It all began in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on June 28th when the Austro-Hungarian archduke Francis Ferdinand was shot and killed by 19-year-old student Gavrilo Princip, who was a member of a secret society of extreme nationalists struggling to reunite Bosnia with Serbia. With most of Europe still ruled by monarchs, it's easy to imagine the shock the Austrians felt learning about the assassination. Emperor Francis Joseph saw it as the occasion for forceful measures to bring Serbia to heel. The German Emperor William the Second and his General Staff were determined to give full support to the advocates of war in Vienna. Russia sided with the Serbs and so, at 7 p.m. on August 1st, 1914, the German Ambassador handed the Russian Foreign Minister a written declaration of war. Two days later, Germany declared war against France. In a show of allied solidarity with Russia and France, Britain also entered the war. Japan preferred to stand by the alliance with Britain and, on August 23rd, it also declared war on the Germans.... That was how a regional conflict degenerated into a global conflagration, engulfing Belgium and France, East Prussia and Galicia, Serbia and Palestine, the Trans-Caucasus, Africa and the oceans. It was the biggest and bloodiest war the world had ever seen before...
The news quickly swept across Russia triggering mass patriotic rallies in big cities and a whopping 96 percent of men liable for call-up reported to recruitment points in the first few days of the war's declaration. Meanwhile, the German armies, flouting the Belgian neutrality, were moving west towards the French borders. Russian Generals Rannenkampf and Samsonov ordered their troops to launch a two-pronged invasion of East Prussia forcing the Germans, already within a few hours' marching distance from Paris, to send reinforcements from the Western Front and so saved France and Europe from defeat and made possible the victory of the Marne. In late August, General Samsonov's army was defeated by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorf at Tannenberg. Devastated by the reversal, caused, besides purely professional miscalculations, by the rashness of the whole operation, General Samsonov killed himself... By the year's end, it was already clear that the war in Europe, both east and west, had largely subsided into a position warfare with the belligerents trying to bleed each other white. Such a war of attrition requires undisrupted supplies of ammunition, food, reinforcements and well-trained soldiers and junior officers - all-important factors none of which Russian could fully boast of... In summation, we can say that, even though the Germans had initiated the war, they still failed to win any major victories having to fight on two fronts against powers whose combined might was bigger than theirs and the British Navy was ruling the waves. In August of 1914, however, few people, if any at all, would venture to forecast the horrible results of what had happened... We'll look at the aftermath of World War One in one of our future programs.
The year 1914 saw the birth of the would-be Soviet leader Yuri Andropov who spent 15 years at the head of the all-powerful KGB secret service. Taking over from the long-serving Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev who died in 1982, Yuri Andropov outlined a string of radical reforms to kickstart the moribund Soviet economy but his death just a little more than a year later, dashed these hopes.
Also in 1914 the United States completed the construction of the Panama Canal which was the biggest technological breakthrough of the century connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and facilitating and shortening the transit of commercial and navy vessels. The United States has a number of military bases built inside the strategically important Canal Zone to protect this 12 lock, 80 kilometer-long technological marvel... In 1914 the American author Edgar Burroughs published his Tarzan of the Apes novel which met with immediate success and has since become a bestseller enjoyed by generations of appreciative readers everywhere. The book is about a little boy from an aristocratic family who gets lost in the jungle and is brought up by the monkeys. Acting on the strength of the book's resounding success, Edgar Burroughs followed up the triumph writing 20 more books about Tarzan.

THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.


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