A People's Tragedy (53 page)

* * * The threat of a war in Europe was increasing. The two great Balkan empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian, were both breaking apart under pressure from nationalist movements. Germany and Russia were lining up for conflict over the spoils, as each sought to advance its interests in the region. The occupation of Constantinople and the control of the Dardanelles, through which half her foreign trade passed, had been Russia's main imperial ambition since the time of Peter the Great. But she also harboured broader hopes of her own Slavic Empire in the Balkans, hopes raised by the nationalist movements in Serbia, Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzogovina.

For a long time such pan-Slavist dreams were seen as the stuff of poetry, not practical politics. The country's military and economic weakness demanded a cautious foreign policy. As Polovtsov had put it in 1885, 'Russia needs roads and schools, not victories or honour, otherwise we'll become another Lapland.'44 It was left to the diplomats to defend Russia's interests in Europe; and this, for the most part, meant conciliating her two powerful neighbours in Berlin and Vienna. The Romanov court had long been in favour of this pro-German policy, partly because of the strong dynastic ties between the ruling families and partly because of their mutual opposition to European liberalism.

There was even talk of reviving the old Three Emperors' League.

After 1905, however, foreign policy could no longer be carried out regardless of public opinion. The Duma and the press both took an active interest in imperial matters and increasingly called for a more aggressive policy in defence of Russia's Balkan interests.

The Octobrists led the way, seeking to stop the decline of their own political fortunes by sponsoring a nationalist crusade. Guchkov, their leader, condemned the diplomats'

decision not to go to war in 1908, when Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzogovina, as a betrayal of Russia's historic mission to defend the Balkan Slavs. The Russian people, he declared, in contrast with the 'flabby indolence of official Russia', was ready for the

'inevitable war with the German races', and it was their patriotic sentiments that 'foreign and indeed our own diplomats must reckon with'. Not to be outdone by such bluster, the right-wing Kadets fashioned their own liberal version of Slavic imperialism. Struve denounced the Bosnian affair as 'a national disgrace'. Russia's destiny, he argued in a celebrated essay of that year, was to extend its civilization 'to the whole of the Black Sea basin'. This was to be achieved (contradictory though it may seem) by a combination of imperial might and the free association of all the Slavic nations —

which in his
view
would look upon Russia as a constitutional haven from Teutonic oppression. Equally anxious to wave the patriotic flag was the liberal business elite of Moscow, led by Alexander Konovalov and the Riabushinskys, who in 1912 established their own Progressist Party on the grounds that the time had come for the bourgeoisie to assume the leadership of the nation. Russia's control of the Black Sea and the shipping routes through the straits was a principal target of their trading ambitions.45

Much of this bourgeois patriotism was informed by the idea that Europe was heading unavoidably towards a titanic clash between the Teutons and the Slavs. Pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism were two mutually self-justifying credos: the one could not exist without the other. The fear of Russia united all German patriots, while the fear of Germany did the same in Russia. Germano-phobia ran extremely deep in Russian society. The revolution was partly based on it — both as a reaction against the war and as a rejection of the German-dominated Romanov court. This fear of Germany stemmed in part from the Russians' cultural insecurity — the feeling that they were living on the edge of a backward, semi-Asian society and that everything modern and progressive came to it from the West. There was, as Dominic Lieven has put it, 'an instinctive sense that Germanic arrogance towards the Slavs entailed an implicit denial of the Russian people's own dignity and of their equality with the other leading races of Europe'. The wealth of the Germans in Russia, their prominence in the Civil Service, and the growing domination of German exports in Russia's traditional markets only served to underline this sense of a racial threat. 'In the past twenty years', declared a 1914 editorial in
Novoe
vremia,
'our Western neighbour has held firmly in its teeth the vital sources of our well-being and like a vampire has sucked the blood of the Russian peasant.' Many people feared that the
Drang nach Osten
was part of a broader German plan to annihilate Slavic civilization and concluded that, unless she now made a firm stand on behalf of her Balkan allies, Russia would suffer a long period of imperial decline and subjugation to Germany. This pan-Slavist sentiment grew as the public became frustrated with the government's conciliatory approach towards the 'German aggressors'.
Novoe vremia
led the way, denouncing the government's decision, brought about by pressure from Berlin, to recognize the Bosnian annexation as a 'diplomatic Tsushima'.* The newspaper called on the government to counteract the growing influence of Germany in the Balkans with a Slavic campaign of its own. Numerous Slavic societies were established after 1908. A Slavic Congress was even convened in Prague, where the Russians attempted to persuade their sceptical 'brothers' from the Czech lands that they would be better off under the Tsar. By the Balkan Wars of 1912—13 this pro-Slav sentiment had brought together many elements of Russian society. Hundreds of public organizations declared their support for the Slavs, the capital cities witnessed huge demonstrations, and at a series of political banquets public figures called for a firmer assertion of Russia's imperial power. 'The straits must become ours,' Mikhail Rodzianko, President of the Duma, told the Tsar in March 1913. A war will be joyfully welcomed and it will raise the government's prestige.'46

There is no doubt that the pressure of public opinion played an

* Tsushima was the site of Russia's biggest defeat in the war against Japan.

important part in the complex series of events leading towards Russia's involvement in the First World War. By the beginning of 1914 the mood of pro-Slav belligerence had spread to the court, the officer corps and much of the state itself. Prince G. N.

Trubetskoi, placed in charge of the Balkan and Ottoman sections of the Foreign Ministry in the summer of 1912, was a well-known pan-Slavist determined to gain control of Constantinople and its Balkan hinterland. Similar views were held by the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, a military man with a powerful influence over the Tsar who in August 1914 was appointed Commander-in-Chief. His father had fought in the Balkan campaigns of 1877—8 and his wife, an ardent Slav patriot, was the daughter of the King of Montenegro. Many generals shared the Grand Duke's Slavic sympathies.

Brusilov was a case in point. Concerned by Russia's lack of moral preparation for the coming war, he looked to pan-Slav nationalism as a means of uniting the people behind the army. 'If the Tsar had appealed to all his subjects', he later wrote, 'to combine to save their country from its present peril and deliver all their brother Slavs from the German yoke, public enthusiasm would have been boundless, and his personal popularity would have become unassailable.'47

The Tsar himself was slowly coming round to the pan-Slavist camp. By the beginning of 1914 he was of the
view
that the time had come for a firm stand against Austria, if not against her more powerful ally in Berlin. 'We will not let ourselves be trampled upon,' he told Delcasse in January. Foreign ambassadors explained this new resolve by the pressure of public opinion. But for the moment Nicholas supported the cautious approach of his Foreign Minister, S. D. Sazonov. Recognizing that a war with the Central Powers was almost certainly unavoidable, they sought to delay it by diplomatic means. Russia's army, according to the military experts, would not be ready for war until 1917. Nor was the diplomatic groundwork complete: for while the support of France was assured, that of Britain was not. But by far the most pressing concern was the threat of a revolution if Russia got bogged down in a long and exhausting campaign.

The memory of 1904—5 was still fresh, and there was nothing the revolutionary leaders would now welcome more than a war. A war between Russia and Austria would be a very useful thing for the revolution,' Lenin told Gorky in 1913, but the chances are small that Franz Joseph and Nicky will give us such a treat.'48

All this strengthened the arguments of the pro-German faction at court against the headlong drift towards war. In a prophetic memorandum of February 1914 Durnovo warned the Tsar that Russia was too weak to withstand the long war of attrition which the Anglo-German rivalry was likely to produce. A violent social revolution was bound to be the result in Russia, for the liberal intelligentsia lacked the trust of the masses and was thus incapable of holding power for long in a purely political revolution. Durnovo outlined the course of this revolution in remarkably prescient terms: The trouble will start with the blaming of the Government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the Government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitations throughout the country, with Socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of the land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of the primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.49

Caution was the key-word of the pro-German faction at court. But from Germany's point of view, if there was to be a war with Russia, then it was better fought sooner than later. 'Russia grows and grows, and weighs upon us like a nightmare,' the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg declared. When the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by Serbian nationalists it was not in Germany's interests to restrain its Austrian ally from threatening war against Russia's last real Balkan ally. This threw the delicate balance of Russia's foreign policy into disarray. The Russian press clamoured for war in defence of Serbia and there were large public demonstrations outside the Austrian Embassy in St Petersburg. On 24 July 1914 the Council of Ministers recommended military preparations. Otherwise, argued A. V Krivoshein, the influential Minister of Agriculture, 'public opinion would fail to understand why, at the critical moment involving Russia's interests, the Imperial Government was reluctant to act boldly'. It was more important 'to believe in the Russian people and its age-old love for the fatherland than any chance preparedness or unpreparedness for war'.50

This placed Nicholas in an impossible situation. If he went to war, he ran the risk of defeat and a social revolution; but if he didn't, there might equally be a sudden uprising of patriotic feeling against him which could also result in a complete loss of political control. There was little time to reach a decision, for if Russia was to mobilize its forces it would need a head start on its enemies, who could mobilize theirs very much more quickly. On 28 July Austria finally declared war on Serbia. Nicholas ordered the partial mobilization of his troops and made one last appeal to the Kaiser to forestall the Austrian attack on Belgrade. 'I foresee', he warned, 'that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure brought upon me and forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war.' Two days later the Kaiser replied, renouncing Germany's neutrality in the Serbian question. Sazonov recommended a general mobilization, realizing that a German declaration of war against Russia was now imminent (it came on

I August). He warned the Tsar that 'unless he yielded to the popular demand for war and unsheathed the sword in Serbia's behalf, he would run the risk of a revolution and perhaps the loss of his throne'. Nicholas went pale. 'Just think of the responsibility you're advising me to assume!' he said to Sazonov. But the force of his Ministers argument was incontrovertible and, reluctantly, the Tsar called for the general mobilization on 31 July.51

Brusilov later claimed that the Tsar had been forced to go to war by the strength of his own people's patriotic fervour: 'Had he not done so, public resentment would have turned on him with such ferocity that he would have been tumbled from his throne, and the Revolution, with the support of the whole intelligentsia, would have taken place in 1914 instead of 1917.' This is undoubtedly an overstatement of the case. The middle-class patriots who assembled in front of the Winter Palace to greet the Tsar's declaration of war on Sunday 2 August — clerks, officials, high-school students and housewives —

were hardly the people to start a revolution. Many of them, according to foreign observers, had been ordered to turn out by their employers or masters. But on that sunny afternoon, as Nicholas stood on the balcony of his Winter Palace and surveyed in the square below him the vast flag-waving and cheering crowds, who then, as one, knelt down before him and sang the national anthem, the thought must have crossed his mind that the war had at last united his subjects with him and that perhaps, after all, there was some reason for hope. 'You see,' he told his children's tutor shortly after in a state of great emotion, 'there will now be a national movement in Russia like that which took place in the great war of 1812.'52

And indeed in those first heady weeks of August there was every outward sign of a national
ralliement.
The workers' strikes came to a halt. Socialists united behind the defence of the Fatherland, while pacifists, defeatists and internationalists were forced into exile. Patriotic demonstrators attacked German shops and offices. They ransacked the German Embassy in Marinskaya Square, smashing the windows and throwing out the furniture, the fine paintings and even the Ambassador's own personal collection of Renaissance sculptures on to a bonfire in the street below. Then, to the cheers of the crowd, they sent two huge bronze horses crashing down from the Embassy roof. In this wave of anti-German feeling people even changed their names to make them sound more Russian: thus, for example, the orientalist Wilhelm Wilhelmovich Struve became Vasilii Vasilievich Struve. Bowing to the strength of this xenophobia, the government also changed the German-sounding name of St Petersburg to the more Slavonic Petrograd. Nicholas welcomed the change. He had never liked St Petersburg, or its Western traditions, and had long been trying to Russify its appearance by adding Muscovite motifs to its classical buildings.