Sergei Witte often expressed sympathy for the many non-Russians in his country. Jews, Poles, and other peoples who were not Russian or Orthodox Christian frequently faced discriminatory laws in the businesses, education, and government of the Russian Empire. But there were basic contradictions in Witte's political career. On the one hand, he held very progressive views and stood for abolishing laws that discriminated on the basis of ethnic origins. Such laws, he felt, hindered the growth of Russia's productivity. Yet this modern outlook contrasted with his admiration for the old traditions of the Russian monarchy, whose absolute powers were often the source of discriminatory laws in the first place. When the Russian emperor Alexander II was assassinated by terrorists in 1881, Witte briefly joined a secret society dedicated to seeking out and destroying terrorists...

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Slavery was a very important social institution in Rus' between, say, A.D. 800 and 1725. Initially, slaves were one of the "forest products" harvested by Vikings making their way on the "route from the Varangians to the Greeks," the Eastern European river route (from the Baltic Sea into the Neva to Lake Ladoga, to the Volkov, to the Shelon', to the Dnepr, into the Black Sea) between Sweden and Constaninople. The Vikings picked up slaves and hauled them (along with wax, honey, and furs) to Constantinople in exchange for luxury goods. No one knows the numbers of slaves there were after the formation of the Kievan Russian state (882-1132), but it is assumed that most of these slaves had come from raids on other non-Slavic people...

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Nicholas II (1868-1918), the czar of Russia from 1894 to 1917, was a staunch defender of autocracy. A weak monarch, he was forced to abdicate, thus ending more than 300 years of Romanov rule in Russia...

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Great Britain and the United States first committed aid to the Soviet Union in October 1941. Not until 1942, however, did matériel begin reaching the U.S.S.R. in quantity. Just how much was sent, and what role it played in the Russian war effort, was a point of controversy during the Cold War. Soviet authorities insisted that Lend Lease amounted to no more than 4 percent of Russia's own production. Even that trickle of aid, it was asserted, was doled out grudgingly, so that the U.S.S.R. nearly bled itself white meeting the German onslaught...

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Among the most enduring images of the Russian effort in the Great War is a lack of the tools of modern war--not merely artillery pieces, shells, and aircraft but also basic requirements, such as small arms. Accounts are replete with stories of replacements being sent unarmed to the front and told to pick up the rifles of casualties, or of bayonets being used to do the work that more-sophisticated armies entrusted to shells and bullets...

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Sergei Witte often expressed sympathy for the many non-Russians in his country. Jews, Poles, and other peoples who were not Russian or Orthodox Christian frequently faced discriminatory laws in the businesses, education, and government of the Russian Empire. But there were basic contradictions in Witte's political career. On the one hand, he held very progressive views and stood for abolishing laws that discriminated on the basis of ethnic origins. Such laws, he felt, hindered the growth of Russia's productivity. Yet this modern outlook contrasted with his admiration for the old traditions of the Russian monarchy, whose absolute powers were often the source of discriminatory laws in the first place. When the Russian emperor Alexander II was assassinated by terrorists in 1881, Witte briefly joined a secret society dedicated to seeking out and destroying terrorists...

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First meeting of Russian representative assembly...

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Three years after his party's successful coup d'état in 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin referred to the Revolution of 1905 as a "dress rehearsal" for the events of 1917. In 1905, Russian society was torn asunder by the Bloody Sunday (22 January) shootings of unarmed workers demonstrating for a redress of their grievances and by a costly and unsuccessful war with Japan. In the midst of rising urban and rural lawlessness, strikes, and civil unrest came calls for a constitutional state with guaranteed civil rights and representative institutions...

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The reasons for the collapse of the Provisional Government in November 1917 and its replacement by Bolshevik rule are the subject of a contentious debate among historians of revolutionary Russia. After the fall of the tsarist government in March of that year, the largely self-appointed Provisional Government took temporary charge of national affairs, expressing its commitment to the full democratization of Russia and implementing important reforms in justice and civil liberties. It also continued Russian involvement in World War I. Like its tsarist predecessor, however, the Provisional Government could not mobilize the troops, gather the resources, or marshal the people's resolve to prevail against Germany and its allies. By late 1917 the Provisional Government had lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of the Russian people and was easily replaced by a communist regime that promised to end Russian participation in the conflict...

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World War I officially ended in Paris and its palatial suburbs, in a series of treaties signed between 1919 and 1923. Formally ending hostilities fell against the backdrop of dramatic events in Russia, which experienced its continuing revolution and civil war in those years. This chapter assesses whether Russian developments had any meaningful impact on what was happening at the close of the "war to end all wars."
One argument maintains that this influence was profound. Allied policymakers plainly could not ignore the challenges of the Bolshevik Revolution. Its determination to export revolution to Europe, revisit the earlier peace settlement between Russia and Germany, and create other obstacles for European diplomacy demanded their attention, as did the appearance of representatives of anti-Bolshevik White forces, who successfully agitated for military, financial, and material support in their battle against the Reds. Forming a new world order demanded careful consideration of the nascent Soviet state and its emerging role in the new international order...

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