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    The Russian Origins of the First World War
    The Russian Origins of the First World War
    The Russian Origins of the First World War
    Ebook344 pages7 hours

    The Russian Origins of the First World War

    By Sean McMeekin

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    About this ebook

    The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg.

    It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

    Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarvard University Press
    Release dateNov 30, 2011
    ISBN9780674063204
    The Russian Origins of the First World War
    Author

    Sean McMeekin

    Sean McMeekin is Professor of History at Bard College, New York. For some years he taught at Bilkent University, Istanbul. His books include the highly successful The Berlin-Baghdad Express (Penguin), The Russian Origins of the First World War and July 1914.

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    • 4/5
      It is hardly news that Tsarist Russia wanted Constantinople, but still the focus on the Russian side of the run-up to WWI is an interesting and unusual perspective.
    • 3/5
      While I enjoy reading Sean McMeekin's work, the man is an unabashed polemicist who doesn't mind throwing bricks through windows; the question is whether these are the right windows. That said, I have to find McMeekin's argument that the Russian government had as much interest in going to war in 1914 as anyone else compelling, on the grounds that between the Ottoman regime taking the lead in the Russo-Turkish naval race and the advances of Russia's unruly Balkan subordinates, the chance to control the Dardanelles might be slipping away. The problem is that McMeekin attributes so much manipulative craftiness to the Russian leadership that he assumes that the Anglo-French leadership was essentially stupid; however, I suspect that it's going to take a better diplomatic historian than I to punch holes in McMeekin's analysis. McMeekin is pugnacious enough that he probably welcomes the opportunity.

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