The Crimean War and Russia’s Relations with European Powers

This epochal change in the structure of European international politics finally led to the conclusion of a Franco-Russian alliance in the early 1890s. However, this alliance proved insufficient to counterbalance unified Germany and its Austro-Hungarian satellite. In July 1914, the FrancoRussian alliance even contributed to the transformation of another Balkan crisis into a pan-European conflict, in which Russia suffered defeat while France achieved only a pyrrhic victory. The fatal character of the RussoFrench alliance, when concluded on an anti-German basis, only highlights what the Franco-Russian alliance could have been if concluded in the first half of the 19th century, i.e., before the structural changes brought about by the Crimean War (Vinogradov, 2005)

Alliance · Politics · Spanish Civil War · World War II · Central European national history · History and International Relations · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact