The writer is professor of economics at Sciences Po, Paris 

It was Russia’s interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve who, a century ago, infamously said: “What this country needs is a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.” In 1904, in the midst of growing public dissatisfaction with the Czarist government, he viewed the forthcoming Russo-Japanese conflict as a welcome distraction from domestic unrest.

His doctrine spectacularly backfired, however. The Russian Empire did go to war with Japan, but suffered a catastrophic defeat; the resulting 1905 revolution forced the tsar to establish the first Russian constitution and parliament, the Duma. Von Plehve himself did not live to see this — he was killed in 1904 by the very same revolutionaries his war was intended to suppress.