Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Three of our buildup arc is Russia: Retreat, Revolution, and the New Empire.

If Germany is the story of a crown falling and a republic trying to stand upright in a storm, Russia is something else entirely. Russia is what happens when an empire doesn’t merely lose a war, but loses the right to command reality. It is the moment a state’s voice stops sounding like fate and starts sounding like a weak man pleading. And once that happens, the world changes shape fast.

The Russian Empire goes into the Great War carrying old weight—peasants and priests, palaces and poverty, a vast distance between the rulers and the ruled, a tradition of obedience held together by habit, fear, and the aura of the Tsar. But modern war is not polite. It doesn’t care about aura. I ...