In 1904 a small, distant war brought Russia to the brink of internal collapse - and yet within ten years the country embroiled itself in an incomparably larger conflict close to home. How the war with Japan and its aftermath actually steered Russia toward such an unlikely, fateful decision is the subject of David McDonald's book, an analysis of Russian foreign policy on the eve of World War I.

This book provides an economic historian's perspective on major questions that confront all students of Russian history: how stable were the economic and administrative structures of late-imperial Russia, and how well prepared was Russia for war in 1914? The decade following the Russo-Japanese War witnessed profound changes in the political system and in the industrial economy. The regime faced challenges to its authority from industrialists, caught in the throes of recession, and from parliamentary critics of tsarist administration. Peter Gatrell provides a comprehensive account of the attempts made by government and business to confront these challenges, examining the organisation and performance of a key industry and showing how decisions were reached about the allocation of resources, and the far-reaching consequences these decisions entailed.

Historians devote a great deal of attention to the diplomacy that led Russia into the Great War, but have tended to neglect the course of this diplomacy once the fighting erupted. This volume addresses that lacuna with a broad range of essays examining the foreign relations of the empire, as well as its republican and early Soviet successors, from the July 1914 Crisis to the end of the Civil War in 1922.Written by distinguished and emerging scholars from North America, Europe, Russia, and Japan, the essays make abundant use of Russian archival collections, largely inaccessible until the 1990s, to reassess the conjectures and conclusions previously drawn from other sources. While some chapters focus on traditional "diplomatic" history, others adopt new "international history" by placing Russia's relations with the world in their social, intellectual, economic, and cultural contexts.Arranged in roughly chronological order, the first volume covers the late imperial period, from 1914 through mid-1916, while the second proceeds through the revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War, up to the end of that conflict in 1922. Together, these books' comments should foster a renewed appreciation for international relations as a central element of Russia's Great War and Revolution.

Because the turbulent trajectory of Russia's foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union echoes previous moments of social and political transformation, history offers a special vantage point from which to judge the current course of events. In this book, a mix of leading historians and political scientists examines the foreign policy of contemporary Russia over four centuries of history. The authors explain the impact of empire and its loss, the interweaving of domestic and foreign impulses, long-standing approaches to national security, and the effect of globalization over time. Contributors focus on the underlying patterns that have marked Russian foreign policy and that persist today. These patterns are driven by the country's political makeup, geographical circumstances, economic strivings, unsettled position in the larger international setting, and, above all, its tortured effort to resolve issues of national identity. The argument here is not that the Russia of Putin and his successors must remain trapped by these historical patterns but that history allows for an assessment of how much or how little has changed in Russia's approach to the outside world and creates a foundation for identifying what must change if Russia is to evolve. A truly unique collection, this volume utilizes history to shed crucial light on Russia's complex, occasionally inscrutable relationship with the world. In so doing, it raises the broader issue of the relationship of history to the study of contemporary foreign policy and how these two enterprises might be better joined.

Imperial Russian Foreign Policy aims to demythologise a field hitherto dominated by suspicions of diabolical cunning, inscrutable motives, and international plots using unseen forces of the gigantic, fear-inspiring empire of the tsar. The contributors, leading historians from both Russia and the West, examine Imperial foreign policy from its origins to the October Revolution, revealing a policy that, as in other countries, had a complex of motives - commerce, nationalism, the interests of various social groups - but an unusual origin, coming almost exclusively from the entourage of the tsar. The work is based largely on original research in Soviet archives, which only became possible after Soviet glasnost.