Ambition in the East
Germany is the traditional villain in the story of World War I’s beginnings, but what if Russia played an even greater role?
By William Anthony Hay
From the Wall Street Journal Online
According to the conventional narrative, World War I began when a network of alliances drew ever-larger countries—in particular Germany,
France and Britain—into a general conflict that spread from the Balkans after the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Germany bears responsibility for the war, in this view, because its leaders deliberately turned a regional clash between Austria-Hungary and Serbia into an existential struggle of rival alliances. Sean McMeekin challenges these assumptions with “The Russian Origins of the First World War,” proposing Russia as the driving force in the brinksmanship that led to the terrible slaughter of 1914-18.
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the long shadow cast by the Soviet Union have tended to diminish attention to Russia’s role in the war. And writing Russian history from a Western perspective presents its own difficulties, from the notorious trouble of gaining access to Russian archives to the scarcity of Anglophone historians who know the language well enough to conduct worthwhile research. Writers, like many generals at the time, have tended to treat the Western Front as the war’s central focus, with everything else a sideshow.
Mr. McMeekin, who teaches international relations at Bilkent University in Turkey, proposes that the war’s real catalyst lay in Russia’s imperial ambition to supplant the waning Ottoman Empire in the Near East and to control the Turkish straits—the Bosphorus and Dardanelles—linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.
Although he fills a real gap by showing the view from St. Petersburg, Mr. McMeekin overstates his case. Russia certainly played a larger role than is generally credited in the July Crisis that followed the archduke’s assassination. But Russia did not primarily drive events, as he claims. Other parts of the story, especially the view from Berlin, are essential to showing the full picture.