August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 is the first volume of his The Red Wheel cycle of novels an epic attempt to explain how Russia slid into the twin catastrophes of war and revolution. Where In the First Circle plunges us into Stalin’s infernal machinery, August 1914 takes the reader back to the slaughter of World War I, when Russia’s failures on the battlefield helped set the stage for Bolshevism. The novel is not only a historical narrative but also a philosophical inquiry into responsibility, fate, and the choice to serve when the nation is in peril.

A Novel of History and Conscience

At its core, August 1914 is a work of historical fiction that dramatizes the disastrous Russian campaign against Germany at the Battle of Tannenberg. Solzhenitsyn follows generals, ministers, and foot soldiers alike, weaving together their perspectives into a portrait of a society ill-prepared for war. The novel does not simply reconstruct events; it interrogates them. Why did Russia, a nation of immense size and resources, crumble so quickly? How did the incompetence of leaders and the blindness of institutions.

Solzhenitsyn’s method is almost documentary. He inserts archival material, official memos, and real speeches into his narrative, refusing to let the reader forget that these characters were not mere inventions but participants in a real historical collapse. The result is a hybrid form—part novel, part chronicle—that demands the reader confront history not as distant fact but as lived human tragedy.

The Figure of General Samsonov

One of the most haunting figures in August 1914 is General Aleksandr Samsonov, commander of the Russian Second Army. Samsonov is portrayed with compassion, not as a villain but as a man crushed by the weight of command, undone by poor communications, a divided staff, and his own hesitations. His tragic suicide after the defeat becomes emblematic of Russia’s humiliation.

Through Samsonov, Solzhenitsyn explores the tension between personal responsibility and systemic failure. Was Samsonov a poor general, or was he doomed by a larger structure of incompetence and corruption? Solzhenitsyn leaves the question open but insists that individuals matter—that decisions, mistakes, and moral weaknesses ripple outward into history.

The Theme of National Blindness

Just as In the First Circle exposes how Stalin’s Soviet Union normalized terror, August 1914 shows how Tsarist Russia normalized complacency. Bureaucrats ignored warnings, generals distrusted one another, and ministers jockeyed for power while soldiers starved at the front. The blindness was not merely strategic but moral: leaders refused to acknowledge the rot at the heart of their system.

Solzhenitsyn suggests that the seeds of 1917 were already present in 1914. The Revolution did not come from nowhere; it germinated in the failures of war, in the gap between the Russian people’s sacrifices and the state’s corruption. August 1914 is thus not only about a battle but about the unraveling of legitimacy.

Style and Structure

The novel is sprawling and demanding. Solzhenitsyn shifts rapidly from the trenches to the salons of St. Petersburg, from the thoughts of peasants to the intrigues of ministers. At times, the sheer detail can overwhelm; he includes staff orders, reports, and digressions that feel closer to history than fiction. Yet the density is deliberate. Solzhenitsyn is building an argument: history is not shaped by a few grand figures alone but by a swarm of documents, conversations, and decisions, each carrying its weight.

Amid this density, however, moments of piercing clarity emerge. A soldier’s death in a muddy field, a general’s paralyzing doubt, a politician’s cynical calculation—these scenes crystallize the human cost of institutional failure. Solzhenitsyn writes with the authority of someone who has lived through national disaster, and he insists that history must be understood not only through archives but through moral imagination.

Solzhenitsyn’s Vision

Although set decades before Stalin, August 1914 belongs to the same moral universe as In the First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. All share the conviction that falsehood and cowardice corrode societies from within. The First World War becomes, in Solzhenitsyn’s vision, a kind of prelude to the greater horrors of the twentieth century. The blindness of 1914 paved the way for the brutality of 1917 and beyond.

What unites Solzhenitsyn’s works is the belief that truth, however painful, must be faced. Just as he stripped the illusions from the Soviet present, here he strips the myths from the Russian past. August 1914 refuses the easy consolations of patriotism or nostalgia. It shows instead a society collapsing under its own deceptions.

August 1914 is dense, sprawling, and often closer to a historical investigation than to traditional fiction. Solzhenitsyn compels the reader to see history as lived tragedy and to recognize how human weakness, bureaucratic inertia, and moral blindness can shape the destiny of nations.

If In the First Circle is a descent into Hell, August 1914 is the map of the road that led there. Both works are united by a single purpose: to bear witness, to insist on truth, and to remind us that history is not fate but the accumulation of choices. In confronting the disaster of 1914, Solzhenitsyn demands that we confront the disasters we inherit—and the ones we may yet create.

Appendix One: A Personal Turning Point

I first read August 1914 in 2006. At the time, I was long removed from my earlier service in the U.S. Army during the 1970s and 80s, nearly a quarter century gone. Yet in Solzhenitsyn’s Vorotyntsev, the thoughtful officer who searches for truth amid confusion, I found something that spoke directly to my own life. Vorotyntsev embodied courage not as bravado, but as clarity—the ability to see through illusions, to recognize responsibility, and to act even when the path was uncertain.

That encounter with the novel stayed with me. The following year, at the age of 54, I re-enlisted in the Army. In 2009, I deployed to Iraq for a year. Many people thought such a choice was reckless, even impossible after so many years away. But Solzhenitsyn had shown me in August 1914 that history, whether of nations or individuals, is not fate. It is made by choices, by the willingness to take responsibility, and by the courage to step forward even when the odds are long.

Vorotyntsev helped me believe that it was not too late, that a return to service was not only possible but meaningful. In that sense, August 1914 was not just a novel I read; it was a turning point, a book that helped set the course of my life in a new direction. Like all of Solzhenitsyn’s work, it insists on truth, responsibility, and action. For me, it became more than literature—it became a call answered in the real world.

Appendix Two:  My Family in August 1914

The date that is the title of Solzhenitsyn's book has huge significance in the history of my family.  In that month my paternal grandfather, Hyman Gussman, began a year-long escape from service and certain death in the Russian army.  The story of his escape is here.

The Museum of the Great War, Somme, France

At the end of my trip to Europe last month, I visited the Museum of the Great War in Somme.  The museum is in a castle near the site of the one of the most horrible battles in World War One.  

The museum displays the things each soldier carried in the armies in the battle: clothes, mess gear, ammo, weapons, cleaning supplies and much more are displayed lying flat in areas recessed into the floor.  The displays have some of the feeling of graves.  

 As a soldier, I had the same kind of equipment I had to lay out for inspection. All the soldiers in the unit lay out their gear in a very specific pattern to make it easier for the their leaders to inspect the equipment. Anything missing is glaring when forty soldiers all lay out their equipment.  

Here are some of the displays from the Great War Museum:

German soldier

French officer uniforms

German uniform items

Machine guns

Machine guns

Medical equipment

Nurse uniform

American Soldier

Just a few miles away was the Red Baron Memorial on the side of a country road.

French Soldier in Afghanistan Writes About His Admiration for American Soldiers

The article below was sent to me by my friend Julian Richter.  It's a real tribute to American soldiers.  Here is the link, but I am pasting the whole thing so dead links won't be a problem.

Here is the original in French.  If you read French the last two paragraphs are beautiful.

I trained with French soldiers in Germany in the 1970s.  Those soldiers were the grandsons of the French Army that lost a million dead and five million wounded in World War One.  This young man would be the great grandson of those men who defended France in the horrors of the trenches.

What follows is an account from a French ISAF soldier that was stationed with American Warfighters in Afghanistan sometime in the past 4 years.  This was copied and translated from an editorial French newspaper.

A NOS FRERES D’ARMES AMERICAINS

"We have shared our daily life with two US units for quite a while - they are the first and fourth companies of a prestigious infantry battalion whose name I will withhold for the sake of military secrecy. To the common man it is a unit just like any other. But we live with them and got to know them, and we henceforth know that we have the honor to live with one of the most renowned units of the US Army - one that the movies brought to the public as series showing "ordinary soldiers thrust into extraordinary events". Who are they, those soldiers from abroad, how is their daily life, and what support do they bring to the men of our OMLT every day? Few of them belong to the Easy Company, the one the TV series focuses on. This one nowadays is named Echo Company, and it has become the support company. 

They have a terribly strong American accent - from our point of view the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word? Whatever State they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other. Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine- they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them - we are wimps, even the strongest of us - and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.

And they are impressive warriors! We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how. Beyond the wearing of a combat kit that never seem to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.) the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to annoy them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles on top, their sight unmoving in the directions of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues nights and days. At night, all movements are performed in the dark - only a handful of subdued red lights indicate the occasional presence of a soldier on the move. Same with the vehicles whose lights are covered - everything happens in pitch dark even filling the fuel tanks with the Japy pump.Here we discover America as it is often depicted: their values are taken to their paroxysm, often amplified by promiscuity and the loneliness of this outpost in the middle of that Afghan valley.

And combat? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all - always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks: they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later - which cuts any pussyfooting short.Honor, motherland - everything here reminds of that: the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels. Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any goal other than to hold high and proud the star spangled banner. Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provides them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location: books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste etc. in such way that every man is aware of how much the American people backs him in his difficult mission. And that is a first shock to our preconceptions: the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team are the focus of all his attention.

(This is the main area where I'd like to comment. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Kipling knows the lines from Chant Pagan: 'If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white/remember it's ruin to run from a fight./ So take open order, lie down, sit tight/ And wait for supports like a soldier./ This, in fact, is the basic philosophy of both British and Continental soldiers. 'In the absence of orders, take a defensive position.' Indeed, virtually every army in the world. The American soldier and Marine, however, are imbued from early in their training with the ethos: In the Absence of Orders: Attack! Where other forces, for good or ill, will wait for precise orders and plans to respond to an attack or any other 'incident', the American force will simply go, counting on firepower and SOP to carry the day.

This is one of the great strengths of the American force in combat and it is something that even our closest allies, such as the Brits and Aussies (that latter being closer by the way) find repeatedly surprising. No wonder is surprises the hell out of our enemies.)

We seldom hear any harsh word, and from 5 AM onwards the camp chores are performed in beautiful order and always with excellent spirit. A passing American helicopter stops near a stranded vehicle just to check that everything is alright; an American combat team will rush to support ours before even knowing how dangerous the mission is - from what we have been given to witness, the American soldier is a beautiful and worthy heir to those who liberated France and Europe.

To those who bestow us with the honor of sharing their combat outposts and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to those who pay the daily tribute of America's army's deployment on Afghan soil, to those we owned this article, ourselves hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and to always continue hearing them say that we are all the same band of brothers".

PERSONAL THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ARTICLE:

For much of this article, the various veterans reading will go 'Well, duh. Of course we do our 'camp chores' and stand our posts in good order. There's a reason for them and if we didn't we'd get our heads handed to us eventually. And, yeah, we're in shape. Makes battle easier. The more you sweat, the less you bleed.'

What is hard for most people to comprehend is that that attitude represented only the most elite units of the past. Current everyday conventional boring 'leg infantry' units exceed the PT levels and training levels of most Special Forces during the Vietnam War. They exceed both of those as well as IQ and educational levels of: Waffen SS, WWII Rangers, WWII Airborne and British 'Commando' units during WWII. Their per-unit combat-functionality is essentially unmeasurable because it has to be compared to something and there's nothing comparable in industrial period combat history.

This group is so much better than 'The Greatest Generation' at war that WWII vets who really get a close look at how good these kids are stand in absolute awe.

Everyone complains about the quality of 'the new guys.' Don't. The screw-ups of this modern generation are head and shoulders above the 'high-medium' of any past group. Including mine.So much of 'The scum of the earth, enlisted for drink.'

This is 'The Greatest Generation' of soldiers.

They may never be equalled.