikes targeted the capitalist economy as such the agenda was influenced by the Russian Revolution. The Soviet State proclaimed a fundamental reverse of labor relations setting free peasants and industrial workers as a political force. Workers’ self-governing of economy by factory committees, the centralization of distribution and the promise of a socialist community that would replace market relations offered an alternative model of a non-capitalist political economy. The Russian Experience thus remained a source of incentives and challenges for Western capitalism which forced post-war governments to improve social relations. Corporatism and organized capitalism in England or Weimar Germany thus may be seen at least partly as a reaction to Soviet "State Capitalism" bringing forth preventive Social Welfare legislation destined to discipline and integrate labor force. 3. War and Revolution caused an unprecedented population transfer especially in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The decomposition of the Empires led to a massive demographic drain of expatriates creating new ethnic urban quarters in those countries which took them up. Ethnic cleansing had its origins in the war when national minorities were suspected as enemy aliens posing a threat to the national body politic. The Civil War in Russia motivated the beleaguered Soviet government to dislocate parts of its native population which were suspected as politically unreliable. It released a second wave of mass migration that followed the millions of people fleeing from war and violence inside the territory of Imperial Russia – a whole empire walking (Peter Gatrell). The bulk of refugees were expropriated and expatriated former residents of aristocratic or bourgeois origin and also ethnic minorities that were targeting European capitals like Constantinople, Paris, Prague, Belgrade or Berlin where authorities perceived them as strangers or even hostile elements threatening the social homogeneity of the indigenous community. Stateless émigrés from Russia thus had to rely on the acceptance of the Nansen-passport by foreign countries or address refugee relief organizations supported by the League of Nations. Immigrants arriving in Weimar-Germany were treated differently according to their ethnic origin and social status like for instance the Jewish refugees from Russia, Latvia or Poland who soon were merged into a single ethnic category labelled as Ostjuden. The East-Jewish minority population remained an object of popular disdain whereas the Russian community in Weimar-Germany which numbered about half a million people at the beginning of the 1920ies succeeded to establish enduring cultural and social structures.