August 1914 transports us to the battlefield at Tannenberg in the early months of World War I. Each command of the generals brings the hapless Russian army closer to humiliating defeat by the Germans, a critical loss that hastens the Bolshevik Revolution. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn depicts a turning point in Russian history with brilliant clarity. He offers unforgettable portraits of Nicholas II and Lenin, and shows us the individual characters--army colonels and peasant soldiers, politicians and bourgeois wives--whose quotidian actions are gathered into the inexorable movement of history.