Nikolay Golovin on Russia’s participation in the First World War: origins of the institutional approach

The article analyzes the views of the Russian military emigrant Nikolay Nikolaevich Golovin on Russia's participation in the First World War. The analysis tool is the institutional theory, which involves identifying the relationship between the most important public spheres: political, military, economic, and social institutions reflected in his works, and allows us to evaluate their influence on the nature of the military struggle against the bloc of the Central Powers. The purpose of the work is to find an answer to the question of how, from Golovin's point of view, the institutions of the Russian Empire in the early XX century determined the possibilities of its military confrontation with its opponents during the First World War. The author characterizes the main theoretical principles through which the views of the Russian military leader were constituted, and demonstrates the influence of domestic military thought, German military theory and the sociological ideas of Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin on their formation. Characterizing Golovin's evaluations of the aforementioned institutions, the researcher emphasizes the military theorist and practitioner's deep understanding of their general inconsistency with the qualitatively new conditions of waging a war which the entire country was drawn into. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that the situation with state, military, social, and economic institutions on the eve of the world conflict described by the former general of the Russian Imperial Army was a serious obstacle to achieving strategic success in the war. This was due to the fact that the system rooted in the past forms and, accordingly, functioning well during the previous wars, was completely inconsistent with a new type of war involving an armed people. This logic led the former general to recognize the unresolved contradiction between the old forms of state and a new large-scale type of armed conflict, which eventually caused the revolution.