Tsar struckTowards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia. By Dominic Lieven. Allen Lane; 429 pages; £25. To be published in America by Viking in August.
THE first world war brought many afflictions to Europe: revolution, civil war, two famines, collectivisation, dictatorship and terror. The botched peace of Versailles stoked revanchism and brought further catastrophe in 1939. So the decisions which took Russia into a needless war in 1914 can be blamed for the death of at least 50m subjects of the tsarist and Soviet empires, plus countless others.
The origins, course and effects of the war have been minutely researched by Western historians, but not, until Dominic Lieven’s masterly new book, from a Russian point of view. The result is a gripping, poignant and in some respects revolutionary contribution to European history. The author—a distinguished British scholar descended from several of the protagonists he describes—has had unprecedented, and possibly unique, access to the Russian state archives. Shortly after he finished his research, the library fell into a...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1cY1wxM
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