The Russian Origins of the First World War

We know how World War I began. Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Serbia in 1914 which started a clash between Austrio-Hungary and Serbia which Germany used as an excuse to threaten France and Russian which then to spread into a European conflict because of all the defensive alliances formed and eventually spread even further. Germany has taken most of the blame which led to major reparations following the war and this eventually provided fodder for the Second World War. Sean McMeekin tries to upend those old assumptions with his book "The Russian Origins of the First World War." He draws on many overlooked sources and many new sources to try to prove that Russia was not the reluctant player forced to react to German agression as has been the standard view. Instead, Russia was the prime player and had actually begun a secret mobilization of its forces already 5 days before there was any declaration of war and that Russian military doctrine equated any large mobilization of forces as an act of war. The focus of research has long been more Western oriented and the focus has been mostly on the western front with the eastern and Asian actions receiving little attention. And, with the Bolshevik (Communist) revolution of 1917 taking Russia out of the war, the tendency has been to overlook what happened under the Czar. In addition, Russia and then the USSR has not encouraged (or even discouraged) any study of its people’s involvement in the war, seeing the war as another capitalist/imperialist debacle that they led their nation out of. Nor have they allowed free access to what archives remain from that era, at least until recently. McMeekin begins with a comprehensive analysis of Russian foreign policy around that time. Russia had, for centuries, wanted to ensure access to the Mediterranean through the Turkish straits. Constantinople had long been a goal for Russia which considered its empire as the successor to Byzantium so much that they called Moscow the "third Rome." They called Constantinople Czargrad. Russia had already fought several wars including the Crimean War just a few decades earlier to increase its power in the Baltics (including Serbia) and to win free passage through the Turkish straits if not outright control by taking Constantinople. However, Britain and Austria had repeatedly blocked Russia in these attempts and in their other forays against the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century, which Russia greatly resented. Russia considered herself being hemmed in by the Western powers while they watched the Ottoman Empire continually weakening. Russia feared the rising power of Germany aligned with Austro-Hungaria would hem them in even further and thus they had already been planning how they might act and began to mobilize first. As the war spread and the eastern theater became a stalemate, Russia again began to flounder producing increasing discontent which led to the overthrow of the Czar and soon after that, the Bolsheviks taking power, ending their part in the great war. McMeekin certainly does a good job in making his point. He has clearly done a great deal of research and his argument is convincing. On the other hand, it also sounds like he goes a little too far in ignoring the role that Germany played in expanding the war from a regional conflict to a conflict between major groups of nations. It seems that there needs to be a lot more thought and a major rewrite of the history books, but it’s too early to absolve the Kaiser as well. This is not casual reading. It’s for people who really love history and want to take the time to think the issue through as they read. I should say also that the e-book that I got was full of places where the scanner clearly misread the text and no editor read through it to fix the errors. In some places it required the reader to stop and spend several minutes trying to rearrange words and syllables to figure out what the original should be. There is no excuse for that kind of sloppiness. But, the book is worth reading.