Imperial Russia bore a special burden for the origin of the Great War. This was an idée fixe among educated citizens, especially among academics, for a half century after the outbreak of that war. During the July Crisis, German policy attempted to manage the unfolding of events in such a way as to make German mobilization appear to be the consequence of Russia's prior declaration. In the 1920s German, French, and British scholarship as well as diplomatic publications “documented” the crisis in terms that explained, or cautiously justified, its entry into the war. The interests of the young, militant Soviet regime, however, lay in discrediting the actions of its tsarist and bourgeois predecessors. Soviet central archives made public many of the most compromising historical documents they held on St. Petersburg's actions of the prewar period. A vast quantity of other documentation, however, remained hidden from independent examination until 1991.

The choices Russian statesmen and staff officers faced during the July Crisis were, paradoxically, simple and unaffected by decades of modernization, and yet clearly constrained by diplomatic and military choices made in preceding years. Statesmen, including Tsar Nicholas II, would struggle with the hour-by-hour development of the crisis, particularly after 24 July, without apparent reference to Russia's political and military crises of 1904–05, the Bosnian embarrassment of 1908, or the changes brought on by the Balkan Wars of 1912–13.