I’ve long believed that Nicholas II’s decsion to defend Serbia was the most disasterous decision of the whole 20th century, and led indirectly to almost every horror of that century. While composing this piece, it occurred to me that, if he’d decided on peace, he never would have known what he’d averted. Nicholas II was not an imaginative man. Nor was he liberal or technologically progressive. He would probably view himself as a failure, never realizing just how horrible his fate, and that of his country, would have been otherwise.
Jordan Bassior