Liberalism gained momentum in the beginning of the 20th century. The bastion of autocracy, the Russian Tsar, was overthrown in the first phase of the Russian Revolution in 1917, but liberalism lasted only a matter of months before Bolshevism triumphed. The Allied victory in World War I and the collapse of four empires seemed to mark the triumph of liberalism across the European continent, including Germany and the newly created states of Eastern Europe. Militarism, as typified by Germany, was defeated and discredited. As Martin Blinkhorn argues, the liberal themes were ascendant in terms of "cultural pluralism, religious and ethnic toleration, national self-determination, free-market economics, representative and responsible government, free trade, unionism, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes through a new body, the League of Nations".