By August, Serbia had been invaded by Austria-Hungary and Russia had declared war in response, prompting the German Kaiser to declare war on his Russian cousin.
When Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot dead in Sarajevo in June 1914, it triggered a wave of threats, ultimatums and troop mobilisations. This placed Russia in a perilous position between Serbia – its Balkan ally with close ethnic and religious ties – and the hostile empires of Austria-Hungary and Germany. The Bismarckian alliance system demanded nations support their allies if one was attacked. What the Tsar did not count on was Wilhelm’s own duplicity, nor did he understand the forces of war that had been building in Europe for more than ten years.
Nicholas thought it highly unlikely that the Kaiser would declare war on the kingdom of a relative. The relationship between the Tsar and the Kaiser was strained at first but in time they became friends, addressing each other in communications as ‘Nicky’ and ‘Willy’. Nicholas and the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, were cousins, while Wilhelm and Nicholas’ wife Alexandra were both grandchildren of Queen Victoria of England. Though tensions between Russia and Germany were long-standing, Nicholas II believed family ties precluded any chance of war between the two empires. One right-wing newspaper described the situation as revolutionary, saying “We live on a volcano”. This culminated in the great general strike of July 1914, which paralysed more than four-fifths of St Petersburg’s industrial, manufacturing and commercial plants. The government’s response was to deny the incident happened. When news of this reached St Petersburg, it triggered worker unrest there the capital was hit by 118 strikes in June alone.Īt the beginning of July 1914, around 12,000 workers from the Putilov steel plant – the same factory at the heart of the ‘ Bloody Sunday‘ protests – marched in the capital, where they were fired on by tsarist soldiers. Fed up with low wages and dangerous conditions, workers at the remote Baku oil field walked out in June. Anti-government sentiment and unrest had been building since 1912 when tsarist troops gunned down hundreds of striking miners at Lena River.īy mid-1914, the number and intensity of industrial strikes were approaching 1905 levels.
At the start of 1914, Tsar Nicholas II was busy enough dealing with pressing domestic concerns.
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