In recent years, the interest of researchers in the First World War and its prehistory has noticeably increased, which is explained by two reasons: the publication of new, previously unknown materials about its origin (after the discovery of archival funds 50 years ago in many Western countries), as well as the strengthening of the ideological struggle of Marxist and bourgeois historiography around this problem in connection with the approaching 70th anniversary of its launch. In the U.S.S.R. 1 and abroad 2 a number of works and documents about the war have been published, and at the same time bourgeois historians of the reactionary trend are trying to revive the old, long-refuted versions of its origin. Among the new foreign publications of sources on the prehistory of the war, the multi-volume publication "Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Kingdom of Serbia", undertaken by the Department of Historical Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANI) with the participation of the SFRY Foreign Affairs Secretariat, is of fundamental importance .3 The publication consists of seven volumes (15 parts) and covers the period from January 1903 to August 1914, i.e., that stage in the history of international relations in the Balkans, when the latter began to attract increased attention of the great Powers due to the change in the balance of political forces in this region after the reorientation of Serbia's foreign policy with Austria-Hungary.Hungary's invasion of Russia, as well as after a number of other important events in the Balkans and the Middle East: the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Bosnian crisis of 1908-1909, the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912, the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, and the political crisis of 1913-1914 caused by the German military mission to Turkey. Sanders. According to the apt expression of the prominent Italian historian L. Albertini, the Balkans at that time turned into the" powder magazine " of Europe, into one of the centers o ... Read more