In the early morning of March 19, 1915, Lt. Colonel S. N.
Miasoedov, a former gendarme officer on active duty with the
Russian army in World War I, was hanged after a two-hour trial in
Warsaw for treason. Although he was innocent of this charge,
Miasoedov's hasty execution, set against the army's disastrous
performance in the war against Germany, touched off a wave of "spy
mania" that resulted in hundreds of arrests and eventually involved
the highest reaches of the Russian Empire, including the minister
of war, General V. A. Sukhomlinov, who was arrested for the same
crime the following year.The trials of Miasoedov and Sukhomlinov
and the purported revelations of elaborate networks of pro-German
spies were for many Russians the principal explanation for the
military catastrophes Russia had endured at Germany's hands since
the beginning of World War I. This belief gradually took hold among
the Russian public at large and politicians of all stripes. Today,
the fact that both Miasoedov and Sukhomlinov were innocent of
treason has been universally accepted, but the full story of the
events leading up to their fallacious prosecutions has never before
been completely revealed. As told here by William C. Fuller, Jr.,
it is an astonishing narrative full of vivid incident and populated
by a cast of characters that includes the emperors of both Germany
and Russia, Baltic noblemen, tsarist generals, courtesans, war
profiteers, peasants, Jewish businessmen, tsarist ministers, German
spymasters, and Rasputin. In the course of reconstructing the
events he so deftly relates, Fuller explains how they crippled the
Russian monarchy and paved the way for the February Revolution of
1917. The book also situates the cases against the backdrop of
Russia's increasingly toxic political culture; bureaucratic
politics; and popular attitudes in late imperial Russia toward
capitalists, Jews, Germans, and women. The Foe Within is an
unprecedented portrait of a regime so riddled with intrigue and
corruption that its collapse in the face of mounting military and
economic difficulty comes to seem all but inevitable.
General
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