Imperial Russia bore a special burden for the origin of the Great War. This was an idée fixe in both popular understanding and academic thought for half a 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, when it came, appear to be the consequence of Russia's prior declaration. In the 1920s, German scholarship and diplomatic publication (no less so than French or even British) “documented” the crisis in terms that explained (i.e., cautiously justified) its entry into the war. The interests of the young and militant Soviet regime, however, lay in discrediting the actions of its tsarist and bourgeois predecessors.