Did you know that Russia was defeated in the First World War even before it began?

But could the result have been different if Nicholas II, as his associates recalled, was in constant ignorance of the true situation of the army and the country? Doubting everyone, the emperor and empress considered the maid of honor Anna Vyrubova to be the most faithful and devoted person in their circle, because she was so narrow-minded that she could neither come up with anything herself nor remember what numerous petitioners tried to instill in her. And the royal couple considered Grigory Rasputin to be the only sincerely loving subject of theirs.

The head of government, Goremykin, did not intend to participate in military affairs, and after the outbreak of the war he did his best to slow down the execution of the orders of the army command. And the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, in many cases, with his orders, aggravated the already complicated situation with military and civil dual power.

The picture that emerged was a general loss of sense of reality. And not only among the ruling elite, but also in all layers of society. Workers went on strike, demanding unprecedented privileges from employers. For example, so that foremen and managers stop monitoring their work. Or for the lunch break to last an hour and a half. And entrepreneurs, having lost huge amounts of money because of the strikes, did not make any concessions, although they perfectly understood that due to the continuation of the strikes they were losing much more.

Against this background, the catastrophic spread of occultism and mysticism in the empire no longer looked strange, but quite logical and natural. And the production of dissertations for doctors of medicine, put on stream, is almost an insignificant detail.

A new issue of “History” is about this and much more that happened a century ago, on the eve and at the beginning of the First World War.

Evgeny Zhirnov, head of the historical and archival service of the Kommersant Publishing House

Kommersant-History No. 15