During the darkest periods of the Cold War, parallels were sometimes drawn to World War I. Armed conflict, it was said, could break out, as it had in 1914, through miscalculation, rhetorical posturing, and the technological imperatives of the new weapons. What was not imagined, however, was that the Cold War might suddenly come to an end in a way strikingly similar to that in which the war had ended on the eastern front in 1918: through the internal collapse and unconditional withdrawal of one of the belligerents. That one of the two superpowers might simply retire from the contest, that it would lose its empire and its internal cohesion, seemed no less improbable seventy-five years ago than, in a different context, does the demise of its successor today.

The collapse of the Russian state, which allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power, and the withdrawal of Russia from the war after the surrender at Brest-Litovsk, resulted from the rigidities of autocratic rule, the costs of fighting an interminable war, and the loss of faith by the nation's elite in the system itself. After the event, what had hitherto seemed unthinkable became strikingly obvious: Of course the Russian state, so outwardly formidable and unyielding, was merely a shell. Beneath the facade of invincibility, however, it was ripe for disintegration. It was almost inevitable, considering the toll of war, that the Romanov dynasty would fall. Was this not evident? Yet, of course, it was not evident at the time because virtually no one in a position of power wanted to believe it.