Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The author examines the main stages in Russia’s preparations for war in the strategic field in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The article focuses on three factors of key importance for the front in the west: space, time and numbers of troops. The inability of the higher administration of the Empire, and the Emperor Nicholas II in particular, to integrate the efforts of various departments to outline a compromised version of the general strategic plan of war against the Triple Alliance may be considered one of the foremost reasons for the premature withdrawal of the Russian Empire, which had become the Soviet Republic, from the First World War in the spring of 1918.

In August 1914, France had already defined a pattern of war aims which would be shaped and amended during the next four years. Regarding East-Central Europe, two approaches present themselves to the French policy-makers: the classic system of alliances to maintain the balance of power, and the new internationalist doctrine implying the priority application of the principle of nationality. Both these concepts reacted to the geopolitical evolutions which occurred during the Great War. The article analyses these evolutions of the French concept of a ‘world order’ in East-Central Europe between 1914 and 1918 primarily through an examination of the case of Poland.

The proclamation to the Polish nation on 14 (1) August 1914 signed by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich has interested more than one researcher. Researchers from Russia and other countries routinely refer to the document in their analysis of the Polish question. However, the proclamation itself has not been an object of research for a long time, although the circumstances of its appearance, its content, and its multiple political consequences might contribute not only to an analysis of the Polish question, but also, in a more general sense, to studies of the national question in the Russian Empire. The paper deals with the history of the proclamation to the Polish nation, the reasons for its appearance, and the characteristics of the text. It analyses the issue of its authorship, and the impact of the proclamation on general public feeling, and also discusses the consideration of the Polish question in the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire during the First World War.

In the evaluation of the goals of the countries that fought in the First World War, one of the most persistent stereotypes testifies to the particular aggressiveness of the Kaiser’s Germany, and its exclusive role in the outbreak of the war. This opinion is directly related to Lithuania, when it comes to the expansionist approach of Germany with respect to the western border zones of the Russian Empire. The paper looks for the origins of these historiographic stereotypes, by analysing how the goals of Germany in the First World War were presented in Soviet historiography, and, in a broader sense, in socialist bloc historiography; and how Lithuanian historiography in the period of restored independence has been impacted by the approaches of foreign researchers. After looking at studies of recent resonant historiographic trends with respect to the military aims of the Kaiser’s Germany, and their traces in the Lithuanian study of history, the author makes an attempt to verify the validity of the statement about ‘German expansionism’ as regards Lithuania and the neighbouring region in the initial period of the war, which has been little explored in Lithuania.

In the course of the First World War, ‘the nationalities question’ exploded in Eastern Europe. By the fall of 1918, the Eastern Europe of the three empires had collapsed, and national states were rising. During the war, the nationalities question as perceived in Switzerland, a neutral country, had developed from an initial concern about the loyalty of the minorities in the borderlands of the three East European empires into a battle royal for recognition as individual states. The article focuses on the activities of the German ambassador in Bern who was the most active force in the development, and he gave special support for the nationalities on Russia’s western border. Poland’s future quickly became the major issue but this threatened Germany’s own ambitions in Eastern Europe. The Lithuanians and the Ukrainians particularly opposed Polish dreams of establishing a large state. The Germans, however, considered the future of Ukraine to lie mostly in the hands of the Austrian Empire, and therefore Lithuania appeared to be the more promising force to limit any new Polish state.

When examining the causes of the revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire, and the course it took, we always face not only social but also national factors. The resolution of national aspirations was intertwined with the social aspirations of the revolution, and we have to admit that national mobilisation would often lose to social mobilisation. This paper shows the interaction between those factors, mainly on the basis of the Ukrainian and Transcaucasian cases, and reveals how the development of events on national peripheries directly affected events at the centre, and vice versa. The social explosion of 1917 that broke out in Imperial Petrograd was echoed by a national mobilisation that forced the centre to make concessions to the peripheries. The subsequent success of the Bolsheviks, and the national disintegration on the peripheries, was affected by the balance created between the unique social project and national factors, as well as the readiness not to block the way to national sovereignty and cultures, provided governance in the national area was arranged in compliance with the Soviet model.

The paper discusses the territorial-geopolitical aspect of the Lithuanian policy during the First World War, which is still not sufficiently studied or properly understood. It concerns the strategic line proposed by members of Lithuania’s conservative elite. The visible side of the line was a game of orientations: first pro-Russian, then pro-German. However, these orientations were based on an ethnographic principle, which created preconditions for the practical development of the Lithuanian nation. On the other hand, the ethnographic principle was related to the idea of national self-determination, raised by the democratic thought, which paved the way for Lithuanian national statehood. Therefore, the strategic line offered by some of the Lithuanian elite went beyond party ideology and became national.