When Russia's empire crumbled

A new book accesses previously archives on Russia's role in the World War I

THE END OF TSARIST RUSSIA
The March to World War I and Revolution
Dominic Lieven
Viking
426 pages; $35

World War I was the greatest empire slayer of all time. Down went the Ottoman Empire, ruling from Bosnia to Basra. Hapsburg shrank into tiny Austria. Germany and Russia remained largely intact, but Wilhelm II ended up in exile, while the Romanovs were murdered by the Bolsheviks. Exit sultans and kaisers; enter authoritarians and totalitarians.

The irony can’t be topped. All four dynastic regimes went to war for the usual reasons: security, power and possession — as did democratic France, Britain and the United States. But beset by indomitable nationality and class conflicts, they also fought for sheer regime survival.

It was a momentous miscalculation that would transform 20th-century history. Had the old despots been gifted with foresight, they would have opted for peace über alles.

This is the takeoff point for Dominic Lieven’s book The End of Tsarist Russia. The tomes on the Great War fill a small library by now. Since history is written by the victors, the first batch fingered the German Reich as starring culprit; later works spread out along an explanatory spectrum that ranged from inevitability to contingency. The war had to happen because so many conflicts had built up in the 19th century, forcing the hands of leaders from London to St. Petersburg. Or else it was the Big Stumble, a chain of folly and arrogance constructed by everyone.

Lieven follows a different path, though it doesn’t quite seem to take him where he wants to go. In his very first sentence, he asserts that the war “turned on the fate of Ukraine.” Then he wanders south and west, naming the Balkans as an “enormous source of international tension.” And back east to Russia, which “occupies center stage.”

Claiming an “original standpoint,” Lieven, a senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, seeks to offer a “Russian history of World War I.” Though Sean McMeekin, drawing on sources also used by Lieven, already published The Russian Origins of the First World War in 2011, Lieven had the good fortune of being able to scour previously closed Russian archives. His finds constitute the most intriguing parts of his book, making readers privy to the thinking of Russian officials and diplomats.

To be sure, Lieven does offer what he calls a “God’s-eye view” in his introduction. But he courts trouble when he shifts to his “worm’s-eye analysis,” personalising and psychologising, as if his Russian characters (often with German names like Lambsdorff, Witte or Osten-Sacken) wrote or even directed the play.

On the one hand, he tells us, the “war was first and foremost an Eastern European conflict” among Russians, Germans and Hapsburgs. On the other, “imperialism, nationalism and the dilemma of modern empire were at the core” of it all. So what kind of war was it — regional or global, ideological or strategic?

Lieven also chides Anglo-American historiography for defining “empire” and “imperialism” as “something that happens outside of Europe.” To do so, he claims, excludes “empire within Europe from the picture.” Yet World War I experts with so parochial a view are not easy to find. In Churchill and Empire, for instance, the historian Lawrence James writes: “We have more or less forgotten the fact, self-evident at the time, that the First World War was an imperial conflict” over “land, economic advantage and influence,” and not just in the tropics. He lists the colossal ambitions of Germany, as exemplified in Brest-Litovsk, where Berlin in 1917 forced the Bolsheviks to cede the Baltic provinces and Finland, Ukraine, Poland and Georgia. Earlier, the Reich had grabbed Belgium and northern France.

Turkey went for Azerbaijan and Georgia. Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Balkans. After the Russian Revolution, Japan landed troops in Vladivostok. And this orgy of conquest was re-enacted by Hitler, Hirohito and Stalin in the Second World War, the extension of the first.

So we are thrown back to the great power system and not to what Messrs. Witte and Osten-Sacken recorded in their dispatches. Lieven’s archival treasures add colour, but they do not change the contours of the largest event in human history before 1939.

The End of Tsarist Russia sets up a paradox: The more we burrow, the fewer the surprises. We should praise Lieven for digging deeper than many scholars before him, at least in the case of Russia. But after all the treasures have been tallied, he still puts his money on the God’s-eye view, and rightly so. This war was indeed about the Big Stuff. It was, as Lieven stresses, about European hegemony — about the system’s failure to accommodate or contain the newest claimant, Germany, the giant that was bound to unhinge the old order. Hence the next war 20 years later. That is the enduring, but not startlingly original moral of this tale.

©2015 The New York Times News Service