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.