World War I was called the "War to End All Wars", but in fact it spawned not only a second World War, but a series of battles after that, many of them directly or indirectly involving Russia or the Soviet Union.

The background to World War I is as convoluted as one is likely to get; Russia had signed a series of diplomatic alliances with Britain and France (The Triple Entente, signed in 1904); agreements with Serbia (The Pan-Slavic Alliance); and were secretly involved in negotiations with the Germans. When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated in June 1914, no one expected that it could lead to a world war. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was a Bosnian nationalist and a member of the Black Hand, a political terrorist group that had ties to the Serbian military intelligence community. While the assassination did not really provoke outpourings of grief in Austria (the archduke was not popular, in large part because of his views regarding the Slavs), it did elsewhere in Europe, and the Germans, in particular, saw this as an opportunity to stir the pot. The Austrian military staff wanted to go in and crush the Serbs, but needed the support of the Germans to do so, and the Germans, led by Kaiser Wilhelm II, were more than happy to agree. Part of the reason for this eagerness was the revenge factor. Wilhelm II was Franz Ferdinand's cousin, but Wilhelm was not particularly popular with the rest of his family (including his cousins Alexandra and Nicholas). He hoped that seeking the revenge for his cousin's death would improve his standing within the family.

The Serbs responded with a conciliatory message (which even the Germans believed would end the threat of war), but they ultimately refused to allow the Austrians complete control over Serbia, and the Austrians responded by declaring war on Serbia in August, 1914. The Russian response to this was entirely too predictable, given their previous humiliations in the Balkans and Japan, and with the exception of the conservative politicians (who were fearful of another 1905) and the Bolsheviks (who denounced the war as an imperialist battle), everyone supported the war effort initially. Russia had begun mobilizing her troops in July 1914; the Austrians declared war on Russia on July 30th, 1914, and the Germans, after demanding that the Russians demobilize, held their breath. When Russia refused to demobilize, Germany declared that they had been provoked and were under siege (the Germans had not yet mobilized their troops); Russia declared war, and France, in response to its treaty with Russia, began to mobilize. The German plan of attack called for a blitzkrieg, or Lightning War, against the west (France, Belgium, etc.) and then a turn back to the East. This plan, called the von Schlieffen Plan (after its creator) was supposed to prevent Germany from having to fight a two-front war. When the Germans invaded Belgium on August 4th, Britain, which had signed a treaty with the Belgians in 1839, declared war on Germany, and all of the major players (excluding the US) were in the game.

The Russian Military Fiasco

World War I got off to a rousing start for the Russians, who had tremendous successes in the first days of the war; the army marched into Austrian territory and inflicted significant losses. Unfortunately, the Russians had done little to improve their military since 1905; many of the soldiers did not have guns, and the general staff was largely incompetent. By 1915, the Central Powers were driving into the Baltic region and Russian Poland, and were inflicting significant casualties. In late 1915, after nearly a year of defeats, Nicholas II decided to take command of the troops himself, which was both brave and foolish. Nicholas had no real military experience, and he became personally responsible for any of the problems that occurred during the battles. The Russian desertion rate increased exponentially as the casualty rate went up, and the Russian people, receiving news of the problems on the front, began to react as they had in 1905, with strikes and protests.

The Government in Chaos and the Murder of Rasputin

Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that Alexandra had taken over running the government in Nicholas's absence, and she had brought into government her friend Grigori Rasputin. Alexandra, who was German by birth, did not speak Russian well, and had largely closed herself off from the Russian populace after the birth of Aleksei, was not a particularly sympathetic figure. Rasputin, better known as the Mad Monk of Siberia, was a charismatic religious figure who had become part of the Empress's inner circle because of his ability to stop Aleksei's bleeding, but he used that position to acquire things that he wanted, primarily power and women. He also used his power to get those whom he did not trust (or more correctly, those who did not like him) removed from any position of power. While that did not matter as much when they were lower level officials, it greatly impacted the government when he began getting ministers fired. Alexandra was blind to the negative impact that this was having, and continued to trust Rasputin completely. Eventually, this led a group of conspirators, headed by one of Nicholas's cousins, to plot the murder of Rasputin, which occurred in December 1916. It was a very famous murder: they poisoned him, stabbed him (at least according to some reports), shot him repeatedly, and then tied him up, threw him in the back of the Rolls Royce owned by one of the conspirators, drove down to the banks of the Neva and threw him in, where he finally drowned.

The February Revolution

Alexandra was heartbroken by the death, and retreated even further; the children all came down with the measles, and she was outside Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called when the war started) at Tsarskoe Selo, essentially trying to run the government, without Nicholas. Protests and strikes continued to occur, and on International Women's Day in 1917, a group of women factory workers began a march in Petrograd to protests the lack of bread and vodka. Others, including garrisons of soldiers, joined in, and soon all of Petrograd was in the hands of the strikers. The Duma resigned, and Nicholas tried to get back to the city from the front, only to be stopped on the way and forced to abdicate. Realizing that Aleksei would be taken from them if he were named as the new tsar, Nicholas abdicated in favor of his brother, Mikhail, who refused the crown because the military could not guarantee his safety. A Provisional Government, headed up by the Progressive bloc of the Duma, came to power, which it would share with the Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies' Soviet, founded in February 1917. In a matter of days, with virtually no bloodshed, the Romanov dynasty came to an end. The second revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik revolution, would be very different.