World War I put an end to more than one empire, gave birth to several nations and, as Dominic Lieven notes in “The End of Tsarist Russia,” propelled Russia toward a series of catastrophes: battlefield failure, revolution, civil war and dictatorship. Russia’s ordeals, in turn, made the postwar global order less stable than it might have been. Given such momentous results, what, Mr. Lieven asks, drove Russia toward the conflagration in the first place?
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