The subject of Russia's military defeat at Tannenberg has fascinated Solzhenitsyn since 1937, when it was first proposed to him as a research topic at Rostov University. He read extensively on the topic and collected material for decades. Ironically he was arrested in East Prussia near the site of the events.

Solzhenitsyn believes that the Bolshevik government that seized power in Russia in 1918 was neither a natural sequel to Czarist autocracy (as many Western scholars argued) nor an historically necessary evolution (as Marxist theoreticians asserted). To him Soviet Communism was an aberration caused by a coincidence of extraordinary events in the first two decades of the century. The first of these is the battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, a major defeat of the Russian army in the first month of the World War I. The original version of August 1914 (1972) describes the invasion of East Prussia by the...