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This article explores Chinese perspectives on the indenturing of Chinese labourers during the First World War and Chinese official intervention in the indenture system. In contrast to the Qing government's reluctance to send people overseas, the Republican government formed in Peking in 1912 believed in integration into the international capitalist system, and that indentured Chinese labourers working abroad would benefit the country and its people. The government sought to regulate indentures to prevent the recruitment of labourers by rogue agents and to establish new standards for the indenturing system. To some extent this arrangement reflected the characteristics of a new system under which the labourer was relatively free. The popular press was the main vehicle through which the Chinese reading public constructed their perceptions of the indenture system. The terrible conditions endured by Chinese labourers in Russia was portrayed in newspapers as a consequence of the fraudulent practices of Chinese recruiting agents. Labourers recruited by the British and French were judged to have received better treatment. The perceptions of Chinese labourers and their families varied, but especially after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, their memories of indenture were influenced by anti-colonial and nationalist perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly and testimonial evidence from Armenian, English, French, German, and Turkish sources document the gendered ways by which the Ottoman Empire utilized mandatory military service — conscription — as a tool to carry out genocide during the First World War. Recruitment and deployment policies empowered Ottoman conscripts to commit crimes while simultaneously authorizing the capture and destruction of Armenian men and boys. Given the obfuscations that arose amid the war’s normalized carnage, it is crucial to note that the intent to destroy and the method of capture that Ottoman perpetrators used existed prior to the demise of their targets. Due to the empire’s gendered necropolitical exploitation of Armenians, combined with the precedent of the draft as a way to raise armed forces, assemble forced labourers, and punish men deemed insubordinate to imperial leaders, the era’s mass loss of life continues to offer some observers a way to erroneously excuse and deny this case of genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a total war, World War I constituted a significant historical moment which proved that warfare not only serves to build nations and national identities, but can also create suitable socioeconomic and political conditions that foster the process of capital accumulation. The Ottoman state, like all the belligerents, on the one hand mobilized human power, means of production and subsistence and natural resources on a large scale for fighting and financing the war; on the other hand, it established a war economy based on violence and protectionism that directly favored war profiteers. The present article centers on the implementation of the War Tax Law, adopted on the eve of the war, which paved the way for state policies of dispossession, confiscation, and requisition. It argues that these practices aimed at the redistribution of capital to give birth to a new generation of Turkish-Muslim capitalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memorials operate on many semiotic and mnemonic levels, and are often created at an architectural scale constituted as clusters of artistically choreographed and architectonically situated signs and symbols. Guest‐ Editor of this 2 Peter J Baldwin explores the sculptural and drawn work of Royal Academician Michael Sandle and discusses the artist's multilayered and multiscaled oeuvre that bristles with haunted, painful pasts – lest we forget! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper examines local response to the recruitment of Labour Corps in the Chin Hills during the First World War. It probes the tenability of colonial binary of dividing the local population into 'loyal' and 'rebel' groups. It argues that the so-called 'loyal' Zo (Chin) were rather coerced to join the Labour Corps through the influence of the Ukpi. On the other hand, those who resisted colonial wartime policy were not 'rebel' but warriors who fought a war within a war in order to free themselves from colonial bondage, albeit it was confined to a particular area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of the British Army during the First World War have emphasised the shift from the small pre-war professional army engaged in imperial policing to the mass citizen army capable of conducting modern industrialised warfare on the European continent. That the conflict's global dimensions led British forces beyond the Western Front to operate in conditions which bore remarkable resemblance to those encountered during the 'small wars' of the nineteenth century and confront comparably irregular adversaries has remained understudied, not least in how earlier experiences affected how such challenges were met. This article redresses this omission by examining how the expeditionary force in Macedonia, the British Salonika Force, was guided by institutional and individual experiences of 'small wars' when approaching the challenges posed by the region, not least the hostile indigenous population and comitadji irregulars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Founded in 1909 by W. Doegen in Berlin, the Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) was enriched during the First World War with valuable texts and folk songs recorded on discs and wax cylinders or recorded on paper. The research took place in 32 of the 175 prisoner-of-war camps of the Allied Powers, which covered the territory of Germany at that time. The prisoners came from European, Asian, African countries and the United States of America, and the research was carried out by a team of 50 German specialists in the languages spoken in those countries. Among them are three camps with prisoners from the Kingdom of Romania and from Bessarabia located in the perimeter of the cities of Chemnitz, Mannheim and Lamsdorf. The study presents some of the results obtained by the professors M. Friedwagner and H. Urtel in the research of the Romanian prisoners in those camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War blurred the lines between "ordinary" and "literary" writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families and friends admit they had no knowledge of their loved one's writing practices until they found a journal full of poems after the author's death, which they only published as a posthumous tribute. This article uses examples of French poetry of the Great War to explore this permeability between what is considered war poetry and what is considered war ephemera. The main question it addresses is what changes when we look at the war poems that were initially ephemera or ordinary writing. Whose stories get told when poetry is studied not as literature to be judged as accomplished or failed art but as a way of writing to make sense of the world? It argues that when we choose to read poems as ephemera and from the point of view of a larger anthropology of writing practices, diverse histories emerge and communities who write poetry not only as an artistic pursuit but also as a means of organizing experience and leaving traces behind reclaim ownership over their own narratives. This can challenge the false equivalence between the cultural history of warfare and an intellectual history of the elites at war and includes poetry within paradigmatic shifts that place objects at the centre of mediations of the experience of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers three South African community cookbooks – including The Overseas Contingent Fund Recipe Book (Turffontein, 1915) and the Paarl Cookery Book in Aid of War Funds (Paarl, 1918) alongside Wartime Cookery (Cape Town, 1915) – as expressions of gendered patriotism. These community-created cookbooks enabled contributors to participate meaningfully in the First World War by drawing together two established gendered practices: philanthropic fundraising and food and household management. This 'domesticity in action' enabled participants to contribute to, and feel connected to, both local and trans-empire causes. These values of philanthropy, economy and patriotism are revealed in the constitutive components of the texts – the titles, aims, prefaces and even the recipes themselves. Apart from supporting specific funds, the call for economy in the cookbooks reflected both experiences and perceptions of wartime material hardship in South Africa. A further consideration of the contributors involved with the books' compilations highlights the intersection of local and trans-empire networks, and wartime (white) identity politics within urban South Africa. The networks suggest locally-grounded loyalisms, many marked by personal connections to men serving, as well as friend and family networks with overseas reach. Lastly, the article is a reminder of the importance of cookbooks as neglected sources in the writing of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The video game Valiant Hearts, released in 2014 for the First World War centenary, sold over 2.5 million copies and can be considered one of the major contemporary pop-culture historical representations of this war shaping public interpretations of this event. The paper explores how Valiant Hearts, as a kind of informal institution affecting historical remembrance, constructs and encourages a specific framing through the deployment of Europeanizing elements of anti-war narrative, Franco-German reconciliation narrative, and the de-nationalizing logic that indirectly legitimizes the European integration. The analysis of the videogame in the context of the historical film Merry Christmas (2005) is complemented with a close reading of illustrative empirical examples of Let's Plays (paratextual user-generated videos where people record themselves while playing videogames) that indicate how Europeans of different national backgrounds interact with the game Valiant Hearts. The examined cases point to how the everyday, seemingly apolitical leisure activity of playing and watching videogames dealing with history can advance Europeanizing narratives and present occasions for informal Europeanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper "Black Monasteries": Hungarian and Italian Literature and Popular Writing in the First World War analyzes War literature and the directly related literature about internment camps, both relating to the First World War, which had a different development in Hungary and Italy; however, similar features can be found in them. Regarding these aspects, this essay examines some works, starting from the Black Monastery [Fekete kolostor] by Aladár Kuncz and other novels and "reportage novels" (Siberian garrison [Szibériai garnizon], by Rodion Markovits) of the same period. Their characteristic traits are peculiar and common with Italian works (i.e. Un anno sull'altipiano, by Emilio Lussu, Taccuino di Caporetto, by Carlo Emilio Gadda), while the final part of the essay concerns popular writing and its role in the literature, based on the experience in internment camps and war literature through studies and research that focus on the correspondence with families and friends of soldiers and internees from many European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article analyses together, for the first time, Ford Madox Ford's short stories about the First World War. A surprisingly unfamiliar form for Ford, who valued allusion, subtlety, and omission as narrative devices, we see in these stories his first attempts to parse his experience of wartime and, subsequently, military service. It is also an aspect of Ford's writing which has received little previous critical comment. The wartime and post-war short stories are approached chronologically: 'The Scaremonger: A Tale of the War Times' (1914), 'Fun!—It's Heaven' (1915), 'Pink Flannel' (1919), 'The Colonel's Shoes' (1920), 'Enigma' ([1920–1922] 1999), and 'The Miracle' (1928). The contemporary debates in which Ford intervened are highlighted by returning to their original periodical publications, and extensive reference to a range of his non-fictional periodical contributions establishes new connections among his wartime writing. Here I bring together for the first time these short stories, arguing that Ford's refracting of the war through the lens of his impressionism is distinctive as an early response to war, trauma, and neurosis and is vital to the genesis of his later successes in prose, notably the Parade's End novel tetralogy (1924–1928). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an essay written sometime in 1917 or 1918, unpublished during his lifetime and only discovered in 1980, Ford Madox Ford reflects on what his war experience in France taught him: "above all things—humility". This article argues that Ford's writing about humility and perspective-taking in his wartime essays, which he connects to unstinting attentiveness to the particularities of place and people, can be read through an ecocritical lens that sees an ecological humility as central to reorienting human relationships within the natural world. In reflecting on both the lessons of war and the causes of such conflicts, Ford highlights humility in terms of perspective-taking and, in a related move, foregrounds the necessity for the precise use of language—both he sees as key to representing and preventing war. In so doing, I argue, Ford calls for an aesthetics and an ethics of war writing. Such literature must realize the impossibility and hubris of the bird's-eye view, instead rooting itself in the ground, both literally and linguistically, while using a precise language that emerges from a clear awareness of this limited perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reactions to the Wright brothers' achievement of the first sustained, controlled powered flight in December 1903 ranged from complete indifference to voluble celebration and evolved into convictions that ranged from a belief that war would be rendered impossible to confident predictions of invasion and widespread destruction. The policies and perceptions of institutions, governments and individuals were subject to constant revision and often abrupt reversal. When war came, the aeroplane, which began as an instrument of reconnaissance, rapidly became one more hazard among many for those at the front and a further point of division between combatants and civilians, for whom airships and air raids tended to loom larger. The first dynamic phase in the story of the aeroplane overlaps with the major early modernist period. This essay seeks to map, within that wider context, the experiences and responses of Ford Madox Ford. He began, like many others, with images of beauty and the natural world in that early stage when a functioning range of descriptive or comparative terms had yet to emerge. He encountered them next in the theatre of war during his service in France. His ambivalence towards aeroplanes was both similar to and different from his earlier responses to trains, cars and telephones. Their relative rarity, as well as their both physical and metaphorical distance, and Ford's own apparent immunity to the glamour and dynamism of aviation enabled him to view them retrospectively and employ them in anecdote, autobiography and fiction as both threat and saviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to the historiography of the First World War, scholarship on violence has focused on abstract and impersonal forms of violence between opposing forces or on more personal forms of violence between civilians and enemy combatants. In contrast, this article uses military justice archives to explore instances of serious interpersonal violence and sustained brutality between soldiers in the same combat unit. It provides a new vantage point to explore the complex entanglement of violence and camaraderie and how that played out in the specific context of France's multiethnic Armée d'Afrique. Unpacking the accusations, explanations, and justifications that emerge from multivocal military justice sources illustrates what it meant to commit and be criminalized for certain acts of violence in a context saturated with violence; how and where the line was drawn between acceptable and unacceptable conduct; and, most important, what violence reveals about individual combat experiences and relationships between comrades. Granting access to the perspectives and internal worlds of this diverse group of soldiers, many from racially and otherwise marginalized communities, military justice evidences a complicated and rich set of situational responses and social relationships that enhances our ability to reflect on the conflict's impact on the men caught up in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Post Office was the United Kingdom's single largest employer and possessed the majority of female workers in the Civil Service before the First World War. This article concentrates on the self-perception and trade union activities of the Irish women who became permanent postal staff by successfully qualifying in the public examination. It first examines the meaning of educational standard to these women by exploring the decline of open competition from 1902. In this process, it demonstrates their professional commitment and pride which was consolidated and amplified after the breakout of the First World War – attitudes sometimes denounced as inconsistent with feminine propriety. These "unfeminine women" constantly fought against discriminatory social norms amid the attacks from "angry men" and survived in the public sphere even after the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Kronika is the property of Kronika, Casopis za Slovensko Krajevno Zgodovino and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Competition between Germany and the West for access to Russian raw materials in 1918 reflected the exceptional importance of raw materials to both the war effort and to plans for the post-war. Anxieties about the weaknesses in their own strategies were reflected in reports on both sides about the enemy gaining access to Russian material when they themselves could not. These anxieties highlighted competing ideas about the ability of markets to allow coercive pressure to be exerted at a distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay analyzes Moscow, the cycle of novels published between 1926 and 1932 in the USSR by the symbolist writer Andrei Bely. The cycle retrospectively recounts the transformations that would lead to the birth of the new Soviet socialist state. Three different utopias in the struggle against the capitalist and bourgeois order identifiable in the cycle of novels are examined: that of the young Lizasha, daughter of the Western businessman and spy Mandro, who dreams of the existence of a "world beyond", that of the socialist Kierko and that of professor Korobkin, i.e. the utopia of free science and universal order, as well as the inner transfiguration of humanity. The essay intends to show how the first two utopias, which in the course of the narration merge into a single one, are overcome in Bielian narration by the third: spiritual regeneration, and not the achievement of socialism, whose flaws Bely covertly highlights, is the only true evolutionary condition of the spiral of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the important contribution to psychoanalysis made by the psychoanalyst Karin Stephen. Following in the footsteps of other feminist biographers and historians of psychoanalysis, who have worked to bring 'Freud's women' out of the shadows, this article not only focuses on Karin Stephen's role within the internal political struggles of the British Psychoanalytical Society during the Second World War, but also shows how her psychoanalytic writings can be read in the context of her political activism in the 1930s. Beginning with a biographical account of Stephen's early life and marriage in October 1914 to Virginia Woolf's brother, Adrian Stephen, the paper goes on to explore the impact of Karin Stephen's political activism on her psychoanalytic writing. The article examines Stephen's arguments, in both her published and her unpublished writings, about the capacity for psychoanalysis to respond to the political crises of the 1930s and 1940s by offering patients freedom from servility to the 'raging dictator[s]' within and beyond the inner world of their minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Second World War saw a sharp rise in bigamy prosecutions in Australia. A variety of factors contributed to this phenomenon, from the whirlwind nature of romances contracted during wartime to increased detection resulting from investigations into military spousal support. This article explores the connections between bigamy prosecutions, war and military enlistment through archival records and media coverage of 159 cases committed for trial across 1914–1945 that involved active or returned servicemen as either bigamy defendants or victims of bigamous spouses. These cases also reveal shifting attitudes towards and experiences of bigamy, marriage, and gender in twentieth-century Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women have never been passive bystanders to the history being made around them and they have always found ways to contribute to shaping their world. Munich in 1918/1919 provides a useful site to examine women's experiences and roles due to the long-standing involvement of women in the peace movement and welfare work, as well as the foundation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic after the First World War. However, Munich in the early years of the Weimar Republic is most commonly associated with Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, an attempt by right-wing men to seize political power. Moreover, the 1918 revolution is also often told through the lens of male political figures. As a result, politics in the early twentieth century is easy to view as a male-dominated affair with women merely experiencing the effects of male political power. This era, particularly from the perspective of Munich, also becomes viewed through the lens of the rise of fascism, which obscures and distorts the alternative political visions many women held and worked towards. This article centres on women's experiences and roles in politics and the public sphere in revolutionary Munich to ask what opportunities the revolution and its immediate aftermath presented for women and how they were able to influence political decision-making despite huge barriers. Through an understanding of how their world was gendered, their role as political agents comes to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines a specific segment of visual propaganda from the First World War, the caricatures of comic papers (German: Kladderadatsch; Austrian: Figaro, Kikieriki, Wiener Caricaturen and Die Muskete; Hungarian: Borsszem Jankó and Mátyás Diák). It focuses on the visual tools used by cartoonists to depict the enemy, how they employed visual propaganda, and whether this met the criteria of effective propaganda. By way of comparison, it also briefly discusses some elements of the self-image. The symbols of the First World War cartoons still closely followed 19th century trends: cartoonists commented on the events of the war by depicting and exaggerating ancient myths, biblical stories, women representing countries and men and animals representing nations. This study will attempt a systematic analysis of these motifs and symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Motif Academy Journal of Folklore is the property of Motif Yayincilik and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article deals with the meanings and agencies of earth in the making of memory. We consider the role of the soil at the Gallipoli peninsula, in today's Turkey, a key First World War battlefield and a nodal point of national memories, especially for Australia, New Zealand and Turkey. Informed by more-than-human approaches to heritage and memory and drawing on contemporary site visits as well as historical sources, we discuss the Gallipoli peninsula as a landscape freighted with earthy memory in multiple ways: with the bodies of the dead of 1915, the material deposits and earthworks of the conflict, the memory practices undertaken relationally between people and nation states, and the weight of international diplomacies in the making and remaking of geopolitical orders and claims. In all of this, the ground is both supremely tangible and extremely abstract, making it a most potent agent in memory practices. We are interested in how groups claim ownership of, and control over, the ground; the many ways in which the earth comes to matter, including why and how it moves, how far, and through what forms of transfer; and the scalar zoom of perception and imagination that allows memory to take different forms. We explore these interrelations through attention to processes of what we call 'formation' and 'activation' of the earth, arguing that they often work to set up mitigations or collapses of distance – geographically and temporally – through different memorial and museum practices and rituals. In our analysis, however, such attempts to create collapses, or 'wormholes', through which the faraway Gallipoli can somehow be felt and grasped, are ultimately doomed to fail, as spatial and temporal distances inevitably seem to re-assert themselves as brutal and unbrookable gulfs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ford Madox Ford famously intended his First World War tetralogy Parade's End to have "for its purpose the obviating of all future wars". But why do we engage in war to begin with? Modernist literature provides some provocative explanations. Ford's Sylvia Tietjens, for example, proclaims that "You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women. It was what war was for". And in the very same year, Virginia Woolf's shell-shocked Septimus Smith "went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare..." I argue that Ford's understanding of the causality of war involves a strange combination of these two explanations in Parade's End's triangulation of seventeenth-century English literary tradition along with sexual and imperial conquest. While countless modernist novels exhibit a sensibility to the power of early modern poetry amidst battle, Parade's End displays a particularly emphatic and extended focus on the relationship between poetic tradition and war. Soldiers of various ranks "talk...in intimate undertones about the resemblances between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet form", host timed sonnet competitions in the trenches, recurringly quote the seduction poetry of Marvell, and fantasize about George Herbert's lifespan being "the only satisfactory age in England...yet what chance had it today? Or, still more, to-morrow?". To answer this question, my own transtemporal study will use early modern scholarship to investigate seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry's dual power to inspire and potentially obviate war. Much has been written on this tetralogy's anti-linear plot but less on the broader temporality of its politico-literary vision. I contend that the metaphysical allusions of this text help Ford to show us the complexities of nationalism in the imperial conquest and imperial damnation that (early) modern aesthetics can catalyse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard image of First World War soldiers is of men in open trenches: waiting to attack or be attacked; walking, sitting, sleeping, dead. Ford's Parade's End includes such scenes. But it is a different kind of image which predominates in his war writings and often produces its most memorable passages: images of houses or house-like shelters. The mind seeks protection in such structures; but they offer little security against the destructiveness outside, against the bombardments, gas, shrapnel, bullets. Ford wrote that the experience of war revealed: 'men's dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. ... all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields [...]'. This realisation works in two ways. The soldier's sense of vulnerability provokes fantasies of home, solidity, sanctuary, while for the returnee soldier, domestic architecture summons war-visions of its own annihilation: 'it had been revealed to you', adds Ford, 'that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos'. It is now customary to read war literature through trauma theory. Building on analyses of Ford's use of repression, but drawing instead on object relations theory, I argue that Ford's houses of war are not screen memories but images of the failure of repression to screen off devastating experiences. The abysses of Chaos can be seen through the screen or projected upon it. Attending to Ford's handling of this theme enables a new reading of his war writing and a new case for its coherence. The essay will connect the opening of No More Parades (in a hut, during a bombardment) with the war poem 'The Old Houses of Flanders'; the postwar poem A House; the memoir It Was the Nightingale (quoted above); and the otherwise puzzling, fictionalised memoir No Enemy, structured in terms of 'Four Landscapes' and 'Certain Interiors'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are important archives of french martial courts in the Service Historique de la Défense, located in the city of Vincennes near Paris. These archives are very precisous for the history of justice, crime and army. If we take the exemple of feminicids during the First World War in Paris, we could understand how this archives are usefull. Maybe too avoid in France so far, this archives could open new questions about links between war violence and ordinary violence, as well as the differences among military and civil justice.

The article is devoted to the problem of relations between the leaders and members of right-wing salons and circles in the capital of the Russian Empire and Grigori Rasputin, a peasant who was then close to the royal family. In the pre-revolutionary years, conservative right-wing salons and circles continued to play a certain role in the political system of the country. Some of them appeared in the late 19th century (the salons of Prince V. Meshchersky, General E. Bogdanovich, and Countess S. Ignatieva), while others became active during the First World War (the salons of Prince M. Andronikov, Metropolitan Pitirim (Oknov) of Petrograd and Ladoga, the circle of N. Burdukov). Many of those associations tried to use Rasputin for their own purposes. They invited the “starets” to the salon meetings, held “spiritual conversations” with him, etc. Based on a set of historical sources (diaries, letters, memoirs, etc.), the author of the article has reconstructed the development of relations between the leaders and members of right-wing salons and circles of St Petersburg–Petrograd and Grigori Rasputin. The author concludes that their communication with Rasputin was mainly aimed at enlisting his support in exerting political influence on the Emperor. According to these sources, the “starets” was distrustful of the leaders of salons and circles and did not want to participate in their political games. The article chronologically retraces the evolution of those relations and concludes that the attitudes gradually changed towards greater distrust and sometimes towards open hostility (as was the case of the Petrograd right-wing monarchic salon of Prince M. Andronikov). It is emphasised that no real facts of influence on Tsarist policy through Rasputin were recorded in the sources. At the same time, allegations that Rasputin gave the Emperor various instructions at the suggestion of the leaders of right-wing salons and circles were published in numerous articles and news items of the liberal pre-revolutionary periodicals. In the author’s opinion, in doing so, not only did the periodicals prepare the psychological ground for the murder of Rasputin, but they also discredited the monarchical idea itself.

The paper discusses the key problem of the Serbian artillery in 1914: the lack of ammunition. The focus of analysis has been placed on the different strategies the Serbian state used to find artillery ammunition and additional weapons. Special attention has been dedicated to the collaboration with France and its shipment of the ’wrong ammunition’ in November 1914. It has been shown that the ammunition crisis was overcome by combining a multitude of resources which included abundant assistance from the Entente, Greece, and the Serbia’s industrial capacities. The problem of the ammunition crisis has been treated as a global phenomenon, enabling placing Serbian theater of operations into a wider perspective.