num_pages: 550
description: The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, started the First World War. This cost more than ten million lives, and overthrew the four ancient and imperial dynasties - Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov - which had ruled most of Europe. The world had not yet outlived the violence and the passions released by this fateful murder, which was itself the climax of many long generations of struggle by the Slavs of southern Europe against Austrian and Turkish tyranny.Here is the complete and exciting story of how and why the desperate deed was done. It is told with important new material from archives opened only by the Second World War. It is a critical and scholarly survey of the enormous historical literature which has been devoted to this subject. Finally, it is told here for the first time in the context of the land and the people of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian schoolboy who fired the fatal shots.Vladimir Dedijer, a Bosnian himself, has put the story together. It took years of research and detective work on official records and documents, many of which had been kept secret because of the long quarrels of scholars and politicians over the problem of guilt for the 1914-1918 war. It involved conversations with the handfuls of men and women still alive who played some part in the murder more than fifty years ago. The author has sorted out all the tangled charges of responsibility for Princip's act, and examined them for the first time against the all-important background of the history of the South Slavs.He has written a story of political terror and of what it was that led a group of schoolboys to kill the Archduke and his wife. Here are Colonel Apis, head of the mysterious secret society called the Black Hand, and Bolsheviks like Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek, Austrian politicians, Serbian poets, the Russian Tsar, English Freemasons, anarchist émigrés living in New Jersey. All these walked some part of the road to Sarajevo which is mapped and pictured in this book.
language: English
title: The Road to Sarajevo
publisher: Simon and Schuster