Thank you. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 217, The Red Dawn, Part 1.

Today I want to talk about a story that's important, but rather hard to convey simply.

It's prompted by one of the mini-anniversaries that were coming on in this, the year 2017. As many of you likely know,

we are three-quarters of the way through the 100-year anniversary commemorations of World War I,

probably the most important conflict in the 20th century. In so many ways, the First World War I, probably the most important conflict in the 20th century.

In so many ways, the First World War laid out the preconditions for the rest of world history

the 20th century up to today.

Specifically, in the late autumn of 2017, we're coming up on and in fact, as of Tuesday of this very week, have just passed, one of the

most important anniversaries in the entire war.

The story of this particular anniversary begins in the spring of 1917, when the government

of Russia's Tsar, which had been teetering on the brink for a while now, finally collapsed.

The Tsar had been on shaky footing for years.

Imperial Russia had, of course, been badly humiliated at the hands of Japan

during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, 1905.

And in the earlier campaigns of World War I, those didn't play out well for the Tsar either.

Russian troops were crushed in humiliating defeats like the Battle of Tannenberg of 1914.

A more energetic monarch perhaps could have found a way to revive the family fortunes,

but Tsar Nicholas II was not that man. Melancholic, depressed, and fatalistic,

the man seemingly took no joy in being Tsar, but also felt that as a divinely appointed monarch,

he could not resign and hand over power to someone else. Doing so would run counter to the will

of God. So Nicholas did little to try and write the ship, and as a result, by 1917, popular

patients with the Tsar's government had worn out.

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