The Triple Entente of Great Britain, Russia, and France was the foreign policy prong of the Russian imperial government's reaction to the disastrous events of 1905, including the revolution and the near defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. This alignment with the two western, liberal powers was almost universally perceived within official Russian governing circles as a necessary, if ideologically distasteful, diplomatic relationship to offset the growing German threat on the continent. Maintaining the entente would help Russia retain its great power status. For the first time, Tomaszewski tells the official Russian side of the story, long inaccessible due to restrictions imposed by the relevant Russian archives during the Soviet era. In doing so, she sheds new light on the international scene as the crisis of World War One approached. The Triple Entente went hand in hand with two policies of Stolypin, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers: draconian repression of the revolutionaries and sweeping domestic reforms. Acutely aware that serious failures in foreign policy would threaten the regime's existence, the imperial government designed both its foreign and its domestic policies to consolidate the autocracy for the twentieth century. Nicholas II gambled on the Triple Entente and its diplomatic alignment with the other two status-quo powers as the best means of preserving the peace in Europe and thereby preserving the imperial system as well.

This is a new release of the original 1928 edition.

In The Lost History of 1914, Jack Beatty offers a highly original view of World War I, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was inevitable. "Most books set in 1914 map the path leading to war," Beatty writes. "This one maps the multiple paths that led away from it." Chronicling largely forgotten events faced by each of the belligerent countries in the months before the war started in August, Beatty shows how any one of them-a possible military coup in Germany; an imminent civil war in Britain; the murder trial of the wife of the likely next premier of France, who sought détente with Germany-might have derailed the war or brought it to a different end. In Beatty's hands, these stories open into epiphanies of national character, and offer dramatic portraits of the year's major actors-Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II , Woodrow Wilson, along with forgotten or overlooked characters such as Pancho Villa, Rasputin, and Herbert Hoover. Europe's ruling classes, Beatty shows, were so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratization for revolution, and were tempted to "escape forward" into war to head it off. Beatty's powerful rendering of the combat between August 1914 and January 1915 which killed more than one million men, restores lost history, revealing how trench warfare, long depicted as death's victory, was actually a life-saving strategy. Beatty's deeply insightful book-as elegantly written as it is thought-provoking and probing-lights a lost world about to blow itself up in what George Kennan called "the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century." It also arms readers against narratives of historical inevitability in today's world.