Despite Congress' reluctance to point them out, it's hardly a secret by now that there are many people in positions of influence--journalists, pundits, subject-matter experts and even elected officials--who exploit their influence to mislead the public. Identifying, cataloging, and deducing the motives of these agents of influence is exhausting but instructive. If someone were to take up this task, they might find, as I have, a consistent pattern. Whether it's fake news sites in the U.S. and China blaming the other's government for unleashing a computer virus, Pundits in China and Japan claiming respective ownership of islands in the South China Sea, "experts" raising fears of all the ways Saddam Hussein might have weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties, former officers of the Tsarist secret police printing anti-semitic literature in a German basement, Kuomintang partisans blaming the murder of a promising Chinese official on a president who fancies himself emperor, J.P. Morgan-owned newspapers urging their readers to murder socialists, or socialists urging their comrades to "further the revolution" by any means necessary, the effect is the same: these agents, witting or otherwise, have used their influence to create the conditions for war.

Of all the groups and interests charged with using their power to manipulate public opinion, which have employed their influence toward such destructive ends? The *Tanaka Memorial* would have believe a part of it was Japanese imperialists, the "Westmoreland Field Manual" claims another part was the CIA, the *Protocols of the Elders of Zion* tells us to blame a secretive cabal of Zionists, and Lenin, asking "[Who stands to gain?](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/11.htm
)," pins the blame on greedy capitalists scheming to profit off arms-dealing.

Lenin might have been brutal, but he was no dummy. When such a disparate range of people--from Chinese bloggers peddling fake news to American weapons experts with Ph.Ds--all mislead the public with the same phony narrative with no apparent gain for themselves, the question of *who* is ostensibly delivering these messages doesn't always tell us much, and we are left to ask *who stands to gain* from the message?


https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/11.htm
	V. I. Lenin
	“Who Stands to Gain?”
	Pravda No. 84, April 11, 1913

	There is a Latin tag *cui prodest?* meaning “who stands to gain?” When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: “Who stands to gain?”

	It is not important *who* directly advocates a particular policy, since under the present noble system of capitalism any money-bag can always “hire”, buy or enlist any number of lawyers, writers and even parliamentary deputies, professors, parsons and the like to defend any views. We live in an age of commerce, when the bourgeoisie have no scruples about trading in honour or conscience. There are also simpletons who out of stupidity or by force of habit defend views prevalent in certain bourgeois circles.

	Yes, indeed! In politics it is not so important who directly advocates particular views. What is important is *who stands to gain* from these views, proposals, measures.


Lenin concludes it was the arms manufacturers who stood to gain most from the warmongering leading up to the First World War ("That’s where the millions and milliards squeezed out of the workers and peasants for armaments go. Dividends of 12.5 per cent mean that capital is *doubled* in 8 years."). The Krupp's and Creusot's of Europe, in Lenin's analysis, had more than enough capital to buy-off  writers, professors, and officials in such quantity that the whole world could be steered toward war. But there are some flaws in Lenin's argument. The war was an economic disaster, for one, and even if it is to be believed that greed for profit is the ultimate motivator of men, the overwhelming majority of capital then was not in the hands of unscrupulous arms dealers.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can take Lenin's line of analysis and do better. We can take a look at the events of that period of history that led to the war, as many historians have done, with an eye for who came out on top in the end:


http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/interview_with_sean_mcmeekin
	**Historians have long argued about the causes of World War I. First it was Germany’s fault, then the Allies, then imperialism, then railroad timetables, then inflexible alliances, then Germany again. Most of us assume such a massive cataclysm required deep-rooted causes. Now it seems more historians are starting to see the origins of World War I as a series of miscalculations and accidents and think that war was in no way inevitable. Can you discuss the evolution of the historiography of the First World War?**

	Arguments about the origins of the First World War are as old as the war itself. Even as they were making the fateful decisions which sent Europe into the abyss, the leading statesmen of the belligerent powers had already begun “massaging” the record, with an eye on how posterity would judge them.

	...The early Cold War saw a surge in Marxist influence on the writing of history, with exciting new work done in social and economic history. Whether or not they were Marxists, historians of WWI felt the pull, looking into “structural factors” such as the arms race, the alliance system, imperialism and war aims, class interests and domestic factors. The most influential works of the era were Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (literally “Germany’s Grab for World Power”), published in 1961, and A. J. P. Taylor’s War by Timetable (1969). While Taylor did not go as far as Fischer in pointing to a premeditated German plan for war, he still faulted the Germans owing to the too-strict timetable of their mobilization (the famous “Schlieffen Plan”).

	The convergence of opinion in this era was well illustrated in Barbara Tuchman’s bestselling popular history The Guns of August (1962). Curiously, most readers, even today, seem to think this book a chronological narrative of the origins of the war. In an editor’s note to the latest edition, Doug Grad tells us that the book chronicles “the month leading up to the war and the first month of the war.” And yet it does nothing of the kind. After sketching out the war plans of Germany, France, Britain and Russia (though not Austria-Hungary or Serbia), Tuchman skips through the assassination in Sarajevo and entire July crisis in one short paragraph, picking up her story only on August 1! Nothing could better illustrate the structuralist consensus of the era than this: a popular book on the origins of the war by a masterful storyteller which leaves out Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and all the diplomatic drama of July 1914.

	...It is only in the last decade or two that historians have rediscovered the actual events of 1914. There are two obvious reasons for this. The terrible wars in the former Yugoslavia reminded everyone of the importance of the Balkans. After 9/11, it was not so easy to dismiss the importance of the act of terrorism in Sarajevo which unleashed the furies of war in 1914. These lessons, along with the upcoming centennial, have brought forth a cornucopia of great new work on the subject. Albertini has been rediscovered; new evidence has emerged from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans; and so historians now tell the story with much more nuance. The war may not have been an “accident,” but it was clearly contingent on various avoidable events, beginning with the assassination itself.


 


https://books.google.com/books?id=vQF099JYW_EC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42
	ON SUNDAY, 28 JUNE 1914, the 525th anniversary of medieval Serbia's terrible defeat by the Turks on the fields of Kosovo Polje, a young Serbian peasant named Gavrilo Princip fired two shots into the bodies of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife as they toured the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, wounding both fatally. Because Ferdinand was heir to the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary and a man of controversial views in his own right, echoes from the "Sarajevo outrage," as it soon came to be known, reverberated quickly across European capitals. Accusations and counter-accusations flew between Belgrade grade and Vienna, spreading from there at second and third remove to Berlin, Petersburg, Paris, and London, as a growing mountain of rumors, half-truths, and obfuscations rapidly obscured the true nature of the crime. Lies about Sarajevo continued circulating for years afterward before the truth slowly emerged.

	By now, the basic outlines of the Sarajevo conspiracy are well known and little disputed. It is clear, to begin with, that Princip did not act alone. The assassin and his six accomplices (one of whom also tossed bombs at the archduke's motorcade) belonged to Young Bosnia, an offshoot of the Black Hand ("Union or Death"), a secret organization headed by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic ("Apis"), Serbia's head of military intelligence. The Black Hand had trained Princip and his fellow conspirators; provided them with guns, ammunition, and explosives; and helped smuggle them and their equipment across the border into Bosnia.


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT263&lpg=PT263
	The Russian Embassy was an important element in the context. Before and during the first Balkan war--in which the Black Hand played a conspicuous role, organizing guerilla bands behind the enemy lines--the Russians gave financial and political support to the organization


 


https://books.google.com/books?id=Litr5ENSmfUC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138
	...Rachkovsky was not yet the capricious master but still the plaything of others, whose dangerous games would come close to destroying him. Hauled in for interrogation by the Third Section in the spring of 1879, over his association with a certain Semionovsky who was suspected of concealing the assassin Kravchinsky, Rachkovsky was obliged to declare his true allegiance once and for all. He would, he confirmed, render the police whatever services they asked of him; his order was gratefully accepted, and he was directed to infiltrate the People’s Will without delay.

	In only a few months, concurrent with Rachkovsky establishing himself in St Petersburg, the People’s Will organisation, or Narodnaya Volya, had come to dominate the radical landscape in Russia


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana
	Among the early Okhrana agents to work alongside revolutionaries was Lieutenant-Colonel Gregory Sudeykin of the St. Petersburg Special Section, who, in 1882, set up an illegal printing operation to publish the revolutionary People’s Will with Okhrana funds. Sudeykin and his colleague, a revolutionary-turned-police-informant named Sergey Degayev, passed drafts of the publication through Okhrana censors before printing.


https://books.google.com/books?id=hU8lHfT4F5wC&pg=393
	It was, of course, another assassin, Gavrilo Princip who, a month earlier on 28 June, had precipitated the impending catastrophe by his shooting dead of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and his wife in their car as they drove through Sarajevo. The bloodied cobblestones of the Balkan city were a long way, in every sense, from the Sussex countryside around Brighton, where Kropotkin now lived, or the middle-class English Utopia of Hampstead Garden Suburb, to which he sent his letters to Kravchinsky’s widow, Fanny; and yet they were linked: on the bookshelves of the assassin Princip and his co-conspirators in the Serbian underground movement, two works took pride of place – Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Underground Russia. From them, and from the practical example of the old People’s Will, the Serbian nationalist movement to which Princip belonged had drawn inspiration and courage for their bid to end Austro-Hungarian rule in the Balkans and promote a pan-Slavic agenda.


 


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT263&lpg=PT263
	...For a long time, not only the Russian military attache but the Ambassador, Hartwig, were in intimate contact with Apis. There is no suggestion that he personally pocketed any Russian funds, but the Russians looked upon him as their particular friend, if not quite their agent, and quite naturally tried to build him up in influence.

	...Artamonov, the military attache, continued, however, to see his Serbian colleague and friend nearly every day. It was natural enough: they were conducting a joint secret-service operation across the nearby Austrian border, with the help of a chain of Serbian customs inspectors and frontier guards who had been recruited as secret operatives of Apis. Artamonov's contribution to the operation had been to furnish some $1600--an impressive sum by contemporary Balkan standards--toward financing the clandestine network that Apis was setting up on Austro-Hungarian soil, particularly in Bosnia.

	...According to former collaborators of Apis, Artamonov was fully informed about the subversive as well as the intelligence aspects of the project

	...Artamanov admitted his close co-operation with Apis, but denied that he had been consulted about the assassination. He declared that he had been away from Belgrade on leave in Switzerland and Italy for some time before the crime was perpetrated, and to back this up, showed the Italian sleuth-historian his diary for the months of June and July, 1914. It contained no mention of the tragedy at Sarajevo. For the fateful date of July 24, there was merely the laconic note, “Austrian ultimatum to Serbia,” followed, Albertini says, by the usual statement of Artamanov’s daily expenses: “coffee-2 lire.”


https://books.google.com/books?id=vQF099JYW_EC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46
	...While any conclusions must necessarily remain cautious, there is more than enough evidence to reconstruct a basic narrative of Russian intentions during the July crisis.

	A good place to begin is with reactions to the events in Sarajevo. There has always been something suspicious about Russian denials of foreknowledge knowledge of the assassination plot. Russia's military attache in Belgrade, General Viktor Artamonov, was out of town on 28 June 1914, giving him a convenient alibi but a strange one, considering that the whole point of Archduke Ferdinand's ill-fated visit to Bosnia was to kick off Austrian military maneuvers in Herzegovina, which would have been of great interest to Russia's official military observer in Serbia.

	...Albertini, after extensive interviews of all the principals, concluded that "Artamonov was told of the plot, if not directly by Dimitrijevic then by some other informant." Unlike Artamonov, Nikolai Hartwig, Russia's notorious minister to Serbia, was in town on 28 June, and at least one historian, L. C. F. Turner, thinks it "impossible" that Hartwig, "the constant guide and mentor of the Serbian Government" throughout the Balkan Wars, "was not consulted ... and did not have detailed knowledge of what was afoot."

	Whatever the truth about prior Russian knowledge of the Sarajevo plot, the reaction of Russian officials at the time does not suggest that the news took them greatly by surprise


 


https://www.quora.com/To-what-extent-was-Russia-more-responsible-for-the-outbreak-of-WW1
	Of course the real test of Russian approval for the assassination was to follow. Austria, first politely, then insistently, requested a Serbian investigation of the crime, which clearly originated within Serbia. When that failed, Austria, along with Germany, turned to Russia, with the just request that Russia use its influence to prevail upon Serbia to investigate the crime. Russia’s foreign minister, Sazanov, flatly, and with provocative rudeness, refused to do so.

	Serbia had an absolute duty under international law to investigate any crime which originated in its territory. By refusing to do so, Serbia was intentionally instigating a war with Austria Hungary, and Sazanov knew this. Why would the Tsar’s government tolerate this action from its vassal state, if it did not want the war, that the Serbian refusal would certainly provoke?


https://books.google.com/books?id=hU8lHfT4F5wC&pg=393
	As co-signatories to the anti-anarchist pact agreed in St Petersburg in 1904, Austro-Hungary expected Serbia to mount a comprehensive investigation of the conspiracy. Equally, it required the cooperation of Russia to pressure its fellow Slavs into compliance. The Serbs’ continued reluctance to concede fully to Vienna’s demands, even as the situation gusted towards a crisis, perhaps betrayed an uneasy conscience over covert official involvement with the conspirators, if not in the plot against the archduke itself. The Serbian police, after all, had enjoyed a good relationship with the Okhrana, learning from its methods. Nevertheless, the tension might have been defused, and the archduke’s murder have resulted in nothing more than an expulsion of diplomatic hot air, or at worst a minor regional confrontation, had not Austro-Hungary prepared to enforce its will by punitive military action, and the military alliance between France and Russia set in motion the engine of wider war. For as a member of the triple alliance with Germany and Italy, the mobilisation of Austro- Hungarian forces against Serbia triggered the terms of the binding agreement that required a response in kind by the governments in Paris and St Petersburg.

	As the man whose intrigues had helped secure the Franco-Prussian alliance and the St Petersburg Pact, Peter Rachkovsky must therefore bear his own small part of the blame for the outbreak of the First World War. Though dead, his influence lingered on as the Great Powers heaved their armies into readiness in the summer of 1914, and would continue to do so for many years to come.


http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/interview_with_sean_mcmeekin
	...French strategy in July 1914 is a bit harder to discern than Russian. Once European war seemed likely, is easy to see why President Poincaré shared the Russian goal of manipulating Britain into supporting the Franco-Russians; but it is harder to understand why his line was so belligerent in the first place. Certainly France had no interests in the Balkans worth mentioning, and so in this sense Sarajevo was just as much "pretext" in Paris as in Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg.


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT287&lpg=PT287
	...A brief flashback to what had been happening behind the scenes in Vienna and in Belgrade, while the rest of Europe settled into its normal midsummer torpor, may be helpful at this point. From the moment the Kaiser had given his unconditional backing, the government of Austria-Hungary had virtually made up its mind to take some kind of military action against Serbia. The Emperor’s ministers and chief military advisers were not unanimous, however, as to its form. General Conrad wanted all-out war, with as little advance warning to the enemy as possible. Count Koloman Tisza, the influential Hungarian premier, a bushy-bearded, high-living, but exceptionally clear-thinking Magyar aristocrat, feared that this course would bring Russia in. Berchtold’s view, which ultimately prevailed, was a kind of sleazy compromise between two antithetical policies. As he told the German Ambassador on July 14, he proposed to send the Serbian government a note “so phrased that its acceptance will be practically impossible.” At the same time, the door would be left very slightly ajar to some solution short of full-scale war if the Serbian government showed last-minute evidence of reasonableness. In provoking Serbia, every effort would be made to minimize the provocation to Russia and France. For this reason the Austrian ultimatum to Belgrade would be held up until the French President had started home from his Russian visit; there would be no chance for a warlike brotherhood “being sworn at St. Petersburg over the champagne under the influence of Mrs. Poincaré, Izvolsky and the Grand Dukes.”

	A tragic accident in Belgrade may have heightened the dangers that were inherent from the first in Berchtold’s recklessly calculated risk. On July 10, Baron Vladimir von Giesl, the Austrian Minister in Belgrade who had been recalled to Vienna for consultation, returned to his post. At 9 o’clock that evening he received an unexpected call from his Russian opposite number, the redoubtable Nicolas Henrikovitch de Hartwig. The Russian Minister said that he had come to express his condolences “for the atrocious outrage” (Sarajevo), but there were undoubtedly other things that he wanted to say. What they were we shall never know. At 9:20 P.M., just as Giesl was launching into a soothing—and quite false—interpretation of Austria’s attitude toward Serbia, Hartwig suddenly slumped to the floor, unconscious. He was dead when a doctor examined him a few minutes later (he was overweight, and had suffered from angina pectoris for some years). An unpleasant scene ensued after the arrival of Hartwig’s daughter, Ludmilla. She brusquely repulsed the sympathy expressed by the Giesls, and poked about the room, sniffing at an eau de cologne bottle, and rummaging in some large Japanese vases. Her father had smoked only his own Russian cigarettes, but Ludmilla had wrapped up the two butts and put them in her bag. Had her father had anything to eat or drink? she asked with unveiled suspicion. In the tense atmosphere of the time, public rumor immediately made a poisoner of the unfortunate Giesl, who was even accused of having brought back from Vienna an electric chair which instantly killed anyone sitting in it.

	Hartwig had inside knowledge of the Serbian Black Hand and its methods (the Austrians were strangely uninformed on the subject, though the alert French Minister in Belgrade had already been able to ferret out for his government the Black Hand’s role in the Sarajevo assassinations).


http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/interview_with_sean_mcmeekin
	...Curiously, Poincaré had taken a harder line in the First Balkan War in 1912 than Russia's Foreign Minister, Sazonov, all but urging the Russians to take the plunge and mobilize (after which, he assumed, Vienna and Berlin would mobilize too) -- so there was a recent precedent in his thinking for a Balkan pretext leading to war with Germany.

	As for why Poincaré took such a hard line, and encouraged Russia's early mobilization -- that remains one of the great questions of the July crisis.


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT250&lpg=PT250
	...The infiltration of the police and the secret-service outlook into the higher policy-making levels of the Czarist state was no less evident in foreign than in domestic affairs. The Okhrana was particularly active in Paris, a major center of émigré revolutionary activities. It operated much as the GPU and the MVD were later to do. The chief agent was usually attached to the Russian Embassy with the rank of counselor; he rendered no accounts to the ambassador but was authorized to correspond with his chiefs through the diplomatic pouch. Co-operation between the Okhrana unit in Paris and the French Sureté was always close in the pre-war years.

	...To neutralize the chronic protest of French Socialists and Liberals against its operations on French soil, the Okhrana bribed French newspapers and journalists of the right who were willing to follow a pro-Russian line. According to an exposé of the Okhrana written in 1919 by one of its former senior officials, V. K. Agafonov, it financed a journalists’ club in Paris and paid regular subsidies to several important French newspapers, including the Echo de Paris, the Gaulois, and the Figaro. The last-named organ, according to Agafonov, for a while received 24,000 rubles—about $10,000—monthly from the Okhrana.

	When Izvolsky took over the Russian Embassy in Paris he promoted an arrangement with the French government for influencing French opinion that was more official, but hardly less conspiratorial, than the crude undercover operations of the Okhrana: the Russians would open a special credit, drawn upon the Czar’s secret funds, for the French government, which would then undertake to buy up the consciences—and the pens—of its own journalists in behalf of joint objectives. A letter sent by the Russian Prime Minister in October 1912 to his French opposite number—at that time Poincaré—pointed out one of the advantages of the proposed system: It would help keep within bounds “certain appetites and certain rivalries” in the French press which the Russians had learned from bitter experience were apt to be stirred up when they approached foreign journalists directly.

	There was another advantage that the Russian communication did not spell out but which Poincaré may have been able to read between the lines. There was another advantage that the Russian communication did not spell out but which Poincaré may have been able to read between the lines. Izvolsky looked upon the dry, little Lorrainer, with his implacable irredentism, as the heaven-sent instrument of Russian foreign policy in France—“If Poincaré were defeated it would be a catastrophe for us,” he warned St. Petersburg before the French presidential elections of 1913—and one of the secret objectives of the press campaign that Russia was proposing to finance was to combat the “pacifist”—we would say today “appeasement”—and therefore anti-Poincaré, elements in French public life. “Do not forget,” Izvolsky once wrote his nominal chief in St. Petersburg, “that Poincare has to struggle with very influential elements in his own party which are generally hostile to Russia and openly preach that France must not be dragged into any war arising out of Balkan affairs.”


https://www.quora.com/To-what-extent-was-Russia-more-responsible-for-the-outbreak-of-WW1
	Russia coordinated with its French allies in mid July, in a state visit by the perpetually belligerent President Poincarre, and significantly, without any official records being kept. Russia had already started mobilizing before Serbia had even been presented the July 23rd demarche, by Austria.


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT304&lpg=PT304
	...Even before the sheer velocity of events became intolerable, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sazonov ... had committed a momentous blunder. After the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia he obtained the agreement of the Cabinet and the approval of the Czar to the principle of a partial mobilization of Russian forces—involving a little over 1,000,000 men—along the Austrian border. This move, Sazonov argued, might scare the Austrians out of attacking Serbia, but would not threaten Germany, and in any case a soothing note to Berlin would accompany public announcement of the call-up.

	...If the Czar had stuck to his refusal not to let Russian mobilization go beyond the limited call-up in the south, peace might have been saved (although the Russian Generals had already begun surreptitiously to exceed the terms of the Imperial ukase). But between 3 and 4 P.M. on July 30, just as Bethmann-Hollweg in Berlin was drafting new instructions to his Ambassador in Vienna advising him that Germany “must decline to be drawn wantonly into a world conflagration without having any regard paid to our counsels,” Nicholas’ vacillant will suddenly buckled.

	It was Sazonov who effected this fatal result. Accompanied by a staff officer, he came to the Peterhof Palace, some 17 miles out of the capital, to try to convince the Czar that general mobilization could no longer be delayed. For more than an hour, in deferential but urgent tones, he marshaled his arguments in favor of mobilization. He had two particularly strong ones: a somewhat vague report that Germany, too, had begun to mobilize, and the arrogant tone of the Kaiser’s latest telegram declaring that he could not mediate in Vienna if Russia went ahead with the partial mobilization against Austria.

	...“Think of the responsibility you are asking me to take if I follow your advice!” he finally exclaimed. “Think what it means to send thousands and thousands of men to their death.”

	Unluckily, Sazonov’s companion, General Tatishev, chose that moment to speak up.

	“Yes, it is a terrible decision to take,” he said.

	“I am the one who decides,” Nicholas snapped.

	From then on he seemed more attentive to Sazonov’s arguments. He was particularly impressed by the Foreign Minister’s view—an erroneous one we now know—that Germany was bent on war and would go ahead whether Russia mobilized or not. At last, after what seemed a terrible inner struggle, the Czar gave in.

	“All right, Serge Dimitrievitch,” he said, “telephone the Chief of the General Staff that I give the order for general mobilization.”


https://books.google.com/books?id=hU8lHfT4F5wC&pg=393
	...Mobilisation was ordered, and the tsar’s apparent decisiveness was rewarded with the support of the country’s socialists, while pacifst dissenters had no choice but to scatter into exile. The unity of the Russian people when faced by a national challenge would, it was hoped, expect a spiritual renewal and restore respect for the tsar. The immediate effect of the mobilisation, however, was merely to provoke Germany to respond in kind.


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT314&lpg=PT314
	On August 1, at 7 P.M. Count Friedrich von Pourtales, the German Ambassador to Russia, red in the face and laboring under the nervous strain of a sleepless week, entered the office of Sazonov, whose amiable features were unusually taut. Rather brusquely the Germans asked whether the Russian government was disposed to give a satisfactory answer to the ultimatum presented by Germany the day before and timed to run out at noon. Receiving an evasive answer, he repeated his question, in a staccato voice. Once again Sazonov replied that the Russians could not demobilize, but that they were, as before, prepared to continue negotiations for a peaceful settlement. Both men were on their feet. The Count fumbled in his pocket and drew out the German declaration of war, which he read, breathing hard as he reached the final sentence:

		“His Majesty the Emperor, my august sovereign, accepts the challenge in the name of the Empire and considers himself at war with Russia.”

	Then, losing all control of himself, he ran to the window which looked out over the Winter Palace reddened by the evening sun, and turning his back on Sazonov, burst into tears. Sazonov wordlessly patted his shoulder, whereupon Pourtales burst out, “Never did I think that I would have to leave St. Petersburg under such conditions.” The two diplomats, who were also old friends, embraced each other, in the Russian style, for the last time.


http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand#Russian_military_attach.C3.A9.27s_office
	Serbian reservists being transported on tramp steamers on the Danube, apparently accidentally, crossed onto the Austro-Hungarian side of the river at Temes-Kubin and Austro-Hungarian soldiers fired into the air to warn them off. This incident was blown out of proportion and Austria-Hungary then declared war and mobilized its army on July 28, 1914. Under the Secret Treaty of 1892 Russia and France were obliged to mobilize their armies if any of the Triple Alliance mobilized. Soon all the Great Powers (except Italy) had chosen sides and gone to war.


 


https://books.google.com/books?id=vQF099JYW_EC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46
	Rounding out the picture of selective recordkeeping inside the Franco-Russian alliance, there are substantial gaps in Russia's own diplomatic correspondence with its envoys in Paris and Belgrade in July 1914, in the latter case for ten whole days following the assassination of the archduke on 28 June. Did the Russians have something to hide? The gaps in the record strongly suggest a good deal of purging took place after 1914. Missing files from Imperial Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs are particularly noteworthy, worthy, in that following the October Revolution, Soviet researchers had no compunction in publishing the most incriminating documents they could find in order to indict the benighted "imperialism" of the old regime.


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT263&lpg=PT263
	...There may be one man still alive who knows the whole story; the Russian assistant military attaché, Captain Alexander Werchovski, who replaced Artamanov during his absence. A friend of Werchovski, a Polish nobleman named Louis de Trydar-Burzynski, stated in his memoirs, published in Italy in 1926, that “the assassination [at Sarajevo] was perpetrated with the support of the Russian military attaché at Belgrade, Captain Werchovski...” Werchovski, he continued, “was later War Minister in the Kerensky government; he was a young man whom I had known very well for years, and he told me quite frankly the truth about the origins, preparations and execution of the plot.” Unfortunately, Werchovski, if he is living today, is not likely to tell any more about the case; when last heard of, he held a high command in the Red Army—a curious detail in itself.


 


http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/interview_with_sean_mcmeekin
	**So France wanted Alsace, Russia wanted the Straits, Germany had some vague desire for Lebensraum and a vague fear of encirclement, and Britain was thinking about Home Rule for Ireland. Not very good reasons to plunge a peaceful and prosperous Europe into hell. And yet, the people of Europe went to war in August 1914 with joy and brass bands and parades. Was it 99 years of peace that lulled them into war? Or an atavistic desire for violence and boredom with bourgeois prosperity?**

	Few historians still see things quite this way. There were a few parades, many volunteered to take up arms, and open opposition to the draft was rare, but the idea that the common people of Europe all marched off happily to war is no longer tenable. Entire books have been written by specialists to debunk "the myth of war enthusiasm," most recently by Mike Neiberg (Dance of the Furies. Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, Harvard 2011). Certainly many young men (most famously Hitler) welcomed the break from dull routine, the cameradie of military life and so on: but most people seem to have reacted to the war's outbreak more with trepidation and terror than bloodlust.

	And this, mind you, is after the war began, with the national press in each belligerent already baying for blood. In its origins, the war of 1914 was almost purely a "Cabinet war," with even the invocation of "public opinion" (let alone the real thing) playing next to no role in the decisions to mobilize (with the curious exception of Russia, the least democratic and nationalist-patriotic of all the initial belligerents).

	The fact that the war of 1914 was a Cabinet war does not make the story any less troubling, however. To me, it is, if anything, more unsettling that a conflict of such world-shattering proportions could be conjured up by such a small handful of men.


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT263&lpg=PT263
	...Like the treason of Redl, the intrigues of Izvolsky, and the conspiratorial Witches’ Sabbath of the Okhrana, the murderers at Sarajevo demonstrate that overlaying the local power vacuum in south-eastern Europe caused by the breakup or decrepitude of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, there was a vacuum of responsibility affecting a much wider area. Responsible government was beginning to collapse under the strains of the modern age, just as civilization was beginning to crumble, in all the autocracies—and in some of their more-or-less democratic allies. (In the Balkans responsible government had never existed, at least not for centuries.) The breakdown, it is true, was limited; the regression to barbarism was noticeable only in certain contexts, the relapse into anarchy was confined to certain sectors. Philosophers continued to philosophize, and the plumbing, where it already existed, worked as well as ever. The trains ran—often on time—mail was delivered and taxes collected: drunkards were jailed and prostitutes had their cards stamped. Only the higher policy-coordinating centers of the state were affected. How grievously, was demonstrated, not only by Sarajevo, but as we shall now see, by the failure of the Old World diplomacy to prevent the crisis inevitably engendered by it from ending in the general European war that virtually nobody in Europe wanted.


http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/interview_with_sean_mcmeekin
	**You have written three books about the origins of the First World War. What makes this topic so compelling?**

	The biggest draw for me as a historian is the stakes. The war of 1914 had such profound, and predominantly negative, consequences -- four years of industrial-scale slaughter all but destroying western faith in human progress, the violent break-up of empires which had endured for centuries, the bloodletting begat by the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the rise of fascism, Nazism, and all the rest. And yet the war, I have come to learn, did not have to happen, at least when and in the manner that it did. Many structural factors -- industrialization and the arms race, empires and alliances, nationalism and the spread of near-universal military service across Europe -- helped produce the carnage of 1914-1918 once the Great War broke out, but they did not cause the war, which could easily have been avoided had various contingent events, actions and reactions not transpired precisely they way they did in 1914.



https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gavrilo-princips-sandwich-79480741/
	...the archduke’s chauffeur, a stranger to Sarajevo, gets lost. He swings off Appel Quay and into crowded Franz Joseph Street, then drifts to a stop right in front of Schiller’s.

	...Schiller’s delicatessen stood on the original route planned for Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade; indeed, the chauffeur’s fatal uncertainty was caused by the local governor, Oskar Potiorek, shouting at him from the passenger seat that he had should have stayed on Appel Quay. In other words, Princip was standing in precisely the right place to assassinate the archduke if the Franz Ferdinand had stuck to his plans, and so could hardly be said to be the beneficiary of some outlandish coincidence.


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT304&lpg=PT304
	...If the Czar had stuck to his refusal not to let Russian mobilization go beyond the limited call-up in the south, peace might have been saved


https://books.google.com/books?id=EmJODQAAQBAJ&pg=PT287&lpg=PT287
	...[Hartwig] is believed to have broken off his originally close relationship with the fanatical brotherhood’s head, Colonel Apis, and in general, to have started putting the brakes on extreme Serbian nationalism, which he had earlier encouraged. His influence on the Serbian government was enormous; if his personal outlook on the Balkan problem had really changed as much as many historians think, his death at that crucial moment was undoubtedly a catastrophe for Europe. Giesl himself believed so. He later wrote that if Hartwig had lived beyond the “critical 25th of July,” the war would not have occurred.


http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/interview_with_sean_mcmeekin
	**Had Gavrilo Princip missed, or had Archduke Francis Ferdinand left Sarajevo after the first failed assassination attempt (as his security detail advised), or had his driver not taken a wrong turn, would a World War broken out at some later date? In other words, was the assassination a spark that ignited an unstable international situation that would have probably exploded at some later date or can we just as easily imagine a Europe that would have remained peaceful for another 99 years?**

	This is one of the great counterfactuals of modern history. I do believe that, had Princip missed or the Archduke taken more sensible precautions for his own safety after the failed bombing attempt, nearly all subsequent history would have taken a different path.

	...Might there have been a general European conflagration at some future point? One can never rule out worst-case scenarios, but there is nothing which would have made war any more likely than in the years before 1914, absent the precise sequence of events which transpired following Sarajevo


http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand#Russian_military_attach.C3.A9.27s_office
	It could be argued that this assassination set in motion most of the major events of the twentieth century, with its reverberations lingering into the twenty-first. The Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War is generally linked to the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II. It also led to the Russian Revolution, which helped lead to the Cold War. This, in turn, led to many of the major political developments of the twentieth century, such as the fall of the colonial empires and the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union to super-power status.


http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/interview_with_sean_mcmeekin
	...My argument is not really that Russia is more responsible for the outbreak of war than the other two, but rather that the war which actually resulted in August 1914 was the war Russian policymakers preferred, not the one the Austrians or Germans wanted.

	...Whatever the merits of Bethmann's policies in July 1914, and I think they were disastrous, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ultimate German nightmare of "encirclement" actually came true in 1914. Like cornered animals, the Germans lashed out, and they have much to answer for. But so, too, do the Bosnian Serb terrorists who assassinated Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian leaders who pushed for a war with Serbia, the statesmen in Paris and St. Petersburg who capitalized on the inept diplomacy of Berlin and Vienna to corner the Germans, and those in London who turned the European conflict into a world war. It did not have to happen.


...

Meanwhile...

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelspecialgeschichte/d-54841257.html&prev=search
	THE GERMANS AND THE REVOLUTION

	...The two ideological mortal enemies joined since 1914 a common interest - the end of the world war in the east. So far unknown documents prove the extent of the secret cooperation: For years the empire supported the Bolsheviks with money, weapons and logistics.

	...It was the complicity of ideological mortal enemies, driven by insidiousness and intriguing sophistication. With consequences of world-historical significance: without the help of Wilhelm II for Lenin, the October Revolution would not have happened 90 years ago. What's more, without German support, Lenin's Bolsheviks would hardly have survived their first year in power.

	...Presumably no Soviet Union would have emerged, the rise of communism would not have existed, no millions of Gulag dead.

	...For the logistics of the revolution, however, the Germans needed experts of other calibres. And in January 1915, one of them became available to them: Alexander Helphand, one of the most important political adventurers of the 20th century.

	...Only a few weeks later Helphand received the explosives he required, a German police pass that made traveling easier, and plenty of money: one million marks.

	...Above all, the network that Helphand raised after talking with Lenin speaks against the thesis of Bolshevik innocence. Because at the intersections leading revolutionaries of the Lenin Party are found again and again. Moisey Uritski, for example, later chief of the Petrograd secret police (Cheka), worked for Helphand; also Jakob Fürstenberg, one of Lenin's closest confidants, and after the October Revolution head of the Soviet National Bank, or the discrete lawyer Mieczyslaw Koslowski, who co-founded the Cheka.


...


The German revolution, unrest in France, Italy, and the U.S. and around the world. The war was unpopular everywhere, and governments around the world continued the war against the wishes and best interests of workers, soldiers, and other citizens, which galvanized them in opposition to their governments:


https://www.britannica.com/place/Italy/World-War-I-and-fascism
	The war was deeply unpopular both among the troops—mostly conscripted peasants who were undernourished and fighting for a cause few could understand—and among the civilian population back home, which included almost one million workers in arms factories who were also subject to military discipline. Many rebelled within the army. (It has been estimated that some 470,000 conscripts resisted call-up, 310,000 committed acts of indiscipline under arms, and 300,000 deserted.) More than one million soldiers came before military tribunals before a postwar amnesty was granted. Many once again saw the Italian state only as a repressive institution. Antiwar disturbances struck Milan in May 1917, and serious bread riots took place among the industrial workers of Turin in August 1917. Troops occupied Turin and took four days to restore order; some 50 demonstrators and 10 soldiers were killed in the clashes.


http://socialistreview.org.uk/393/revolution-trenches
	Socialist Review
	Revolution in the trenches

	...Given the enormity of the casualties, the war might have been seen by most soldiers as an inescapable juggernaut of death. But as the trenches became almost a fixed feature of the war, soldiers on all sides began to choose to face it with a different attitude — to live and to avoid killing in order not to be killed. They began the practice that became known as “Live and let live”. The best known examples were those at the Christmas truce in 1914, but in-depth studies have shown and many memoirs have recorded that troops on both sides came to more and more frequent “‘live and let live” arrangements. The generals called it fraternisation and forbade it. Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin wrote that it was the instinctive response of oppressed people, tired, exhausted and losing confidence in capitalist promises. These arrangements were not motivated by clear-cut political ideas. The will to survive and to respect the enemy soldiers’ wish to do the same replaced ruling class exhortations to “Kill the Hun” or “Destroy the English”.

	It was the beginning of a gradual change of attitude among the frontline soldiers, that in the end came to predominate. It finally brought the war to an end in waves of draft dodging, desertions and voluntary surrenders, initially by the Russians, French and Italians in 1917, and from March to October 1918, by the Germans, Bulgarians and Austria-Hungarians. Germany’s defeat was presented by military historians as a hard fought struggle to the bitter end. In reality voluntary surrenders, desertions and mutinies foiled the generals’ plans. The revolutions that followed this mass disobedience brought down three European empires and the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. The “endemic live and let live” truces started the process of troops abandoning the war.

	...Lenin argued that live and let live and draft dodging should not simply continue as the only possible way for individual soldiers to survive through to the peace, but that revolutionaries should set themselves the task of turning fraternisation and the will to survive into politically conscious movements to transfer power into the hands of the revolutionary proletariat.


The Bolsheviks took advantage of this anti-war and anti-government sentiment to channel it into support for their cause around the world. Bienno Rosso ("two red years") in Italy, the 1917 army mutinies in France, the November Revolution in Germany (and the subsequent Spartacist uprising and formation of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic), the Aster Revolution in Hungary (and subsequent formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and even shorter lived Slovak Soviet Republic), and the Kiev Bolshevik Uprising in Ukraine were all an immediate result of the war and were all brought about, with varying levels of directness, by Bolsehvik propaganda and agitation:


https://books.google.com/books?id=jYdgAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT264
	...The example of the soviets encouraged radical industrial militants everywhere to see their local power as a means of pressing for peace. The most serious popular upheaval of the war in Italy, the insurrection in Turin in August 1917, was partly triggered by a visiting delegation from the Petrograd Soviet, greeted by 40,000 Turinese socialists and metalworkers crying, 'Long live the Russian Revolution, long live Lenin!' Although caused by bread shortages and bitter hostility over industrial discipline, the Turin rising rapidly adopted the demand for peace. In France, where the political culture of labour drew on a broad revolutionary tradition, the Russian Revolution strengthened the tendency for economic and political protest, including the demand for peace, to be expressed in revolutionary language and imagery. 'The Russian Revolution has occurred just when the peoples [of Europe] are weary of spilling their blood to satisfy the appetites of the Tsar, the Kaiser, and Poincare' declared the French socialist deputy and Kienthal signatory Pierre Brizon in March 1917. 'The revolutionaries will impose peace, which will bring the regeneration of humankind and abolish all frontiers.' Even in Britain, where the political culture of labour was generally anything but revolutionary, the prestige of the March (or February) Revolution gave a fillip to the yearning for peace. An extraordinary meeting of socialist opposition groups, held in Leeds in June 1917, called for the establishment of 'Councils of Workers and Soldiers' throughout the country.


 


https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CInVseCvW-wC&pg=PA9
	The Hungarian Revolutions of 1918 and 1919

	In the fall of 1918, as it became clear that the war had been lost, revolutionary forces began gathering in Budapest. Tensions among the population had been rising, with food riots, strikes, and increasing desertions from the army--a result of the terrible losses during the war, rising prices and growing shortages. The revolutionary spirit of the October Revolution of 1917 was spreading, fueled by the returning Hungarian prisoners of war from Russia with demonstrations expressing sympathy with the Bolsheviks and demanding peace.


https://books.google.com/books?id=yBMWAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT238&lpg=PT238
	The novelty effect soon turned to disillusionment among those who had hoped for better days, and the conflict between the regime and its increasingly numerous enemies rapidly turned into terror. Indeed, there was no attempt to disguise its nature: the government set up a parallel police force, a special terror unity, colloquially known as 'Lenin's boys', referring to the great leader who encouraged his Hungarian comrades in ruthlessly haranguing the enemies and traitors of the revolution, including Social Democrats. 'Shoot them'--was Lenin's telegraphed message to Kun. Carrying out this order would have caused embarrassment since Social Democrats were in government. The 'Lenin's boys' did not find themselves out of work, however. The exact number of victims is unknown; estimates vary enormously from a few hundred to a few thousand.

	The dictatorship was run by the government and its five-member Directorate. At close quarters, Bela Kun behaved like a less ambitious Lenin. A provincial journalist with some oratory and organising skills, Kun had returned from Moscow with an informal mandate from Lenin.


https://books.google.com/books?id=sPbqDSWXK7QC&pg=PA145&lpg=PA145
	In late March 191, the Bolshevik journalist Bela Kun gained power as the leader of a radical Hungarian Soviet Republic, which attempted to regain Slovakia through a military incursion by the Hungarian Red Army at the beginning of May. The Hungarians occupied two-thirds of Slovakia and instituted local soviets in some areas of Slovakia and Ruthenia. A Slovak Soviet Republic appeared in Presov on June 16 with its leaders declaring their support for the Soviet Republics in Hungary and Russia.


https://books.google.com/books?id=QtwzDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT86
	The only Communist government installed in any European state for more than a brief period was the Bela Kun Government of Hungary, which held power from March 21, 1919, to August 1, 1919. Lenin did his utmost to help this government to survive, sending funds and jewels by secret couriers, and giving constant advice and directions to Kun by radio.


https://books.google.com/books?id=yBMWAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT238&lpg=PT238
	...After the collapse of the Hungarian Soviets, when [Kun] was once more in exile in Moscow, he carried the accolade of having sustained a Soviet Republic in the heart of Europe for 133 days. This unique experience subsequently placed him at the top of the Communist International, until 1937, the year of his downfall followed by his execution.


 


http://www.jstor.org/stable/24436670
	The French Army Mutinies of 1917

	...Although it may have been superficial, the influence of the Russian revolution on the mutineers was unmistakable. Notable in this connection, and perhaps the best known incident of the mutinies, is the revolt of the Russian brigades. Three Russian brigades had arrived in France early in 1916 for service on the French front. They were already infected by the revolutionary propaganda that was rife in the Czar's army. After the March revolution they had formed soviets and demanded to vote on their participation in the April 16 offensive. They had voted overwhelmingly to fight, and according to Painlevé, who was in a position to know, they conducted themselves gallantly before Brimont. Painlevé suggests it was the First Russian Brigade that sowed the seeds of the mutinies. The date of their first act of insubordination is not clear, although it would appear to have been around the middle of May. By June they had been transferred to an isolation camp at Courtine near Limoges. Here on June 9 the soldiers' council of the First Regiment published a manifesto that ranks as the most revealing document of the period of the mutinies:

		Since our arrival in France a year and a half ago, the rumor has been current that we had been sold for munitions. These rumors have multiplied more and more; in short they consider the Russian soldier not as a man but as a thing.

	Terrail reports that during the next three days a loyal Russian brigade fired 500 rounds of artillery into the camp. After eight men were killed and twenty-eight wounded, the rest submitted to discipline. Churchill repeats this statement, which would appear to be the origin of the many stories of the bombardment of mutineers that were circulated after the event. On the other hand, Major General Sir Edward Spears has informed the writers that there was no shelling of mutinous troops, although he agrees that the Russians bear much responsibility for inciting the revolts.

	...the first Russian revolution, was clearly in the minds of many French soldiers during the uprisings. The socialist slogans that were shouted, the demands that the government issue passports to the Stockholm peace convention, and the general agreement on the pernicious example of the Russian brigades make clear the importance of foreign socialist influence.


http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/096834459500200203?journalCode=wiha
	War and 'Politics': The French Army Mutinies of 1917

	...they involved a collective and categorical refusal of orders to take up positions in the front lines. Second, for the most part, the demonstrations concluded with soldiers leaving for other units to encourage further resistance. Third, soldier's stated demands--sometimes including peace though revolution if necessary--went well beyond boundaries of expression normally conceded even to citizen-soldiers.


 


http://socialistreview.org.uk/393/revolution-trenches
	Socialist Review
	Revolution in the trenches

	...In April 1917 when the Americans joined the war almost half the French army overstayed home leave, deserted or mutinied, often singing the Internationale in protest at the war’s continuation. Subsequently general Petain kept the mutineers out of any major battles for almost a year and regained their loyalty by meeting many of their demands for longer leave and better food. With the help of the French Social Democrats he was able to deflect the drive to revolution.

	The same was not the case when the German soldiers and sailors decided to desert en masse and to surrender without a fight. No German general succeeded in driving them back into the trenches.


https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelspecialgeschichte/d-54841257.html&prev=search
	...slowly it dawned on the German strategists that in the end they would be the losers of the purposive alliance between Lenin and the Hohenzollern empire.

	In the end, Wilhelm's generals did not even dare to relocate soldiers from the Ukraine or the Baltic to the Western Front because the men were meanwhile regarded as unreliable: they sympathized with Lenin's revolution. A request from the Bolsheviks to have 20,000 machine guns, 200,000 rifles, and 500 million cartridges was rejected by the Supreme Command, saying that there was a danger that the weapons "might later be used against us."

	For Lenin calculated as coolly as the Foreign Office, and while he cooperated with the Empire in Moscow during the summer, he spared neither money nor expense to support those comrades in the Reich who were aiming for a German Soviet republic.

	The Germans should have been warned - it was the same policy of revolution that they had supported in the years before when it was against the Czar.


http://socialistreview.org.uk/393/revolution-trenches
	...Subsequent attacks by the Germans failed due to the drastically depleted ranks of their divisions. Draft dodging in Germany had become so common in 1917 that enrolment fell from 1.4 million to 0.6 million, a figure that reduced reserves for all the German armies and the size of its divisions at the front to the point where offensive battles were no longer possible. This marked the end of Ludendorff’s war plans. Many of the German relief divisions, having served in Russia in the run up to the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, when fraternisation with the Russians had become common, sounded like Bolsheviks according to one top commander.


https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/IX_SOLDIERS_SHOOTING_THEIR_OWN_OFFICERS
	A German Deserter's War Experience
	1917

	...However, not all the soldiers approved of that senseless, that criminal murdering. Some of the "gentlemen" who had ordered us to massacre our French comrades were killed "by mistake" in the darkness of the night, by their own people, of course. Such "mistakes" repeat themselves almost daily, and if I keep silence with regard to many such mistakes which I could relate, giving the exact name and place, the reader will know why.


http://socialistreview.org.uk/393/revolution-trenches
	...Ten percent of the replacements jumped off the trains as they were transferred to the Western Front. Others had been sent to the front as punishment for going on strike in the munition factories. “Stay at home,” they shouted to the men they were replacing. The “hidden army strike” removed over a million troops from Germany’s field armies sent to defend its borders after the failure of the spring offensive.

	...In the final months of the war one in every two in the reserves failed to report for duty. Ludendorff himself became a deserter in late October and fled to Sweden. Some army generals and those commanding the navy and the air force called for national unity in one last ditch battle. They even considered bombing the trains that the deserters-turned-mutineers had commandeered to take them home. The Kaiser, Emperor Wilhelm II, supported the generals’ call for a desperate last stand. He and those preparing to attack their own workers and soldiers were over-ruled by the lower ranks of generals for fear of provoking a civil war in Germany. Without the support of his generals, the Kaiser abandoned his post.

	In November 1918 sailors at Kiel naval port joined the mutiny and took over the town and the German Revolution had begun.


http://richthofen.com/scheer/scheer18c.htm
	...we suffered the bitterest disappointment at the hands of the crews of the Fleet. Thanks to an unscrupulous agitation which had been fermenting for a long time, the idea had taken root in their minds that they were to be uselessly sacrificed. They were encouraged in this mistaken belief, because they could see no indication of a will to decisive action in the bearing of the Government. Insubordination broke out when, on October 29, the Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet was making preparations to weigh anchor for the planned attack. As always, the intentions and aim of the expedition had been kept secret from the crews, until they were at sea. The mutiny was at first confined to a few battleships and first class cruisers, but it assumed such dimensions on these ships that the Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet thought it incumbent upon him to desist from his project. By seizing the agitators and imprisoning them in the meantime in Wilhelmshaven, he hoped that the ships could be calmed down. The crews of the torpedo-boats and the U-boats had remained thoroughly loyal.

	The Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet reported these events to the Navy Command on November 2, saying that they were due to a Bolshevist movement, directed by members of the Independent Social Democratic Party, on board the ships. As a means of agitation, they had made use of the statement that the Government wanted peace and the officers did not.


https://books.google.com/books?id=ZInPBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Kiel+%22shop+stewards%22+%22revolutionary+stewards%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5mvHZ8eDXAhURMd8KHeRNARsQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&q=Kiel%20stewards&f=false
	The German Revolution in Berlin: 1918

	During the war the Shop Stewards had organised an escalating series of political mass strikes and one may be tempted to take the revolutionary events of November 1918 in Berlin as the fourth and final mass strike. The three previous strikes had radicalised the Stewards, workers of Berlin and other industrial centres and they now believed that only a revolution would end war and hunger.

	...the Shop Stewards did not want to initiate action until the mood was right--and then they wanted to spring into action on a massive scale throughout Germany. The element of surprise was meant to give the Empire and additional, final blow and overthrow it. This time, the Shop Stewards were not preparing for just another mass strike, however big and impressive; they were preparing for Revolution.

	Arming the Revolution

	For weeks, Emil Barth had organised the purchase and collection of weapons. ...Barth apparently acquired money for weapons from the Soviet embassy. Muller would later deny that the Shop Stewards received money from abroad without, however, revealing where the money came from instead. Historian Ottokar Luban, who reconstructed the reapons procurement process in considerable detail from available archival sources, found that the Shop Stewards had been in contact with the Bolsheviks starting in September 1918. A representative of the Russian revolutionaries actually participated in a Shop Stewards' meeting in mid-September. To ensure secrecy, they had no further direct contact with the Shop Stewards and the money was not transferred until October.

	...The Shop Stewards continually postponed the uprising at the secret meetings despite the impatience of the Spartacists in general and Karl Liebknecth in particular, principally because the arms they sought came late and, in their view, were insufficient. Under no circumstances did they want to engage in a struggle for Berlin, the capital, without being prepared for the possibility of armed counter-attack by loyal soldiers.

	...Detailed deployment plans were prepared and a choreography of revolution emerged at last on the morning of 2 November, when the REvolutionary Shop Stewards and the Spartacists met in a pub in Berlin-Neukolln. Several armed marches would proceed from the large factories on the city's periphery to the barracks and then, along with deserting soldiers and the additional weapons they brought, they would occupy the key positions in the city. It was quite clear to the revolutionaries that they could not win an armed battle with a loyal army. The troops would therefor have to either be intimidated or surprised into remaining neutral or, better yet, persuaded to desert.

	...Even as the finishing touches were being applied to these plans for the uprising in Berlin, however, the German November Revolution was breaking out elsewhere. The first mutinies in the High Seas Fleet had erupted on 27 October. Sailors, many of them former workers who had been drafted into the imperial navy's 'floating factories', as German battleships were known because of their heavy machinery, refused to leave the harbour for a final assault on the British navy. They saw it as a suicide mission and refused the orders of their superiors. A few days later, rebel sailors hoisted the red flag over the battleships and elected sailors' councils. There was no denying it any more: the Revolution was under way.

 

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/28.htm
	Vladimir Lenin

	...The Russian revolution has shown that the war is inevitably leading to the disintegration of capitalist society in general, that it is being converted into a war of the working people against the exploiters. Therein lies the significance of the Russian revolution.


The Bolsheviks were well-prepared to, as Lenin put it, "convert" the war between imperialist powers into a war between the proletariat and the bourgeois. Bolsheviks and their sympathizers inserted themselves into the forefront of the anti-war movement from an early stage--the German communist Rosa Luxemburg began anti-war agitation as early as the July crisis--and so, when public frustration with the war came to a boil, were ready to organize socialist revolutions against their governments, often with Soviet support.

The war was a calamity: mines and shelling left swathes of land uninhabitable, just about every belligerent was economically ruined, and soldiers were conscripted to die from combat, disease, and famine by the millions--in France nearly every family had lost at least one member. The question of "what can be done to end the war?" thus occupied the minds of citizens and soldiers alike, along with the natural follow-up, "who can we look to to lead such an effort?" The Bolsheviks sought to answer both:


https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm
	Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
	The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution

	...In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital *it is impossible* to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/xx/theses.htm
	Rosa Luxemburg

	Theses on the Tasks of International Social-Democracy

	...World peace cannot be assured by projects utopian or, at bottom, reactionary, such as tribunals of arbitration by capitalist diplomatists, diplomatic “disarmament” conventions, “the freedom of the seas,” abolition of the right of maritime arrest, “the United States of Europe,” a “customs union for central Europe,” buffer states, and other illusions. Imperialism, militarism and war can never be abolished nor attenuated so long as the capitalist class exercises, uncontested, its class hegemony. The sole means of successful resistance, and the only guarantee of the peace of the world, is the capacity for action and the revolutionary will of the international proletariat to hurl its full weight into the balance.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/kun-bela/1918/05/24.htm
	Bela Kun
	The Model Product of Imperialism

	...The state of mind of the troops shows that that struggle has already begun. If there are still “Social Democrats” who, fearing an Austrian defeat, deliberately stand in the way of the revolution, they will be swept away by the masses of true proletarians.

	After this treaty, the Austro-Hungarian proletariat is even more definitely than before at the cross roads of the dilemma: endless war or the revolution?


A repeated theme in Bolshevik propaganda was that only a revolution of the proletariat could truly end the war. The war, in their parlance, was an "imperialist war" deliberately caused by capitalists in order to turn a profit. Bolshevik propaganda stated that war is an inevitable result of capitalism, and so the only way to achieve to lasting peace is to replace "world capitalism" with a new form of economics and government, typically some form of socialism or communism. Naturally, the propagandists would be the "experts" in these new forms of government and so would be found in positions of power after the revolutions they called for had succeeded.

The importance of the Bolshevik's propaganda cannot be overstated. A testament to its efficacy can be seen in the frustration of many of the belligerents' military commanders, such as Commander Nivelle in France, General Ludendorff in Germany, and particularly General Denikin of Russia, who wrote extensively of Bolshevik propaganda and its deleterious effects on the Russian army in his memoirs:


https://archive.org/stream/russianturmoilme00deniuoft/russianturmoilme00deniuoft_djvu.txt
	The Russian turmoil; memoirs: military, social, and political
	by Denikin, Anton Ivanovich

	...I have more grounds and more right to speak of the Army and in the name of the Army than all those strangers of the Socialist Camp, who, in their haughty self-conceit, as soon as they touched the Army, began breaking down its foundations, judging its leaders and fighters and diagnosing its serious disease, who even now, after grievous experiments and experiences, have not given up the hope of transforming this mighty and terrible weapon of national self-preservation into a means for satisfying party and social appetites. For me, the Army is not only an historical, social, national phenomenon, but nearly the whole of my life, in which lie many memories, precious and not to be forgotten, in which all is bound up and interlaced into one general mass of swiftly passing days of sadness and of joy, in which there are hundreds of cherished graves, of buried dreams and unextinguishable faith.

	...Then came a torrent of newspapers, appeals, resolutions, orders, from some unknown authority, and with them a whole series of new ideas, which the soldier masses were unable to digest and assimilate. New people appeared, with a new speech, so fascinating and promising, liberating the soldiers from obedience and inspiring hope that they would be saved from deadly danger immediately. When one Regimental Commander naively inquired whether these people might not be tried by Field Court-Martial and shot, his telegram, after passing through all official stages, called forth the reply from Petrograd that these people were inviolable, and had been sent by the Soviet to the troops for the very purpose of explaining to them the true meaning of current events.

	When such leaders of the Revolutionary Democracy, as have not yet lost their feeling of responsibility for crucified Russia, now say that the movement, caused by the deep class differences between the officers and the soldiers and by " the enslavement " of the latter, was of an elemental nature, which they could not resist, this is deeply untrue.

	All the fundamental slogans, all the programmes, tactics, instructions and text-books, forming the foundation of the "democratisation" of the Army, had been drawn up by the military sections of the secret Socialist parties long before the War, outside of "elemental" pressure, on the grounds of clear, cold calculation, as a product of "Socialist reasoning and conscience."

	True, the officers strove to persuade the men not to believe the "new words" and to do their duty. But from the very beginning the Soviets had declared the officers to be foes of the Revolution; in many towns they had been subjected to cruel torture and death, and this with impunity. Evidently not without some reason, when even the "Bourgeois" Duma issued such a strange and unexpected "announcement" as the following: "This first day of March, rumours were spread among the soldiers of the garrison of Petrograd to the effect that the officers in the regiments were disarming the soldiers. These rumours were investigated and found to be false. As President of the Military Commission of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, I declare that the most decided measures will be taken to prevent such action on the part of the officers, up to the shooting of those guilty of it. Signed, Colonel Engelhardt."

	Next came Order No. I., the Declaration and so forth.

	...Perhaps, however, it might have been possible to combat all this verbal ocean of lies and hypocrisy which flowed from Petrograd and from the local Soviets and was echoed by the local demagogues had it not been for a circumstance which paralysed all the efforts of the Commanders, viz., the animal feeling of self-preservation which had flooded the whole mass of the soldiers. This feeling had always existed. But it had been kept under and restrained by examples of duty fulfilled, by flashes of national self-consciousness, by shame, fear and pressure. When all these elements had disappeared, when for the soothing of a drowsy conscience there was a whole arsenal of new conceptions, which justified the care for one's own hide and furnished it with an ideal basis, then the Army could exist no longer. This feeling upset all the efforts of the Commanders, all moral principles and the whole regiment of the Army.

	...Nine a.m. The first Company gradually begins to awaken. The trenches are incredibly defiled; in the narrow communication trenches and those of the second line the air is thick and close. The parapet is crumbling away. No one troubles to repair it; no one feels inclined to do so, and there are not enough men in the Company. There is a large number of deserters; more than fifty have been allowed to go. Old soldiers have been demobilised, others have gone on leave with the arbitrary permission of the Committee. Others, again, have been elected members of numerous Committees, or gone away as delegates; a while ago, for instance, the Division sent a numerous delegation to " Comrade " Kerensky to verify whether he had really given orders for an advance. Finally, by threats and violence, the soldiers have so terrorised the regimental surgeons that the latter have been issuing medical certicates even to the "thoroughly fit."

	In the trenches the hours pass slowly and wearily, in dullness and idleness. In one corner men are playing cards, in another a soldier returned from leave is lazily and listlessly telling a story; the air is full of obscene swearing. Someone reads aloud from the Russian Messenger the following:

	"The English want the Russians to shed the last drop of their blood for the greater glory of England, who seeks her profit in everything. . . . Dear soldiers, you must know that Russia would have concluded peace long ago had not England prevented her. . . . We must turn away from her — the Russian people demand it; such is their sacred will."

	...Along the trenches came Lieutenant Albov, the Company Commander. He said to the groups of soldiers, somewhat irresolutely and entreatingly:

	"Comrades, get to work quickly. In three days we have not made a single communication trench to the firing line."

	The card players did not even look round; someone said in a low voice, "All right." The man reading the newspaper rose and reported, in a free and easy manner:

	"The Company does not want to dig, because that would be preparation for an advance, and the Committee has resolved. . ."

	"Look here, you understand nothing at all about it, and, moreover, why do you speak for the whole Company? Even if we remain on the defensive we are lost in case of an alarm; the whole Company cannot get out to the firing line along a single trench."

	He said this, and with a gesture of despair went on his way. Matters were hopeless. Every time he tried to speak with them for a time, and in a friendly way, they would listen to him attentively; they liked to talk to him, and, on the whole, his Company looked on him favourably in their own way. But he felt that between him and them a wall had sprung up, against which all his good impulses were shattered. He had lost the path to their soul — lost it in the impassable jungle of darkness, roughness, and that wave of distrust and suspicion which had overwhelmed the soldiers. Was it, perhaps, that he used the wrong words, or was not able to say what he meant? Scarcely that. But a little while before the War, when he was a student and was carried away by the popular movement, he had visited villages and factories and had found "real words " which were clear and comprehensible to all. But, most of all, with what words can one move men to face death when all their feelings are veiled by one feeling — that of self-preservation?


By most accounts, the propaganda was particularly effective among soldiers, many who had been forced to fight in a war they did not want nor understand. For a soldier bearing brunt of the horrors of World War I in the trenches (to give an example: 1.2 million men were lost in the Battle of the Somme for a mere 7.8 miles of territory), the Bolsheviks' propaganda which, as Denikin put it bluntly, "justified the care for one's own hide and furnished it with an ideal basis," might have been especially appealing. The Bolsheviks provided noble-sounding reasons for soldiers to rebel and desert:


https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/20e.htm
	V. I.   Lenin
	Appeal to the Soldiers of All the Belligerent Countries

	...Are we going to continue submissively to bear our yoke, to put up with the war between the capitalist classes?Are we going to let this war drag on by taking the side of our own national governments, our own national bourgeoisies, our own national capitalists, and thereby destroying the international unity of the workers of all countries, of the whole world?

	No, brother soldiers, it is time we opened our eyes, it is time we took our fate into our own hands. In all countries popular wrath against the capitalist class, which has drawn the people into the war, is growing, spreading, and gaining strength. Not only in Germany, but even in Britain, which before the war had the reputation of being one of the freest countries, hundreds and hundreds of true friends and representatives of the working class are languishing in prison for having spoken the honest truth against the war and against the capitalists. The [February] revolution in Russia is only the first step of the first revolution; it should be followed and will be followed by others.


https://www.bl.uk/russian-revolution/articles/propaganda-in-the-russian-revolution
	Bolshevik anti-war propaganda during the First World War was based on Lenin’s idea formulated in his work The War and Russian Social-Democracy (October, 1914):  ‘The conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan’.

	As the War progressed, the slogan became increasingly popular, as it seemed to overcome moral contradictions for soldiers and sailors from poor backgrounds. According to the logic of this slogan, unwillingness to kill or be killed does not make a person a traitor, because class loyalty can outweigh allegiance to the state.

	This idea addressed to the masses implied that a sacrifice for the Homeland was not necessary, as the country was represented by the state that had betrayed its citizens by oppressing them.


The Italian army saw nearly a million desertions, and the German offensives of 1918 were stopped in part by desertions and failure to enroll. Nearly half of the front armies of the French took part in the mutinies of 1917, which were linked to "defeatist" propaganda. The issue of "enemy" propaganda in the French army and press rose to such prominence in France that it led to a treason trial of the Minister of the Interior:


http://www.jstor.org/stable/24436670
	The French Army Mutinies of 1917

	...The most damming evidence against the Minister of the Interior, viewed in historical perspective, is Nivelle's letter of February 28, already cited, in which the general asked Minister of War Lyautey to intervene with Malvy to take action against the disseminators of pacifist and defeatist propaganda, who were undermining the morale of the army. He did not say, as Mangin tried to imply before the letter became public, that the police under Malvy were actually protecting the propagandists, but the general did make it clear that he had received no co-operation from the Ministry of the Interior on what he regarded as a critical matter.


https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Malvy
	At the outbreak of war Malvy resisted calls for the round-up of so-called subversives unionists, pacifists and other 'undesirables' whose names were listed in the Carnet B. He became involved in subsidising newspapers and came under intense criticism when it was learned that the Bonnet Rouge (one of the papers supported by Malvy) had been receiving German money to spread pacifist propaganda.

	When the paper's administrator, Duval, was arrested with a cheque on his person from a German banker, Clemenceau accused Malvy during a secret session of the Senate in July 1917 of 'betraying the interests of France'. When the paper's director was also arrested as a result of the subsequent investigation (which revealed the sale of the paper to a shadowy intermediary, Bolo Pacha), the paper was closed and its director died in prison.

	Added to the civilian unrest of 1917 and the French Army mutinies, the discovery of French military documents in the Bonnet Rouge's offices meant the end for Malvy.

	As Minister of the Interior, he was blamed for not suppressing defeatist and pacifist agitators and publications with sufficient energy and he was forced to resign on 31 August 1917. In October he was charged with treason and tried by a special commission of the Senate the following year. Although acquitted of treason, he was found guilty of culpable negligence in the performance of his duties and banished for five years. His former directeur du cabinet was imprisoned, however, and Bolo and Duval received death sentences.


(see also: https://books.google.com/books?id=tnsxAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA267&lpg=PA267)


And, of course, the formation of paramilitary Red Guards and the October revolution would not have been possible without Bolshevik propaganda.

With the help of Bolshevik propaganda, the war took in conscripts and produced soldiers angry and disillusioned with their governments, sympathetic to Bolshevist ideas, emboldened in mutinous attitudes, and highly experienced in combat--an ideal setup for socialist revolutions. The fruits of this labor can be seen in the Red Guards' seizing of the Winter Palace, the Hungarian Army's support for the Aster revolution, the the Kiel mutiny, the French army mutinies, and so on. Behind the lines, propaganda and agitation played an equally important role: many of the Red Guards were armed workers, and socialist-organized strikes built support for the revolution in Germany and almost did so in Italy (for a thorough, if biased, overview of socialist strikes, see http://isj.org.uk/the-mass-strike-in-the-first-world-war/ . See also https://books.google.com/books?id=v0A7AAAAYAAJ for some insight into Russian socialist activities in the U.S. during and after the war.)

For all the gains to be had by their propaganda, the Bolsheviks were remarkably good at not paying for it:


https://archive.org/stream/Germany-and-Revolution-in-Russia-1915-1918/GermanyAndRevolutionInRussia1915-1918-DocumentsFromArchivesOfGermanForeignMinistry_djvu.txt
	The Chancellor to the Foreign Ministry Liaison Officer  at General Headquarters

	Berlin, 26 July 1917

	...I should therefore be very grateful if the intended statement could be temporarily shelved, and if General Ludendorff could give me an opportunity to express an opinion before he formulates new principles for propaganda at the front. We must be very careful that the literature with which we are aiming to further the process of disintegration inside Russia does not achieve the directly opposite result. 1

	...1. E. Vandervelde, who spent two weeks touring the Eastern front in June 1917, wrote in his Three Aspects of Russian Revolution (London, 1918, p. 134) : 'It seems that this propaganda, while admirably organized and splendidly carried on has the same fault that we find in all German enterprises of this sort; it over-reaches its mark, and provokes finally, by its ponderous insistence, a psychological reaction which is the one result that its organizers failed to foresee.' Vandervelde also noticed the similarity between German propaganda and the views of the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and the Internationalists (p. 133). Bruce Lockhart wrote in The Two Revolutions (London, 1957, p. 93) : '. . . most of the Bolshevik propaganda, including Lenin's articles, which reached the Russian front was disseminated by the Germans, who, either with or without the connivance of Lenin, were able to buy the Bolshevik newspapers in Stockholm and reproduce them.'


https://books.google.com/books?id=_Z46AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138
	...By Vladimir Bourtzev

	...During the war Malinovsky was in Germany, and the Germans, who knew him as a friend and co-worker of Lenine, entrusted to him the propaganda of Bolshevist ideas among the Russian prisoners, which he conducted on an extensive scale.



https://books.google.com/books?id=V3IeAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA418&lpg=PA418
	New Lights on the Russian Revolution

	June 14, 1919

	...Mr. Spargo traces the intricate history of the Russian revolutionary parties and shows how the Socialists in 1902 slit in two, the majority (Bolsheveki) following Lenin, and the minority (Mensheviki) following Plechanov. At first the Bolsheviki were nurst by the Czar, later by the Kaiser. The most violent of the Bolshevik leaders in the Duma, Malinovsky, a close friend of Lenin, turned out to be a police spy and *provocateur*, and his fiery speeches attacking the Government and the bourgeoisie were written for him by Beletzky of the Police Department.

	...The charge that the Bolshevik movement was secretly encouraged by the Russian Government before the war is confirmed by Serge Persky in the latest volume of his journalistic articles, From Nicholas II to Lenin. He has a photograph of notes of a speech delivered by Malinovsky in the Duma which had been OK'd and annotated by the Minister Maarof. Pravda ("Truth"), the official organ of the Bolshevists, was subsidized by the Okhrana (secret police), and Lenin himself in 1910 or 1911 had relations with them. When this was exposed Lenin defended himself in the same fashion as when charged with receiving German aid:

		It was not the Okhrana that made use of us but on the contrary we that made use of the Okhrana. Without doubt the Okhrana has rendered great services to our party without ever obtaining anything from us.


https://archive.org/stream/russianturmoilme00deniuoft/russianturmoilme00deniuoft_djvu.txt
	...the Army was flooded with criminal Bolshevik and Defeatist literature. The stuff upon which our Army was fed — and apparently at the expense of Government funds and of the people's treasure — can be gauged from the report of the Moscow Military Bureau, which alone supplied to the Front the following publications:

		From March 24th to May 1st —
			7,972 copies of the Pravda
			2,000  "    "   Soldiers' Pravda
			30,375 "    "   Social Democrat

		From May 1st to June 11th —
			61,522 copies of the Soldiers' Pravda
			32,711   "    "  Social Democrat
			6,999 11 "    "  Pravda

	and so on. The same kind of literature was sent to the villages by the soldiers.


The Tsarist government, the German government, and the Russian provisional government all at various points funded and distributed Bolshevik propaganda to their own detriment.

If such activities were a detriment to these governments, however, it wasn't always so for their members: some later became high-ranking officials in the Soviet Union or the Weimer Republic, such as the Russian Captain Verchovsky or German State Secretary von Jagow:


https://archive.org/details/fallofthedynasti012755mbp
	There may be one man still alive who knows the whole story; the Russian assistant military attaché, Captain Alexander Werchovski, who replaced Artamanov during his absence. A friend of Werchovski, a Polish nobleman named Louis de Trydar-Burzynski, stated in his memoirs, published in Italy in 1926, that “the assassination [at Sarajevo] was perpetrated with the support of the Russian military attaché at Belgrade, Captain Werchovski...” Werchovski, he continued, “was later War Minister in the Kerensky government; he was a young man whom I had known very well for years, and he told me quite frankly the truth about the origins, preparations and execution of the plot.” Unfortunately, Werchovski, if he is living today, is not likely to tell any more about the case; when last heard of, he held a high command in the Red Army—a curious detail in itself.


https://archive.org/details/fallofthedynasti012755mbp
	Localized war was, in fact, the official catchword in Berlin and Vienna. The sooner it came, the better, according to the experts.

	The bolder Austria became, and the more strongly she was supported, “the more likely Russia is to keep quiet,” said Herr Gottlieb von Jagow, the German Secretary of State (Foreign Minister).


https://books.google.com/books?id=DBwTBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA957&lpg=PA957
	In Lichnowsky's view, Britain would definitely support Russia and France in any war defending Serbia against Austrian aggression. Jagow in particular, however, believed that Lichnowsky had been duped by the British. In August 1914 on the British declaration of war against Germany, Lichnowsky left his post, returned to Germany, and retired from the diplomatic service.

	In a privately circulated pamphlet in 1916, Lichnowsky asserted that his efforts to prevent the outbreak of World War I had not been supported by the German government. This pamphlet, published in January 1918 without his permission and widely distributed by the Allies, caused his expulsion from the Prussian upper house of parliament in April 1918.


https://archive.org/details/fallofthedynasti012755mbp
	...Lichnowsky’s dispatch reached the Wilhelmstrasse at about the same moment as a message from Vienna informing the German government that Austria would declare war on Serbia the next day, or at the latest on July 29. Thereupon Bethmann-Hollweg committed either an incredible blunder, or—as Albertini and some other historians believe—an act of almost equally incredible duplicity. Acting upon instructions from the Kaiser, he forwarded to Vienna Sir Edward Grey’s suggestion about German good offices, but on his own initiative he omitted a key passage in the message he had received from the German Embassy in London which stressed the seriousness of the British warning, and he failed to indicate any official German endorsement of the suggestion; he merely asked for the Austrian views about it. He even allowed his colleague, Jagow, to call in the Austrian Ambassador, and in effect to advise him that the Austrians should pay no attention to any British suggestions that Berlin might feel obliged, for the sake of the record, to forward.


https://archive.org/stream/Germany-and-Revolution-in-Russia-1915-1918/GermanyAndRevolutionInRussia1915-1918-DocumentsFromArchivesOfGermanForeignMinistry_djvu.txt
	The State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry to the State  Secretary of the Treasury

	Berlin, 6 July, 1915

	Five million marks are required here for the promotion of Revlulionary propaganda in Russia. As this sum cannot be covered out of the funds at our disposal, I would like to request Your Excellency to put it at my disposal by charging it to Article VI, Section II of the extraordinary budget. I should be extremely grateful to Your Excellency if you would inform me  what action is taken. 1

	JAGOW

	1 The request was granted on 9 July.


https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538811
	...In short, the high bureaucracy was not interested in personnel purges in 1919. Nor were the dominant Social Democrats. In fact, the SPD never demanded that the senior statesmen and diplomats of the empire be held accountable. The resulting irony was that the Republic's Committee of Enquiry, for example, relied for many of its "expert" affidavits upon the very men who had been in positions of power and responsibility in July 1914, men such as Gottleib von Jagow and Johanes Kreig. By failing to clean house in 1919, by failing to confront the matter of Germany's role in the origins of the First World War brutally and honestly, and, above all, by failing to chase the patriotic censors from their temples of influence, the first leaders of the Weimar Republic did their country a great disservice.


The case of von Jagow and his accomplices at the German Foreign Ministry is particularly awkward: Jagow acted suspiciously to start the war, then acted carelessly to fund the Bolsheviks, only for the Bolsheviks to turn around and arm and support the anti-war German Revolutionaries, who proceeded to act suspiciously to keep Jagow in office!

More than a few of the key players in World War One made decisions which, when viewed in aggregate, are awkward or hard to explain. The Tsarist Foreign Minister Sazonov, for example, had worked closely with the Okhrana in a plot to dissolve the Duma in June 1907; the same Sazonov convinced the Tsar to mobilize his forces and avert peace at the start of the war before sabotaging the White Army's final chance to take Petrograd near the war's end:


https://books.google.com/books/?id=L1pDAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA61
	WHY PETROGRAD HAS NOT BEEN TAKEN

	...The initial main cause of the failure to take Petrograd had consisted in the faulty political organisation of the Russians managing the affairs of those attacking the Bolsheviks. According to the theory proceeded upon Admiral Kolchack, being situated in Siberia, has by general consent assumed the position of 'supreme ruler' of the Russians driven from Russia by the tyranny of the Bolsheviks. He is represented in the South of Russia by General Denikin, on the Petrograd front by General Yudenich, who had authority to 'carry on' without assuming any original responsibility on their own. Further, there was a 'political conference' representing Admiral Kolchak in Paris and consisting of M. Sazonov, former Minister of Foreign Affairs to Nicolas the Second, and four or five stray Russian politicians, using the word 'stray' in it strict sense as meaning those who have turned up by accident. ...As no important decision could be taken without the consent of Admiral Kolchack, and as evidently the Admiral could not in addition to his manifold trials on the Siberian front master the conditions north of Petrograd and south of Moscow, in practice every question was referred to the Russian representatives in Paris. Here the political council was at loggerheads. Prince Lyvov had the distinction of being the most ineffective of all the Ministers in the Russian Provisional Governments after the revolution; M. Tchaikovsky, a veteran of the struggle with despotism, was an enthusiast out of touch with actual conditions in Russia; M. Savinkov, the only man of ability and energy, was extremely distasteful to the Conservatives; consequently all business came into the hands of M. Sazonov.

	...Even however had Yudenich been able to take Petrograd alone, most people, including himself, thought that he would not be able to hold it unaided with so small a force as was at his disposal. ...help could only be obtained from one of two quarters, the Finns or the Esthonians. It was here that the political question came in. ...The services of Finland, ...if obtained, would be at a price. What the price was, all knew: the recognition by the Russians of her independence, together with modest territorial compensation and financial support in making the expedition. For this she would guarantee to take and hold Petrograd with troops that were fresh, hardy, loyal to the cause of order and buoyed by the knowledge that they had beaten the Reds in Finland and could beat them again in Russia. The Bolshevik dispositions on the Finnish front were known down to the last detail, and it was calculated that if they were pressed on the south of the Gulf of Finland too, the affair would be over in ten days, at most a fortnight. It was clear that the co-operation of Finland was essential to turn the capture of Petrograd from a gamble into a certainty ...and common prudence dictated obtaining it at the price of recognising what was already a *fait accompli*, namely the independence of Russia's small but stubborn northern neighbor

	...the first and best chance of taking Petrograd missed. But the chance of obtaining Finnish co-operation came again when General Yudenich started on his forlorn hope. His initial success was so striking that the Finnish army and the greater part of the nation was all agog to move ...After the suggestion of Finland's co-operation had first been scouted by Yudenich and his representatives in Finland and that co-operation had been solicited, but in so cavalier a form as to alienate valuable Finnish sympathy...


https://books.google.com/books?id=SagUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA143
	...Up to now the government has followed and will continue to follow the same relations with the Russians. Finland cannot bind itself to give strategic guarantees to Sazonov. Kammerer's threats in this condition are rejected by various Entente diplomats here. Sazonov's offer to pay for the Petrograd expedition and to arrange for all other questions concerning Finland's demands are on the whole not adequate...


https://books.google.com/books/?id=L1pDAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA61
	...an urgent appeal was made to M. Sazonov to satisfy the Finish demands and so save the Russian situation. ...Privately [Sazonov] was known to have held the view that the recognition of Finnish independence was inadmissible and, it is said, even went to the ridiculous length of saying that he would never speak to General Mannerheim. Now, he took the opportunity to leave the appeal of General Yudenich, of the North-West Government, and of the Russian representatives in Finland unanswered at all events until Yudenich's force was beat back and the Finns would no longer have been willing to move. Nor was M. Sazonov alone in his obstinacy. Even then the question was actively discussed in Finland of a volunteer expedition against Petrograd. This was the moment chosen by Kerensky in Paris and Professor Miliukov in London separately to make statements to the effect that no one had the right to recognize the independence of Finland, thus completely antagonising the latter's growing sympathy with the Russians.


Petrograd was second in importance only to Moscow; had Finnish support come, and Petrograd been taken by the Whites, world history might have been very different. But Sazonov ignored Yudenich's plea to secure Finnish aid while the Bolsheviks drove the Whites out of Petrograd and away from hope of victory. When it looked like the Finns might decide to come anyway, Kerensky cooled hopes for a surprise Finnish initiative with an ill-timed insult.

Whatever their intentions, Sazonov and Kerensky often acted in ways that ended up helping the Bolsheviks. Sazonov's 1907 intrigues to dissolve the Duma further soured public opinion against the Tsar, and Kerensky's weakness during the Bolshevik's coup (among other things) is often cited in charges of his responsibility for their rise to power. Sazonov and Kerensky also worked in tandem to give the Bolsheviks a crucial propaganda win:


https://books.google.com/books?id=Hnb3CgAAQBAJ&pg=PT112&lpg=PT112
	The Milyukov crisis was the first test of Lenin's mettle after he arrived in Russia, and deserves a closer look. The issue of war aims was arguably *the* political question opened up by the February Revolution, even if it had been initially obscured in the popular euphoria over the fall of the tsar and his secret police. For what purpose, after all, were all those millions of wretched muzhiks fighting, bleeding and dying on fronts stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea? While few in Russia, or anywhere else, yet suspected the full extent of the secret Ottoman partition plans agreed between then foreign minister Sergei Sazonov, Mark Sykes and Georges Picot in 1915-16, rumors were running hot, and getting hotter all the time. On 2 December 1916, then-chairman of the Council of Ministers A. F. Trepov, to quiet the usual mob of hecklers that had greeted his first Duma address, had revealed publicly for the first time that Britain and France had promised Russia Constantinople and the Straits. Realising the political potency of the issue, Kerensky had reportedly rifled through the Foreign Ministry archives after the tsar had abdicated in March for copies of these 'secret treaties', and then instructed the Provisional Committee of the Duma to 'Hide them!' Suspecting that the Provisional Government was indeed hiding something, Bolshevik factory committees in Petrograd had issued a series of resolutions demanding the publication of the secret treaties.


http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/971/qotw.html
	“Statement by Trotsky on the Publication of the Secret Treaties”

	...In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition. Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy... The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists... The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.


For the Bolsheviks, Sazonov's well-documented complicity in the infamous Sykes-Picot deal (notable for its disastrous effects on peace and stability in the Middle East) was proof of what their propaganda had been saying all along: that the war was not started for any noble reason like honor or defense of the homeland, but for the gain of an elite few. The provisional government's inexplicable decision not to release these documents on their own denied them an easy opportunity to throw cold water on Bolshevik accusations that the provisional government were mere puppets of imperialist warmongers while giving the Bolsheviks ammo to continue the same.

The Bolsheviks got many more lucky breaks throughout the course of the war, and not just from Kerensky's doughy lack of initiative. Had Sazanov and the German Foreign Ministry not acted to mobilize their respective armies, a wider war would likely had been avoided (if the Willy Nicky Telegrams tell us anything), and the war, the Bolsheviks' main prop for turning citizens against their governments, could very well have been over in a matter of months rather than years. Even after the Entente and Central powers had become locked in heavy fighting, there were missed chances for an early end to the war.

World War One, infamous for its grueling trench warfare, started out as a faster "war of movement." The Germans believed they had six weeks to defeat France before Russia would become too powerful to stop, and so their opening move was a sweeping kind of blitzkrieg across north eastern France, converging on Paris. The Schlieffen plan, as it was called, was an early success: by the sixth week, nervous French officials contemplated evacuation as the sound of German artillery echoed through Parisian streets.

But as the Germans met France's last line of defense at the river Marne, things began to go wrong. Field Marshall Bulow began shelling his own armies. Communications among field commanders and with the High Command were plagued with technical problems and human error:


https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Marne_1914.html
	Messages often arrived so mutilated at Bülow’s and Kluck’s headquarters that they had to be re-sent three or four times. Field telegraph stations managed to get only twenty-nine of fifty-nine reports from First Army’s fliers to Kluck and Kuhl between 1 and 5 September. There were no electronic ties between First and Second armies, or between them and their army corps and cavalry corps. ...No one thought of using airplanes to pass important orders along the line. The distance between Bülow’s headquarters at Montmort and Kluck’s at Vandrest (and later Mareuil), after all, was a mere fifty-five kilometers, or half an hour by air. The two commanders were thus effectively cut off from discussing the rapidly developing situation with each other—and with Moltke, who was 435 kilometers by automobile* away from Second Army headquarters and 445 from First Army headquarters.

	Interestingly, Tappen rejected all suggestions that the OHL, or at least a small operations staff, move up to the front behind the German right wing on the grounds of “technical difficulties as well as stodginess.”68 One can only speculate whether Moltke, for his part, remembered that in 1866 his uncle had supervised the movements of his armies during the Battle of Königgrätz from the Roskosberg, above the Bistritz River, and that he had likewise led from the front in 1870 during the Battle of Sedan from a ridge high above the Meuse River near Frénois.


Cheif of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, in an apparent fit of nervousness, moved two divisions to the Eastern front and issued a vague and inconsistent "General Directive" to his armies while declining to move to the front to direct them. Then things got worse:


http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/insert_main_wide_image/public/marne_sept_7.jpg

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Marne_1914.html
	Within hours, the lack of command and control from Luxembourg became manifestly evident. At the very moment that Moltke and Tap-pen were drafting their General Directive calling on Third Army to drive on Troyes-Vendeuvre, Hausen at 5 PM on 4 September informed the OHL that he had ordered a day of rest for his forces. He repeated the message an hour later. “Troops desperately need a day of rest.” He did not budge from his decision when the two flanking armies, Second and Fourth, informed him that they were resuming the offensive early the next morning. He stood firm even after he belatedly received Moltke’s instruction to advance on Troyes-Vendeuvre at eight o’clock that night.

	Just before midnight, he informed the OHL for a third time in less than seven hours that Third Army would rest on 5 September. Moltke raised no objections.

	...Every other German army had marched relentlessly under a searing sun during the last month. Every other army had suffered heavy casualties. Every other army needed rest and resupply. Some had in fact marched much greater distances than Third Army: First Army 500 kilometers and Second Army 440.

	...It was now the thirty-fifth day of mobilization. Schlieffen had prescribed victory on the thirty-ninth or fortieth day...

	...Realizing that First Army’s three (under strength) corps on the Ourcq were too weak to mount a counterattack against 150,000 French soldiers, they turned to Bülow. Shortly after 8 AM on 7 September, they telegraphed Second Army headquarters at Champaubert: “II, IV and IV Reserve Corps heavily engaged west of the lower Ourcq. Where III and IX Army Corps? What is your situation?” No reply. They repeated the message, adding “Urgently request answer.” It crossed paths with a radiogram from Second Army wishing to know, “What is your situation?” Finally, a third request from Kuhl, “Engagement III and IX Corps at the Ourcq urgently required.”65 No reply.

	...Kluck and Kuhl could wait no longer. Still without a reply from Bülow to their request for reinforcements, they seized the initiative and ordered Ewald von Lochow’s III Corps and Quast’s IX Corps, both temporarily assigned to Bülow, to leave Second Army’s right wing in broad daylight and quick-march to the Ourcq.71 For Kuhl had decided to master what now threatened to be assaults on both his wings by way of an all-out offensive on the right, designed to crush Maunoury’s Sixth Army before the BEF could engage German First or Second army.

	Incredibly, neither Kluck nor Kuhl was aware that General von Bülow shortly after midnight on 7 September had already pulled back his right wing, fearing that his soldiers were too exhausted to ward off another French frontal attack. Bülow withdrew III and IX corps of First Army as well as his own X Reserve Corps fifteen to twenty kilometers behind the shelter, such as it was, of the Petit Morin River—some eight hours before First Army’s duumvirate ordered them to march to the Ourcq. Bülow radioed Moltke of his action at 2 AM. He declined to inform Kluck via dispatch rider.

	...the German position on the Marne and the Ourcq defies rational analysis...

	Without firm direction from the OHL, both commanders had developed their own operational concepts. ...Bülow made no effort to coordinate the operations of the two “strike” armies or to bring Moltke fully into the calculus.

	...For the Germans, 7 September was the critical day in the Battle of the Marne. Kluck and Kuhl, as noted previously, had hastily taken II and IV corps out of the line on the Marne and rushed them north to aid Gronau’s corps on the Ourcq. Bülow had then withdrawn III and IX corps as well as X Reserve Corps behind the Petit Morin—only to have had Kluck and Kuhl eight hours later order III and IX corps to leave Bülow’s right wing and to march north in order to help defeat Maunoury’s French Sixth Army. None of these orders was shared, much less discussed beforehand. In the process, as is well known, Bülow, Kluck, and Kuhl had created a fifty-kilometer-wide gap between First and Second armies—one into which the BEF was slowly stumbling

	...At Luxembourg, General von Moltke yet again was on the verge of panic. “Today a great decision will come about,” he wrote his wife, Eliza, on 7 September, “since yesterday our entire army is fighting from Paris to Upper Alsace. Should I have to give my life today to bring about victory, I would do it gladly a thousand times.” He lamented the “streams of blood” that had already been shed and the “countless” homes and lives that had been destroyed. “I often shudder when I think of this and I feel as though I need to accept responsibility for this dreadfulness. …”75 These were not the words of a great captain.

	...In three days and while outnumbering the enemy at least ten to one, “Johnnie” French’s army had advanced just forty kilometers. The BEF’s importance lay in its role as an “army in being,” to borrow a naval term.

	...The Allied advance into the fifty-kilometer-wide space between First and Second armies drove Moltke ever deeper into despair. He issued no orders to either Bülow or Kluck on 6 or 7 September. Instead, he withdrew into a world of self-pity and grief. The “burden of responsibility of the last several days,” he wrote his wife, was impossible even to name. “For the great battle of our army along its entire front has not yet been decided.” The “horrible tension” of the last few days, the “absence of news from the far distant armies,” and “knowing all that was at stake” was “almost beyond human power” to comprehend. “The terrible difficulty of our situation stands like an almost impenetrable black wall in front of me.”

	...Bülow’s X Corps had pounded Dubois’s IX Corps at Saint-Prix and his Guard Corps had violently assaulted IX Corps at Bannes on 6 and 7 September; he now urged Third Army to exploit the gap. It would require a major effort by an army down to 2,105 officers and 81,199 ranks.100

	Yet again, Hausen prevaricated. It was the dilemma of Dinant all over again. On his right, Plettenberg’s 2d Guard Division had stalled at Normée. Bülow again called for relief. “Strongest possible support 3 Army urgently desired. The day’s decision depends [on this].” On Hausen’s left, Heinrich von Schenck’s XVIII Corps of Fourth Army likewise had been stopped in its tracks around Vitry-le-François, and Duke Albrecht called for assistance.102 Whom to obey? A royal prince? Prussia’s senior army commander? Or Moltke, who had ordered Third Army to march on Troyes-Vendeuvre? As at Dinant, Hausen decided to please all suitors: He divided his army. He ordered Maximilian von Laffert’s XIX Corps to support Schenck’s VIII Corps at Glannes; he approved Karl d’Elsa’s prior decision to rush 32d ID as well as the artillery of 23d ID to aid the Guard Corps at Clamanges-Lenharré; and he instructed his remaining forces (mainly 23d ID and 24th RID released by the fall of Fortress Givet) to continue on to Troyes-Vendeuvre. He declined to use Fourth Army’s direct telephone to Luxembourg to seek Moltke’s input.

	Hausen justified his actions in his unpublished memoirs. Orders were orders. He could not disobey a direct command from Bülow, or from Duke Albrecht, or from Moltke, even if it meant splitting his army into three separate entities.

	For a third time since Fumay and Sommesous–Sompuis–Vitry-le-François, Hausen lost a splendid opportunity to drive an attack through the French line. The day of rest he had generously given his troops on 5 September now came home to roost: He was too far behind Second and Fourth armies on his flanks to rush to the immediate aid of either, and he was too far from the fighting front to penetrate Foch’s weak spot. By dividing his forces, he forwent any attempt to envelop French Ninth Army. By having halted on 5 September, he had given away the chance to break through the fifteen-kilometer-wide gap between Foch’s Ninth Army and Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army.104 One can only imagine what Hans von Gronau would have done under the circumstances.

	...Bülow promised 2nd GD (later also 1st GD) for Kirchbach’s right wing. Hausen now commanded six and one-half army corps...

	...General von Hausen’s supporters have depicted him as a “gifted army commander” who sought to bring about a small Cannae at the eleventh hour, and they have seen in his night attack an example of operational art to be emulated by the rest of the German army.126 Yet even at the tactical level, its wisdom remains questionable in light of the fact that it was carried out across a river at night, without reconnaissance of enemy positions, without prior shelling, without artillery support during the advance, and with unloaded rifles.

	...At that very moment, a visitor from the OHL arrived at First Army headquarters: Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, on what undoubtedly is the most famous staff tour in military history.

	...“IF THE PESSIMISTIC OBERSTLEUTNANT HENTSCH HAD CRASHED INTO a tree … somewhere on his journey of 8 September, or if he had been shot by a French straggler, we would have had a ceasefire two weeks later and thereafter would have received a peace in which we could have asked for everything.”...

	...U.S. Army chief of staff Peyton C. March after the war expressed amazement that Germany’s senior army commanders had readily obeyed orders from “a perfectly unknown lieutenant colonel … far exceeding his authority,” and suggested that the Allies erect a monument in their “Hall of Fame” to honor Hentsch.

	...THE MOOD AT THE OHL on the morning of 8 September can only be described as bordering on panic.13 Moltke had received no word from First or Second armies the past two days. Both were reported to be within striking distance of Paris, yet one (First) had cut sharply across the front of the other (Second) at the Marne. French chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre had launched a massive counterattack along the entire front from Paris to Verdun. A new French Sixth Army seemed to be trying to envelop First Army’s right flank on the Ourcq. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) ever so slowly was marching into the fifty-kilometer-wide gap between First and Second armies. Moltke, fearing that First Army had already been attacked in the rear and was in danger of being ground up between French Sixth Army and the BEF, desperately needed clarity.

	During the intense discussions among the four officers—Moltke, Tappen, Hentsch, and Dommes—in Tappen’s office, Moltke most likely gave Hentsch powers to initiate a general withdrawal of the right wing to the line Sainte-Menehould–Reims–Fismes–Soissons if First Army’s predicament made such a move “necessary.” Hentsch took this to constitute “full power of authority” (Vollmacht) to act in Moltke’s name.

	...he was off to Second Army headquarters at Montmort-Lucy, where he arrived at 6:45 PM. Bülow returned from his command post at Fromentières half an hour later. The ensuing meeting was greatly to shape the Battle of the Marne.

	On arriving at the Château de Montmort, Hentsch’s cautious optimism waned. The shafts of the wagons of Second Army’s headquarters staff all pointed north, an indication of a planned withdrawal.

	...At this point in the discussion, either Bülow or Matthes uttered what soon became a fateful word, “Schlacke.”25 Captain König reiterated this fact in formal replies to the historians of the Reichsarchiv in March 1925 and January 1926, and on both occasions testified that the word cinders had been applied to Second Army.

	...All present at the meeting agreed that First Army’s situation was “desperate;” none had faith that Kluck’s right wing could envelop Maunoury’s left. Furthermore, all agreed that the last possible moment to order a general retreat would come as soon as major Allied forces crossed the Marne. For reasons that he never explained, Hentsch decided to spend the night at Montmort rather than to push on to First Army headquarters.

	...Bülow, having risen and been briefed by Lauenstein and Matthes on their talks with Hentsch, reviewed the morning’s reconnaissance report from Lieutenant Berthold of Flying Squadron 23. It confirmed his worst fears: “Advance by 5 hostile columns in a northerly direction in the region of Montmirail—La Ferté.”31 They were obviously advancing from the Petit Morin toward the Marne into the gap between First and Second armies. For Bülow, the last moment to order a general retreat had arrived. “Second Army initiates retreat,” he tersely informed Hausen and Kluck on his left and right, respectively, at 9:02 AM, “right flank on Damery [sic].”32 When shortly thereafter a message arrived from Mareuil stating that First Army was withdrawing its left flank (Alexander von Linsingen’s II Corps) toward Coulombs, Bülow (incorrectly) assumed that this was because Hentsch had ordered Kluck also to begin the withdrawal.33 Bad communications yet again bedeviled the Germans.

	How does one account for the bizarre meeting at Montmort? On the surface, it seems ludicrous that a mere lieutenant colonel was able to move Prussia’s most senior field commander into ordering his army to retreat without having suffered a major defeat. Even more ludicrous is that Bülow made absolutely no effort to contact either Moltke at Luxembourg or Kluck at Mareuil—by telegraph, rider, automobile, or airplane. Incredibly, four trains of Bülow’s Telephone Section 2 sat idle at Dormans studying handbooks on how to install and repair lines and equipment; they took no steps whatsoever to establish telephone communications with Kluck, less than sixty kilometers away as the crow flies.

	...Surely, Bülow and Lauenstein could, and should, have overruled a lieutenant colonel and taken responsibility for coordinating their intended action with the OHL and First Army.

	The truth of the matter is that the order to retreat was issued not by Hentsch or by Moltke, but by Bülow, with whom responsibility for setting in motion the German retreat from the Marne must rest.

	Some scholars have viewed Bülow’s decision on the fourth day of the battle to avert a pending “catastrophe” by way of a timely retreat as “a sound one.”35 At the time, Lauenstein crowed to Deputy Chief of Staff von Stein that “Germany will one day thank General von Bülow that he issued the order to retreat.”36 Few German military writers, either at the time or subsequently, have agreed with either view. They are right.

	Quite apart from the sudden and impulsive nature of the decision and Bülow’s refusal to seek input from Moltke or Kluck, it did not correspond to the situation on the ground. There had been no major breakthrough. Kluck was rallying his army corps to crush French Sixth Army on the Ourcq. Rudolf von Lepel’s infantry brigade, marching southwest from Brussels, was about to strike Maunoury’s left flank. Second Army had merely to close up its front and stand firm at the Marne.

	...General von Kuhl, First Army’s chief of staff, met Hentsch on a dusty road at Mareuil. ...Hentsch then made his formal presentation. Fifth Army was tied down at Verdun; Sixth and Seventh armies likewise were pinned at Nancy-Épinal; and Bülow’s VII Corps had not “withdrawn” behind the Marne but had been “hurled” back across the river. To wit, the time for a general retreat had come.

	...Kuhl “vigorously” objected.43 First Army’s right wing was about to break Maunoury’s left; the attack had to be given a chance to succeed; a retreat by his exhausted and disorganized forces was out of the question. And how, he demanded to know, had Bülow come to retreat behind the Marne? Hentsch obfuscated. “The decision to retreat,” he coldly replied, “had been a bitter pill for Old Bülow to swallow.”

	He then repeated the unsubstantiated but critical comment made by either Bülow or Matthes at Montmort that Second Army had been reduced to “cinders” by Franchet d’Espèrey’s vicious attacks. Finally, Hentsch pulled his ace out of his sleeve: He had come with “full power of authority” and “in the name of the Oberste-Heeresleitung” ordered First Army to retreat. It was less than a clinical staff performance.

	...Kuhl had no direct telephone line to Luxembourg, and he chose not to use one of his aircraft to send a staff officer to Montmort to confer with Bülow or Lauenstein. Later on, he simply informed Kluck of his discussion with Hentsch. “With a heavy heart, General von Kluck was obliged to accept the order.”

	...Hentsch, “psychologically deeply shaken” by the gravity of his action and fearful that he would be “blamed for the unfortunate termination of the [Schlieffen-Moltke] operation,”46 departed Mareuil at 1 PM—not to brief Second Army on his discussions with Kuhl but to inform Third, Fourth, and Fifth armies of the decision to retreat.

	...at around 9 AM, Lieutenant Colonel Hentsch arrived at Varennes on the return leg of his tour of the front. Arguing that Second Army had been reduced to “cinders"...

	...chief of staff, General Walther von Lüwitz, lectured Moltke that a major withdrawal would have a decimating “moral effect” on the troops.

	Then the proverbial bolt from the blue: Just as Tappen was drafting orders for Fifth, Fourth, and Third armies to maintain their positions, his staff overheard a relayed radio message from Bülow at Second Army headquarters to the OHL. “Enemy appears to want to direct his main offensive against the right flank and center of Third Army” in an obvious attempt to break through at Vitry-le-François.102 A “deeply shaken” Moltke saw no reason to doubt Bülow. The only countermeasure was to withdraw the entire German center to the line Suippes–Sainte-Menehould

	...He instructed Second Army to fall back to Thuizy (southeast of Reims), Third Army to the line Thuizy-Suippes, Fourth Army to Suippes–Sainte-Menehould, and Fifth Army to east of Sainte-Menehould. This would essentially become the stationary trench line of the Western Front.

	...To the German soldiers at the sharp end of the stick, the order to retreat seemed grotesque. They did not feel like a beaten army. Georg Wichura, whose 5th ID for days had valiantly held up the advance of the BEF and the French cavalry corps between Monbertoin and Montreuil-aux-Lions, was “decimated” by the order. The “mood swing” among his men was “terrible, everywhere confused looks.” “A thousand serious thoughts went through their heads,” the division’s diary noted. “Legs like lead. Silent and exhausted, as if in a trance, the column plods on ahead.”116 Similar reactions were noted at Third Army. The order to retreat arrived like a “bolt of thunder” at 133d RIR. Its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Schmidt, recalled, “I saw many men cry, the tears rolled down their cheeks; others simply expressed amazement.” Lieutenant Colonel Wilke of 178th IR noted “understandable shrugging of shoulders, sad shaking of heads. … Finally, it all turned into a dumbfounded silence filled with ominous anticipation.”117 The general feeling among the Saxon troops was that “it was not our fault, we stood our ground.”

	...It began at the Marne in 1914. It ended at Versailles in 1919. In between, about sixty million young men had been mobilized, ten million killed, and twenty million wounded. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, the great tragedy of the Marne is that it was strategically indecisive. Had German First Army destroyed French Sixth Army east of Paris; had French Fifth Army and the BEF driven through the gap between German First and Second armies expeditiously; had French Fifth Army pursued German Second Army more energetically beyond the Marne; then perhaps the world would have been spared the greater catastrophe that was to follow in 1939–45.


As the Germans engaged the French at Marne, Field Marshal Hausen and Field Marshal Bulow inexplicably stayed behind. Hausen later split his army in an attempt to follow three orders at once and led a bayonet charge with unloaded rifles across a river. Bulow ordered his corps to withdraw while Marshall Kluck ordered some to advance, with neither aware of the other's orders nor making any attempt to coordinate with Moltke. Moltke sent Colonel Hentsch to check the armies and decide on a general retreat, only for Bulow to decide to retreat on his own. Hentsch, despite having no contact with Bulow after his decision to retreat, tells Kluck that Bulow has already retreated and that its time for him to retreat too. Hentsch then skips updating Bulow on Kluck's status and orders the rest of the armies to retreat. Just as Lüwitz and Tappen are trying to convince Moltke to hold the line, Bulow radios in with news of a new French offensive. Moltke, "deeply shaken," orders a full retreat. Even though Bulow, unusually, doesn't blow up any bridges behind him, the French fail to pursue or do any serious damage to the retreating German army. With neither side making any decisive gains, the Germans retreat to a fortified line that remains more or less stationary for the rest of the war.

As Herwig writes, the great tragedy of the Battle of Marne is that neither side capitalized on the others mistakes--had the BEF been a little faster, they might have breached the gap in the German lines and surrounded their armies. If the French had pursued and destroyed the retreating Germans, they might have done enough damage to bring the Germans to negotiate. Had the Germans not retreated, they might have taken Paris. These opportunities missed, the battle failed to be decisive for either side. Instead, Marne was decisive in how it shaped the rest of the war: the war of movement on the Western Front became trench warfare for four long years.

By some German military historians' analysis, the Germans had already lost the war by September 1914. The German government, however, made no attempt to negotiate for peace.

After Marne, General Erich von Falkenhayn replaced Moltke as Chief of the General Staff. Falkenhayn's career there, unfortunately, was a repeat of Moltke's string of failures to capitalize on opportunities to quickly end the war, this time on a strategic scale:


http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=hashtaghistory
	...Moltke was replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn, whom the Kaiser personally knew and trusted. The appointment of Falkenhayn was not well received by the rest of the High Command, and he became increasingly loathed as the war progressed and Germany failed to break through in the West.

	...General Falkenhayn believed that Germany should focus its efforts on breaking through in the Western Front. They were close to achieving this at the Marne, and he believed that by transferring troops from the East to the West, that break through could be achieved.  However, General Ludendorff and his like-minded partner Paul Von Hindenburg believed that Germany’s forces should concentrate on the Eastern Front since they had already achieved major victories over the Russians at the Battles of Tannenberg, Lodz, and the Masurian Lakes in 1914-1915. Ludendorff was adamant that if Falkenhayn diverted troops to the Eastern Front, he would be able to completely encircle the Russians at Lodz at the bend of Vistula River and achieve the knockout blow that Germany sought. Falkenhayn, however, was narrowly focused on the West. He dismissed Ludendorff’s pleas and after the war commented on the subject stating that, “It was a grave mistake to believe that our western enemies would give way, if, and because Russia was beaten. No decision in the East, even though it were as thorough as it was possible to imagine, could spare us from fighting to a conclusion in the West.”

	Falkenhayn was the Chief of the General Staff and outranked Ludendorff.  He ignored Ludendorff’s protests and launched a second assault on the French city of Ypres, which was repulsed with heavy casualties. Yet even after this defeat, Falkenhayn’s resolve did not waver. As a result, by the end of 1915 the Russian armies were severely weakened but crucially still in the field, while Germany continued to fight an exhausting war on two fronts. The commanders in the Eastern Theatre were appalled by this series of unfortunate events and resorted to name-calling and petty hostility to Falkenhayn.

	...The successful German Gorlice - Tornow Offensive of May 1915 was a major blow to Russian morale. The Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, declared himself front - line supreme commander to inspire the faltering troops. 49 Consequently, each subsequent Russian defeat was blamed on the Tsar and his government. Had Falkenhayn transferred the required battalions to the east at the Battle of Lodz, the Russian army would have been completely annihilated ...A decisive defeat at the Battle of Lodz could have produced a political and social crisis significant enough to bring Russia to the negotiating table. With Russia out of the war in 1915, the Central Powers would not have resorted to the question of unrestricted submarine warfare because of the Allied economic blockade, denying the excuse for America to join the war, and allowing most of the eastern forces to bolster the west for a true knockout blow that the High Command desired.


Falkenhayn was obsessed with getting a breakthrough on the Western Front, even at the expense of missed opportunities to knock Russia out of the war. Even on the Eastern Front, Falkenhayn sought to pull troops from Russia to attack Serbia. If Falkanhayn had committed the requested forces to Lodz, Russia would have surrendered and Falkanhayn would have had enough forces for his Western Front breakthrough.

Falkenhayn's breakthrough never came. His major offensive at Verdun didn't go as planned, in part due to communications failures and stubborn field commanders, reminiscent of the tragedy at Marne:


http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=hashtaghistory
	In order to end the war using his new strategy of “bleeding the French white,” Falkenhayn chose the fortress of Verdun as the target for his next attack. Although this battle is traditionally remembered today as an atrocious meat grinder that amounted to little more than needless bloodshed, the battle was never intended to develop the way it did.

	...Falkenhayn kept a large force in reserve to thwart the eventual Allied counterattack, and believed that his heavy artillery could produce enough casualties to bring the French to the negotiating table. However, miscommunication and disagreement between Falkenhayn and the commanders of the German 5th army undermined this unique plan for limited victory.

	The commanders of the 5th army, who represented the brunt of the German assault believed that they should employ artillery on the three available sides surrounding Verdun. Artillery would be used to thoroughly bombard Verdun, and then the 5th army could take it. The attack order given to troops on January 27, 1916 urged the soldiers to fight much more aggressively than Falkenhayn intended. “The entire battle for the fortress of Verdun depends upon the attack never coming to a halt, thereby preventing the French from ever having the opportunity to construct new positions in their rear and reorganizing their shattered resistance.

	Falkenhayn did not want to risk such a complicated three - prong attack, and instead told the 5th army to limit their attack on just the east bank of the Meuse River; after - all, it didn’t matter if they took the fortress, they just needed to be in a desirable position and provoke an Allied counterattack.

	The discord between Falkenhayn and the 5th army produced disastrous consequences for the German forces. Although the initial wave of attacks against Verdun were successful in inflicting massive casualties on the French, Falkenhayn refused to deploy his reserve force to shatter the faltering French line. Crown Prince Wilhelm, the son of the Kaiser, was one of the commanding generals of the 5th army and after the battle he lamented that:

		On the evening of the 24 February, the resistance of the enemy was actually broken; the path to Verdun was open!... We were so close to a complete victory! However, I lacked the reserves for an immediate and ruthless exploitation of the success we had achieved. The troops, who had been engaged in unbroken, heavy combat for 4 days, were no longer in the condition to do so. Thus, the psychological moment passed unused.

	Falkenhayn’s reluctance to commit his reserves on time allowed the Franco - British forces to reinforce the area. The Germans were halted well short of the line Falkenhayn wished to hold to conduct his offensive - defensive battle, and the French were content to bombard the Germans with their own artillery from the west bank of the Meuse.

	The Battle of Verdun dragged on with mounting casualties, but the numbers were not lopsided enough to produce the political effect Falkenhayn hoped for. The initiative was finally called off on December 17, 1916.


Instead of "bleeding the French White," the battle of Verdun bled both sides with horrific casualties:


https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Verdun
	...As the French defense was reorganized, the Germans captured the undefended Fort Douaumont, arguably the most formidable of the strongpoints surrounding Verdun. Eight months would pass and much blood would be shed before the French could reclaim the fort.

	...On June 1 the Germans attacked Vaux and Thiaumont, two strongpoints in the French line on the right bank. After days of back-and-forth combat, the Germans captured both positions on June 9, but they were unable to carry their attack through to the defensive works south of Thiaumont. Fighting on the left bank was largely inconclusive, but on June 15 the French reclaimed roughly a little more than a half mile (one kilometre) of trenches on Le Mort Homme. Such minor gains, which came at an enormous cost in lives, would typify the horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front.

	...The preliminaries of the great Franco-British offensive on the Somme started on June 24 with a weeklong artillery barrage. The general Allied infantry assault began on July 1, and the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties—with 20,000 killed—on the first day alone.

	...From February 21 to June 15, the French army had fielded 66 divisions at Verdun; by December 1916, roughly 75 percent of the French army had seen action on the Meuse. From February through July, the Germans had used 43 divisions. French guns at Verdun fired over 10,000,000 rounds with the field artillery, over 1,000,000 medium-calibre rounds, and 600,000 large-calibre rounds. At the conclusion of this enormous expenditure of blood and treasure, the lines were little changed from where they had been in early February.

	...In September, Gen. Charles Mangin, who had held command of a section of the French defensive line from Fleury to the right bank of the Meuse from June 22, proposed a scheme to liberate the Verdun region. Nivelle approved, and that offensive was initiated on October 21 with an artillery barrage across a broad front. An infantry assault followed on October 24, with three divisions advancing behind a creeping artillery barrage. By that evening the French had retaken Douaumont along with 6,000 German prisoners, and by November 2 the fort at Vaux was once again in French hands. Mangin was a gifted strategist, but he was widely regarded as a spendthrift when it came to the lives of his men, and his commitment to offensive warfare at any cost earned him the nickname “the Butcher.”

	...Over 10 months in 1916, the two armies at Verdun suffered over 700,000 casualties, including some 300,000 killed. The pastoral landscape surrounding the city had been permanently transformed, and nine villages—Beaumont, Bezonvaux, Cumières, Douaumont, Fleury, Haumont, Louvemont, Ornes, and Vaux—were entirely destroyed. After the war the villages were memorialized as having “died for France” and, although uninhabited, continued to be administered by mayors to preserve their existence as administrative entities. The unknown dead were commemorated at the Douaumont Ossuary, a monument completed in 1932 that contains the remains of 150,000 unidentified French and German soldiers.


The French and German armies suffered more than 700,000 casualties over 10 months, and Verdun became synonymous with senseless slaughter. If Falkenhayn had troops to spare to knock Russia out of the war before, it was not certain he did now.

Germany's military blunders made the war bloodier and probably much longer, while also having the effect of keeping Russia just barely able to stay in the war. Russia's string of military defeats and strained economy therefore brought a particular stress and sense of hopelessness to the Russian people--fertile soil for the Bolsheviks' propaganda, especially in the army:


https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/rgwr_postprint.pdf
	Russia’s Home Front

	Between 1913 and 1919 a country with the largest territory, the third largest population, and the fourth largest economy of any in the world was reduced to an average level not seen in Europe since the Middle Ages, and found today only in the poorest countries of Africa and Asia. By the time recovery was under way, 13 million people – nearly one in ten of the prewar population – had suffered premature death.


http://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/july-days/
	...Between April and June 1917, the Bolshevik party was engaged in consolidating its position, recruiting new members and building support. Of particular importance was extending Bolshevik influence in the Petrograd Soviet, where the majority was still held by Menshevik and SR delegates. Lenin’s preferred tactic was to wait patiently while the party strengthened, while continuing to attack the government with propaganda and rhetoric and to promote the Soviets as the alternative government. But events in mid-1917 were fuelling the tinderbox of popular revolution faster than Lenin would have preferred. The Provisional Government’s adherence to the war radicalised thousands of soldiers and heightened calls for a Soviet revolution. On June 18th one military unit, the 1st Infantry Reserve, drafted resolutions calling for the overthrow of the government:

		The slaughter continues and there is an industrial collapse in the making. We see the rich lining their pockets from this criminal war and we sense and know that a sinister and terrible famine is approaching. We also see the jackals from the State Duma and State Council reaching out with their filthy paws to strangle freedom. The rights of the soldier are falling by the wayside; so is the reinforcement of the rights of freedom… We hotly protest any kind of bourgeois ministry and we demand that the ten bourgeois [ministers] make way. We demand that the All-Russian Soviet of Soldiers’, Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies seize all power.


https://archive.org/stream/russianturmoilme00deniuoft/russianturmoilme00deniuoft_djvu.txt
	The relief came at last. Captain Bouravin, the Commander of the Fifth Company, came into the hut. Albov offered to show him the section and explain the disposition of the enemy.

	" Very well, though that does not matter, because I am not really in command of the Company — I am boycotted."

	" How? "

	" Just so. They have elected the 2nd Lieutenant, my subaltern, as Company Commander, and degraded me as a supporter of the old regime, because, you see, I had drill twice a day — you know that the marching contingents come up here absolutely untrained. Indeed, the 2nd Lieutenant was the first to vote for my removal. ' We have been slave-driven long enough/ said he. ' Now we are free. We must clean out everyone, beginning with the head. A young man can manage the regiment just as well, so long as he is a true Democrat and supports the freedom of the soldier.' I would have left, but the Colonel flatly refused to allow it, and forbids me to hand over the company. So now, you see, we have two commanders. I have stood the situation for five days.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x02.htm#s12
	Political Parties in Russia and the Tasks of the Proletariat

	...

	12) SHOULD OFFICERS BE ELECTED BY THE SOLDIERS?

		A. (to the right oi the C.D.) and B. (C.D.). No. That would be detrimental to the landowners and capitalists. If the soldiers cannot be pacified otherwise, they must be temporarily promised this reform, but it must be withdrawn at the earliest possible moment.

		C. (S.D. and S.R.). Yes, they should.

		D. (“Bolsheviks”). Not only must they be elected, but every step of every officer and general must be supervised by persons specially elected for the purpose by the soldiers.

	13) IS IT DESIRABLE FOR THE SOLDIERS, ON THEIR OWN DECISION, TO DISPLACE THEIR SUPERIORS?

		A. (to the right of the C.D.) and B. (C.D.). It is distinctly harmful. Guchkov has already forbidden it. He has already threatened to use force. Guchkov must be supported.

		C. (S.D. and S.R.). It is. But it is not clear whether they should be replaced before the matter is taken up with the Contact Commission, or vice versa.

		D. (“Bolsheviks”). It is desirable and essential in every way. The soldiers will obey and respect only elected authorities.


https://archive.org/stream/russianturmoilme00deniuoft/russianturmoilme00deniuoft_djvu.txt
	Look here, Albov, you are not in a hurry, are you? Very good, then ; let us have a chat. I am feeling depressed. Albov, have you not yet thought of suicide? "

	"Not as yet."

	Bouravin rose to his feet.

	"Understand me, they have desecrated my soul, outraged my human dignity, and so every day, every hour, in every word, glance or gesture one sees a constant outrage. What have I done to them ? I have been in the service for eight years ; I have no family, no house or home. All this I have found in the regiment, my own regiment. Twice I have been badly wounded, and before my wounds were healed have rushed back to the regiment — so there you are ! And I loved the soldier— I am ashamed to speak of it myself, but they must remember how, more than once, I have crept out under the barbed wire to drag in the wounded. And now ! Well, yes, I reverence the regimental flag and hate their crimson rags. I accept the Revolution. But to me Russia is infinitely dearer than the Revolution. All these Committees and meetings, all this adventitious rubbish which has been sown in the Army I am organically unable to swallow and digest. But, after all, I interfere with no one; I say nothing of this to anyone, I strive to convince no one. If only the War could be ended honourably, and then I am ready to break stones on the highway, only not to remain in an Army democratised in such a manner."


The propagandizing and demoralizing of the Russian army over the war's four year grind was of great importance to the Russian revolution and socialist revolutions around the world. Soldiers, for one, by necessity must travel great distances and meet people along the way, and so were ideal for spreading the Bolsheviks' message. Accordingly, Bolshevik propaganda instructed soldiers to spread propaganda to villages and even foreign armies, and one can find examples of Russian soldiers agitating for mutiny in France or fraternizing and sharing socialist ideas on the Eastern Front.

Of more immediate importance, the Bolshevik revolution would have been put down should the Russian government have had a larger loyal fighting force than the Bolsheviks, and so winning-over, demoralizing, or incapacitating as many Russian soldiers as possible would have been an essential task for the Bolsheviks.

Lenin, who advocated for the defeat of the Russian government to convert the "imperialist war" into a "class struggle," took that idea to it's logical conclusion--arguably, the main army of the Bolshevik revolution was not the Red Guards, but the Germans:


http://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/july-days/
	A dangerous situation was made worse by a disastrous military offensive. It was authorised in mid-June by Alexander Kerensky, since been ‘promoted’ to the Provisional Government’s war minister. In mid-June Kerensky approved a massive assault on Austro-Hungarian defences in Galicia. Kerensky’s decision to attack seems to have been motivated by the arrival of dozens of heavy artillery pieces from Britain and Japan; he also hoped to improve morale, both in the ranks of the army and in Russia generally. The first two days of the ‘Kerensky Offensive’, as it became known, was more successful than not, as the Allied guns blasted openings in the Austro-Hungarian defences that allowed Russian infantrymen to make early advances. But the offensive soon encountered stronger resistance from German units and began to collapse. By mid-July the Russians had suffered 400,000 casualties and were forced to retreat, surrendering more than 200 kilometres.


https://archive.org/stream/russianturmoilme00deniuoft/russianturmoilme00deniuoft_djvu.txt
	"In spite of its enormous numerical and technical superiority, the 11th Army was retreating uninterruptedly. On the 8th of July it had already reached the Serenth, never halting at the very strong fortified position to the West of the river, which had been our starting point in the glorious advance of 1916. Bohm-Ermolli had detached some of his forces for the pursuit of the Russian troops in the direction of Tarnapol and had moved his main forces southwards between the Serenth and the Strypa, threatening to cut off the communication of the 7th Army, to throw them into the Dniester and, perhaps, cut off the retreat of the 8th Army. On July 9th the Austro-Germans had already reached Mikulinze, a distance of one march south of Tarnapol.

	...On July 10th the Austro-Germans advanced to the line Mikulinze-Podgaitze-Stanilavov. On the 11th the Germans occupied Tarnapol, abandoned without fighting by the 1st Guards Army Corps. On the next day they broke through our position on the rivers Gniezno and Sereth, South of Trembovlia, and developed their advance in the Eastern and South-Eastern directions. On the same day, pursuing the 7th and 8th Armies, the enemy occupied the line from the Sereth to Monsaterjisko- Tlumatch.

	On the 12th July, seeing that the position was desperate, the Commander-in-Chief issued orders for a retreat from the Sereth, and by the 21st the Armies of the South-Western Front, having cleared Galicia and Bukovina, reached the Russian frontier. Their retreat was marked by fires, violence, murders and plunder. A few units, however, fought the enemy stubbornly and covered the retreat of the maddened mob of deserters by sacrificing their lives. Among them were Russian officers, whose bodies covered the battlefields. The Armies were retreating in disorder; the same Armies that, only a year ago, had captured Lutsk, Brody-Stanislavov, Chernovetz in their triumphal progress . . . were retreating before the same Austro-German troops that only a year ago had been completely defeated and had strewn with fugitives the plains of Volynia, Galicia and Bukovina, leaving hundreds of thousands of prisoners in our hands.


http://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/july-days/
	News of the offensive was met with anger and hostility in the cities. Perhaps aware of the oncoming crisis, the Provisional Government’s coalition ministry collapsed, triggered by the resignation of prime minister Lvov and all four Kadet ministers. News of the disastrous offensive, along with the implosion of the government, sparked unrest in Petrograd not dissimilar to the events of February. On the evening of July 3rd, street demonstrations and riots involving thousands of factory workers broke out in the capital. The following day they were joined by mutinous soldiers from the Petrograd garrison, as well as sailors from the nearby island fortress of Kronstadt (they had earlier taken control of their base, murdering more than 40 officers and establishing their own form of direct democracy). Estimates of their numbers vary: some sources suggest there were 100,000 involved, others more than a half-million.


http://www.richthofen.com/ww1sum2/
	By 1917, the Russian Army's officer corps was increasingly demoralized by the poor progress of the fighting. Though grossly outnumbered, the Germans had proven to be dangerous and cunning opponents, and the Russian royal family's unfortunate intervention in affairs did not improve anything. The repeated catastrophes suffered by Russian field armies squelched what patriotism had existed three years earlier, slowly allowing the entire governing system to fall apart. By March of that year, some Army units began ignoring their orders, a situation made worse as growing Communist rebel groups exaggerated reports of minor events such as the revolt of a Russian Guard depot formation at Petrograd (this famous mutiny was carried out by trainees and depot troops, not by fully trained Imperial Guardsmen). After the Tsar abdicated his throne that same month, a provisional government was formed with Alexander Kerensky at its head. He made a short-lived attempt to uphold Allied obligations by putting General Brusilov in command of another offensive against the German Southern Army in Galicia. But despite his best efforts, Brusilov's 1917 offensive only cleared a few mutinous Austrian formations out of the way before running into the brick wall of German general's Hoffman and Hutier, who first held off, then counter-attacked the hesitant Russian troops. This was the last straw for the Imperial Russian Army, which virtually disintegrated as open civil war swept like a wave across Russia.


https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2016/02/25/the-battle-of-riga-september-1917/
	The Battle of Riga -September 1917

	At the Moscow Conference General Korniloff had uttered grave warning to the effect that if the Russian army did not help him to hold the shore of the Gulf of Riga, the road to Petrograd would be opened wide. Whilst he was speaking, the Germans were preparing their attack. Great naval activity started in the Gulf of Riga on September 1st. On the same day, after a strong artillery preparation, the German land forces crossed the River Dvina in the region of Uxkull, south-east of Riga, occupied Kupfer-Mammer, and developed their success in a northerly direction. The next day the enemy assumed the offensive in the region of the Mitau road. Towards the evening they succeeded in penetrating the Russian positions on the river Jagel, in the region of Melmager-Skripto. Some Russian detachments left their position and retired to the north. This caused a general order to be given to abandon the Riga region, and the Germans were left in possession. The city was evacuated on Monday, September 3rd, after it had been shelled by the Germans for a few hours.

	Later details of the fall indicated that although some Russian detachments had fled before the oncoming enemy, others of the Russian troops behaved with great gallantry. They fought well, but were finally compelled to retreat owing to the superior numbers of the enemy’s forces, and his preponderance in artillery. The Petrograd reports mentioned that the fortifications and bridges of the town were blown up before the retirement.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/aug/22.htm
	V. I. Lenin

	Letter Over the Publication of “Leaflet on the Capture of Riga”

	Written after August 22 (September 4), 1917

	This leaflet cannot, of course, be published legally, but everything must be done to have it published illegally.

	... I am aware that the sluggishness of our Bolsheviks is   great and that it will take a great deal of effort to secure the publication of illegal leaflets. But I shall go on insisting because those are the demands of life, the demands of the movement.

	We must issue illegally free leaflets and handbills which are not curtailed and which speak out at the top of their voice. They should be signed: “A group of persecuted Bolsheviks”.

		Workers, soldiers and all working people!

		The enemy troops have taken Riga. We have suffered another heavy defeat. The incredible calamities inflicted on the people by the war are being aggravated and dragged out.

		Why is the war being dragged out? The reason is still a division of the spoils between the capitalist brigands ...The Kerensky government, with the participation and support of the Mensheviks and the S.R.s, has been brazenly cheating the people, lulling them with empty talk about their desire for peace, talk which is not binding in any way, while actually dragging out the predatory war

		...Tens and hundreds of thousands of people have died in the offensive, which the Kerensky, Menshevik, and S.R. government started in June. Tens and hundreds of thousands will die in the protracted war, so long as the people continue to tolerate such a government.

		Only a workers’ government can save the country. It alone will not cheat the people, but will immediately offer to all countries precise, clear-cut and fair peace terms.

		The bourgeoisie has been trying to intimidate the people and create a panic, in an effort to get the ignorant people to believe that peace cannot be offered right away, as this would mean “losing Riga” and so on. That is cheating the people.


https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2016/02/25/the-battle-of-riga-september-1917/
	Once in possession of the town, German submarines entered the Gulf of Riga, and commenced shelling the villages along the shore. Meanwhile the Russian army fell back north, and was followed by a rapid advance of the Germans.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jul/26.htm
	V. I.   Lenin
	The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War

	To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105).

	...The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany. ...Semkovsky (an opportunist who is more useful to the working class than all the others, thanks to his naively frank reiteration of bourgeois wisdom) blurted out the following: “This is nonsense, because either Germany or Russia can win” (Izvestia No. 2).

	Take the example of the Paris Commune. France was defeated by Germany but the workers were defeated by Bismarck and Thiers! Had Bukvoyed and Trotsky done a little thinking, they would have realised that they have adopted the viewpoint on the war held by *governments and the bourgeoisie*

	...A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war is, on the one hand, facilitated by military reverses ("defeats") of governments; on the other hand, one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby facilitating defeat.


https://books.google.com/books?id=I1LtBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT125
	THE FALL OF RIGA

	...On 1 September, 1917, German artillery fired more than 20,000 shells, most of them gas shells, without warning. The attack struck Russian defenders like a bolt of lightning, catching them completely unprepared. German stormtroops soon began to cross the rivers and streams around Riga in specially designed boats, establishing bridgeheads and directing the fire of more conventional artillery to prevent Russia counterattacks.

	...the Germans were able to land nine divisions of troops across the Dvina River in just 48 hours. Once they did so, the Russian defenders knew the battle was lost and made quick plans to evacuate a now indefensible Riga. Setting some buildings on fire to, the Russians evacuated as many men and supplies as they could amid scenes of chaos and sheer panic. German artillery pounded the city and many of the bridges leading east in the hopes of capturing as many Russian soldiers as possible. By the third day of the operation, German forces had entered parts of Riga, and by day four they had complete control of the city and its port.

	...The Germans estimated their causalities at 4,200 and Russian casualties more than 25,000. The Russians also lost 250 of their precious artillery pieces, leaving five Russian divisions without significant artillery support. Many smaller Russian units simply melted away in the face of the attack, underscoring the essential morale problems of the army. The Russian officer crops tried everything it could think of to stem the tide of desertion. Commanders ordered deserters shot on sight, tried to create their own storm-troop detachments and even formed a special all-female battalion. The Russian soldier, however, had begun to give up the cause.


Following the the German counter offensive and General Kornilov's coup, which pit Russian soldiers against Red Guards and ended with most of the soldiers deserting or joining the Bolsheviks, the Russian army's demoralization and the provisional government's dysfunction reached a zenith. On October 24, 1917, the Lenin sprang his coup:


http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSnovemberR.htm
	On 24th October, 1917, Lenin wrote a letter to the members of the Central Committee: "The situation is utterly critical. It is clearer than clear that now, already, putting off the insurrection is equivalent to its death. With all my strength I wish to convince my comrades that now everything is hanging by a hair, that on the agenda now are questions that are decided not by conferences, not by congresses (not even congresses of soviets), but exclusively by populations, by the mass, by the struggle of armed masses… No matter what may happen, this very evening, this very night, the government must be arrested, the junior officers guarding them must be disarmed, and so on… History will not forgive revolutionaries for delay, when they can win today (and probably will win today), but risk losing a great deal tomorrow, risk losing everything."

	...Leon Trotsky supported Lenin's view and urged the overthrow of the Provisional Government. On the evening of 24th October, orders were given for the Bolsheviks to occupy the railway stations, the telephone exchange and the State Bank. The Smolny Institute became the headquarters of the revolution and was transformed into a fortress. Trotsky reported that the "chief of the machine-gun company came to tell me that his men were all on the side of the Bolsheviks".

	The following day the Red Guards surrounded the Winter Palace. Inside was most of the country's Cabinet, although Kerensky had managed to escape from the city. The palace was defended by Cossacks, some junior army officers and the Woman's Battalion. At 9 p.m. The Aurora and the Peter and Paul Fortress began to open fire on the palace. Little damage was done but the action persuaded most of those defending the building to surrender. The Red Guards, led by Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, now entered the Winter Palace.


The revolutionaries met little resistance. With a handful of men and 18 million corpses behind them, the Bolsheviks walked into the Winter Palace.