July 1914

‘An imperial power must do something when the heir to its throne is assassinated.’ (1)

Indeed. The chances of Austria-Hungary letting bygones be bygones in the case of the archduke’s assassination were always going to fall on the side of ‘not happening in a million years’. Slav nationalism had been the thorn in her side for years, and with the rest of Europe looking on to see how the empire would handle this particular blow, the time to re-assert power had been forced upon her. It was hoped-and mainly expected-at first that this reassertion of power would be limited to the Balkans, and that the rest of Europe would be able to carry on as normal. As Stefan Zweig wrote in his autobiography, even the people of Vienna showed ‘no special shock or dismay’ (2) at the killing, carrying on with their lives in the assumption that ‘the name and person of Franz Ferdinand would [soon] have disappeared from history for ever’ (3). The majority of politicians carried on with their summer holidays. The public carried on with their lives. It would be weeks before telegrams started flying, before newspapers started suggesting, before everyone started wondering…before realisation dawned that things might not quite be so simple after all.

Exactly one month passed between the Archduke’s assassination and Austro-Hungarian action. Another week still would pass before this action would lead to European war. Countless discussions between countless figures took place in those five weeks-because, believe it or not, getting a whole continent from a state of peace (uneasy as it was) to war is not an easy task. There is no way for me to cover the hundreds of small stories that accompany the overarching tale, and so I will mainly be sticking to a general timeline of events-as always, if you read this and want more, then just about any of the books referenced here or in the link above will have you covered.

Russia 1900-1914

‘There had always been an element of bluff in Russia’s claim to be a European power’ (1)

In the interests of transparency, I will admit this straightaway: I am a Russophile. I can talk about modern Russian history until begged to stop, and even then, it’s unlikely I actually will stop. I spent my 27th birthday in Moscow in -20C temperatures seeing the body of Lenin and visiting the grave of Stalin’s second wife. I once forced my husband to go hungry because I had spent the last of our money on tickets to the Communist Museum in Prague. I even gave my child a Russian middle name. It is an astonishing country with astonishing history, and I literally cannot believe that I am about to attempt to cover fifteen years of that history (fifteen years which, incidentally, are part of one of the most turbulent centuries of any country in the history of the world) in just two thousand words*. Again, in the interests of transparency: there is no way-absolutely no way-I am going to do this period of Russian history justice. What I will hopefully do, though, is provide an entertaining summary which might-if I manage it well enough-encourage you to go out and learn more. That has always been the aim of this blog, but in the case of Russia, I really cannot stress it enough: take what I give you, and run with it. Go the library, watch documentaries on YouTube, rent Battleship Potemkin on DVD…your brain will thank you for it, I promise.

ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION

So. Now that is out of the way, let us get back to Margaret Macmillan’s statement above; a statement which, in 1900, seemed more true than ever. Russia entered the twentieth century as the biggest country in the world, inhabited by 126 million people (2). She was ‘gigantic, lumbering and inefficient, economically and technologically backward’ (3). And, having only abolished serfdom (simple translation: the ownership of peasants by landowners) in 1861, she was now attempting a massive economic transformation aimed at modernising the country to the levels of Britain, France, the USA et al,