Editorial

ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022, Vol. 92, Suppl. 11, pp. S999. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2022. Editorial DOI: 10.1134/S1019331622170063 The past centenary of the First World War gave a new impetus and a new quality to the study of this grandiose historical phenomenon. The result of an unprecedented surge in research and publishing activity of Russian and foreign historians is a qualitatively new stage in the evolution of scientific knowledge about the largest military conflict of the first third of the last century, which had no analogues in the previous history of human society. This stage is characterized by the expansion of the source base of research, the active development of new problems and subjects of the history of the Great War, the expansion of the range of methods and approaches to its study, and the improvement of cooperation between national scientific schools. In Russia, the First World War finally emerged from the shadow of the 1917 revolution and began to be perceived by both the scientific community and society as an independent historical phenomenon. This thematic issue of the journal is dedicated to the “eternal” problems of the origin of the Great War and their interpretation in the light of the latest achievements in the historiography of the prehistory, course, and consequences of the events of 1914−1918. Among these problems are the international political context of Europe’s “slipping” into a global military conflict; internal political, economic, and social problems of the powers as a catalyst for world war; armed forces and strategic plans of future participants in the war; and, finally, the actors and decisions of the “July Crisis” of 1914. Denis Kozlov, Dr. Sci. (Hist.), Head of the Center for Military History of Russia of the RAS Institute of Russian History and President of the Russian Association of Historians of the First World War e-mail: S999  (...truncated)