August 1914

To his depiction of the outbreak of the First World War and of the Russian offensive into East Prussia and defeat at Tannenberg, Solzhenitsyn has added a brilliant reconstruction, from the alternating viewpoints of all involved, of an event that hastened not only the disaster of 1914 but the Revolution of 1917: the assassination of the tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died in 1911 at the hands of Dmitri Bogrov, a loner and sometime anarchist whose crime was inadvertently furthered by the bumbling tsarist secret police. A full and unbiased portrait of Nikolai himself--as an honest yet inept man-—leaves no doubt that with Stolypin perished Russia’s last hope of reform.

August 1914 is the first volume in Solzhenitsyn’s multi—part epic, The Red Wheel; each of three subsequent volumes will concentrate on another critical historical moment, or ”knot,” as the author terms such turning points as October—November 1916, March 1917, and April 1917. At each juncture, the fiery wheel of revolution gains added momentum—until it cannot be stopped. 

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN is the winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature.