Russia
The russian empire
Russia before the war
Russia spanned one-sixth of the globe and was by far the largest nation of Europe, both in size and population.
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Russia’s government and social structure retained medieval elements; absolute power rested with the tsar (monarch).
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Despite a marked increase in industrial growth in the late 1800s, Russia’s economy lagged behind western Europe.
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In 1904-5 Russia suffered a humiliating military defeat at the hands of Japan, which triggered a domestic revolution.
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Russia’s relationship with Germany had been comparatively good, in part because the Russian tsar and German kaiser were cousins – however this evolved during the first years of the 1900s.
Russia's diplomacy
Russia wanted to control the Turkish Straits, to expand its borders southward, and to continue influence in the Balkans.
Since the eighteenth century, Russia had been trying to seize the Turkish Straits, its only access to the Mediterranean Sea and rich southern trade routes.
Russian interests in Central Europe had moved from defending its western borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to expanding into Polish territory in the eighteenth and attempting to create a hegemony over the Balkans in the nineteenth.
Russia's ambitions in the Balkans were its primary reason for going to war in 1914, but it continued to press for its other aims as well. Russia wanted to secure the Turkish Straits, expand territorially in Asia Minor, increase its ethnically Polish territories at the expense of Germany and Austria-Hungary, secure territorial expansion for its Serbian client state, replace Austrian control of Bohemia with an independent kingdom under the rule of a Russian prince, and restore the independence of several lesser German states subsumed within the German Empire after 1871.
Russia's war
Russia entered World War I in August 1914, after promising support to its Balkan ally Serbia against Austria-Hungary.
The war doused anti-government sentiment which had peaked with a general strike in St Petersburg in July 1914.
Russia’s first military forays had some successes, more so against Austria than Germany. However, the Russians were on the retreat from East Prussia after Tannenberg and were pushed back spectacularly in the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive in 1915 which gave all of Poland and a sizable chunk of Eastern Europe to Poland. Russian soldiers were poorly equipped, its officers barely competent.
In September 1915 the tsar took command of the army, a move that associated him with future defeats and losses.
By mid-1916, two years of war had decimated the Russian economy, triggered downturns in agrarian production, problems in the transportation network, currency inflation and food and fuel shortages in the cities.