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Book: Who really started the first world war?

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  • Book: Who really started the first world war?

    The Sunday Times (London)
    January 1, 2012 Sunday
    Edition 1; National Edition

    Who really started the first world war?

    A bold study pinpoints Russia's role in the outbreak of the 1914-18
    war in Europe

    by ORLANDO FIGES


    THE RUSSIAN ORIGINS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR by SAM MCMEEKIN Harvard £22.95 pp344

    As any schoolchild knows, the first world war began when the
    assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 was used by the
    Austrians to punish Serbia and by the Germans to pick a fight with
    Russia, whose growth they feared. In this scenario, what Bismarck had
    once called a "damn fool thing in the Balkans" engulfed the entente
    powers in a war to stop the expansionist ambitions of Germany, the
    power most responsible for the conflict.

    But as Sean McMeekin argues in this bold and brilliant revisionist
    study, Russia was as much to blame as Germany for the outbreak of the
    war. Using a wide range of archival sources, including long-neglected
    tsarist documents, he argues that the Russians had ambitions of their
    own (the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, no
    less) and that they were ready for a war once they had secured a
    favourable alliance with the British and the French.

    The tsarist archives show that the Russians had been mobilising their
    forces for several days before Germany declared war on August 1. They
    did so at the risk that it would trigger the beginning of hostilities,
    because the Germans could not wait for them to mobilise.

    The German Schlieffen Plan was counting on their greater speed to
    concentrate their forces in the west and defeat the French in time to
    turn them round against the "Russian steamroller" before it was moving
    against them from the east. They could not afford a two-front war.

    Historians have portrayed Russia as a junior partner in the entente
    cause, sacrificing troops in East Prussia to help the British and the
    French by diverting German forces from the Western Front. But as
    McMeekin reminds us, two-thirds of the Russians were deployed against
    the Austrians in Galicia, where they were fighting for specifically
    tsarist aims: the extension of Russia's "natural" frontier to the
    Carpathians and the conquest of Polish lands in Silesia.

    >From Galicia, the Russians looked towards the annexation of
    Constantinople and the Black Sea straits. Nicholas II wanted to
    achieve what Nicholas I had failed to do in the Crimean war: expel the
    Turks from Europe and liberate the Slavs from Islamic rule. McMeekin
    is dismissive of any pan-Slav aims on Russia's part. He rightly
    focuses on the strategic importance of the straits to Russia's naval
    defence of its vulnerable Black Sea borders and to its commerce with
    the world. But he might have made a little more of Constantinople's
    historic and religious role in Mc an pa st sde Bl co mo h the Russian
    imperial consciousness.

    >From the 18th century, the Russians dreamt of turning it into the
    capital (Tsargrad) of an Orthodox empire built upon the ruins of
    Byzantium.

    They had little chance of getting the straits on their own (the Turks
    had German dreadnoughts at their disposal). But the Russians managed
    to persuade their allies to fight for them on their behalf - without
    promised Russian help - in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

    As McMeekin shows, the absurd logic of the British was to give the
    Straits to the Russians in exchange for a non-binding promise by the
    tsar not to invade Persia in his war against the Turks. Gallipoli was
    the sacrifice the British made to protect the route to India. They
    were still playing the Great Game.

    The Russian advance into Asia Minor was unstoppable. They were soon in
    Persia, where the British had to accept them anyway, if only, McMeekin
    suggests, to prevent the greater threat of "some new Germanophile
    Islamic regime that might declare war in British India".

    McMeekin's final chapters chart the Russian campaigns in Persia and
    the Caucasus. He details how the Russians armed the Armenian
    resistance to the Turks in Eastern Anatolia - a thinly veiled policy
    of Russian imperial expansion that helped to bring about the Armenian
    "genocide", the systematic deportation and killing of about 1m
    civilians by the Turks in 1915.

    By the spring of 1916, the Russians had made so much headway into Asia
    Minor that they were able to secure allied support (the Sykes-Picot
    agreement) for their long-desired partition of the Ottoman empire. The
    Russian empire stood to gain European Turkey and the straits, Eastern
    Anatolia and Persian Azerbaijan, more than it had dreamt of getting in
    the 19th century.

    But then came the 1917 revolution and the collapse of the Russian
    military. Here McMeekin lets his mistrust of the Russians spoil his
    excellent archival work. He argues that the provisional government
    carried on the tsarist policy of capturing the Straits, but, in fact,
    it soon renounced all territorial gains and pledged to fight only for
    the defence of the revolution and Russia's prewar boundaries.

    Yet even this was not enough to stop the rot in the army. After the
    October revolution, millions of soldiers demobilised themselves,
    forcing the Bolsheviks to sue for peace on humiliating terms. With the
    Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia ceased to be a significant power in
    Europe. Its gamble on war had failed disastrously.

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