This is John Batcher, conversation with Professor Nick Lloyd, Professor of Modern Warfare at King's College

London about his new book, The Eastern Front.

The Great War in 1914 to 1918. The first volume was the Western Front. This is the

Eastern Front. The Habsburg Empire, the Hoensolern, that's the Germans, the Kaiser,

versus the Romanovs. They're all related at some point and exchange letters of

commerce and concern before the war, but here they are in a death struggle and one man emerges in the Romanov Empire.

His name is Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky.

He is the commander of what comes to be the Russian army after the Tsar abdicates and

the Tsar's relatives don't want to lead the army.

Kerensky wants to lead the army.

And as the professor describes the conditions,

the Bolsheviks are competing with Kerensky and everyone else for leadership grasping in

this country that's not only in turmoil, on the edge of anarchy because of the losses in the first war and the absence of the

czar. Without the czar what what is the state? They swore allegiance to the czar

to the to the empire. Now it fancies itself a republic or

something like it. And Kerensky is the tragic figure at the center of trying to suppress what he believed was a

threat to the state by military officers, Cornell of his mention mentioned and in league with the Bolsheviks with Lenin.

This of course led to the catastrophe and the collapse of the army and the rise of

the Bolsheviks and two million dead in the Civil War and

then the 20th century tragedy of the Soviets and the Hitlerites in the Second

War.

Kerensky is the figure who misreads.

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