July 1914: Countdown to War (9 page)

Like Berchtold in Vienna, Russia’s foreign minister was in a precarious position at the time of the Sarajevo incident, having
just barely survived in office through the tumult of the Balkan Wars. There was a Francophile (that is, anti-German) “war party” in Petersburg akin to Conrad’s belligerent faction in Vienna, led by the agriculture minister, A. V. Krivoshein. It might seem odd that a minister of agriculture would favor a belligerent foreign policy, but then Tsarist Russia was something of an odd country.

Imposing in appearance—with her demographic and economic growth rates convincing the Germans that she was an unstoppable “steamroller”—the empire of the tsars was, in reality, fragile and ramshackle, capable of cracking apart under pressure, as had very nearly happened in the Revolution of 1905, following her humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. Although Russian industrialization continued apace, the peasantry still comprised 80 percent of the population. Land reform was
the
key element of social policy, which gave outsized importance to the Agriculture Ministry. Krivoshein was the star protégé of Peter Stolypin, chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1906 to 1911, who had aimed, through reforming the laws of land tenure, to create a stable and prosperous class of peasant smallholders to serve as a bulwark against another anarchic social revolution. The “Stolypin program” required aggressive tariffs to block German wheat imports, French capital investment in Russian railways, and unimpeded access to grain export markets. Because most of Russia’s wheat was grown in her southern regions abutting the Black Sea, and her Baltic and Arctic Sea ports were icebound most of the year (Vladivostok, on the Pacific, was too far afield to be a practical option), exporters desperately needed warm-water access to the Mediterranean for Russian grain exports, by way of the Ottoman Straits (the Bosphorus, Sea of Marmara, and Dardanelles). Through the Straits, in the other direction, flowed imported components critical to Russian industry, paid for by Russian grain exports. Any interruption of Russia’s access to the Mediterranean would
undermine the Stolypin land reform program, on which everything else depended.

After Stolypin was assassinated in 1911, Krivoshein became the senior member of the Council of Ministers, considerably more senior than Sazonov. While Stolypin had famously advocated “twenty years of peace” to complete Russia’s economic modernization, the Italian and Balkan Wars of 1911–1913 suggested to Krivoshein that Petersburg would not have so much time. In summer 1912, the beleaguered Ottoman government had briefly closed the Straits to commercial shipping, exposing the vulnerability of Russia’s grain-export economy: the volume of her Black Sea exports dropped by one-third, and heavy industry in the Ukraine nearly ground to a halt. Even more worrisome was the “Liman von Sanders affair” of December 1913–January 1914, when a German general had been appointed to command the Ottoman army corps in charge of defending the Straits. German officers had been training the Ottoman army since the 1880s, and relations between Berlin and Constantinople were usually warm, but this was something new: Liman’s Straits command would leave Russia’s access to the Mediterranean at the mercy of Germany, her most powerful enemy.
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Little wonder that Krivoshein was edgy in 1914. The agriculture minister was, anyhow, a temperamental Germanophobe: he was France’s favorite Russian. Sazonov, to be sure, was a Francophile too, seeing the military alliance with France, which was concluded in 1894, as an essential part of Russia’s foreign policy and France as something of a model for backwards Russia—not for her radicalism so much as for her passionate nationalism. Sazonov’s was the Russian “national liberal” position, which opposed the conservative or “Germanophile” antiwar opposition, best represented by Sergei Witte, the statesman presiding over Russia’s industrialization drive since the 1890s, whose star had gone into eclipse after his fall from power in 1906.
Krivoshein and his French admirers did not really disagree with Sazonov’s Francophile foreign policy, but they suspected him of being yellow, just as Conrad did not trust Berchtold’s mettle. Austria’s foreign minister, as we have seen, had been jolted out of his passive funk by the Sarajevo outrage. Would Sazonov likewise be nudged toward Krivoshein and the war party by the drama in the Balkans, or would he back down yet again when Austria made her move?

A great deal depended on the answer to this question in July 1914. And yet it remains just as difficult to answer today as it was for the Austrians then. Sazonov, unlike Berchtold, draws a veil over this entire period in his memoirs, skipping straight from a pro forma mention of the Sarajevo incident until July 24, revealing nothing about his thinking or intentions in between. Documents from the time are no help. After the war, the Bolsheviks, seeking to impugn the benighted “imperialism” of the Tsarist Russian regime, published hundreds of volumes of secret diplomacy relating to the origins and course of the First World War. These volumes cover, in tremendous depth, events large and small from the nineteenth century to 1917—everything except for the days following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, when they fall virtually silent. Likewise, in the French diplomatic archives, the dispatches of Maurice Paléologue, France’s ambassador to Russia, simply disappear between 28 June and 6 July 1914.
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Stranger still are the missing letters of Alexander Izvolsky, Sazonov’s predecessor as foreign minister and, in 1914, ambassador to France, Russia’s most important ally. Forced to resign as foreign minister after his humiliation in the First Bosnian Crisis, Izvolsky had been given the consolation prize of the Paris embassy, from which grounds he worked to avenge himself against Vienna. (When he learned that Russian mobilization had been declared in July 1914, Izvolsky reportedly exclaimed, “This
is my war!”) Some in Paris saw Izvolsky’s hand in France’s nationalist revival and her push toward rearmament in the years before 1914. As one Socialist leader asked, “has [France] no other glory than to serve the rancors of M. Izvolsky?” After World War I, an entire “black book” was published of Izvolsky’s secret correspondence, which comes thick and fast: many days have five or more dispatches. But between 19 June and 22 July 1914, there is a single letter to Sazonov, and it concerns not Sarajevo or Russian foreign policy but French domestic affairs.
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Likewise, Britain’s ambassador to Russia, Sir George Buchanan, in whom Sazonov rarely confided anyway, did not report on Russian reactions to Sarajevo until 9 July 1914, eleven days after Sarajevo. Even then he offered only a typically unsourced and unenlightening opinion that “the general impression” in Petersburg was “one of relief that so dangerous a personality [e.g., Franz Ferdinand] should have been removed from the succession to the throne.”
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Owing to the silence of Russian, French, and British sources, Sazonov’s thinking in the days after Sarajevo must be puzzled out of reports from “hostile” Austrian and German diplomats. These are more informative, although still ambiguous. Otto Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian legation secretary in Petersburg filling in for Ambassador Friedrich Szapáry in the latter’s absence, reported to Berchtold on 3 July that Sazonov had expressed sincere and heartfelt condolences for the loss of the Habsburg heir. Slyly, however, Russia’s foreign minister had also suggested that his own warm sentiments were not shared widely in Russia, where Franz Ferdinand was universally (and incorrectly) viewed as a “Russia-hater.” The death of the archduke would not, Czernin concluded sadly, do anything to halt the “extravagant anti-Austrian baiting Russian nationalists had been indulging in for years.”
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In a follow-up audience held over the weekend, Sazonov’s sympathy evaporated quickly. After he warned Czernin that
Austrian press “attacks” on Serbia were producing a “disquieting irritation” in Russia, Czernin informed Sazonov that Austria-Hungary might indeed seek redress by bringing her investigation of the crime onto Serbian territory. Hearing this, Sazonov “cut him off short” and unleashed a tirade. “No country has had to suffer more than Russia from outrages prepared on foreign territory,” the Russian told Czernin. “Have we ever claimed to employ against any country the procedure with which your newspapers threaten Serbia?” To ensure the Austrians got his point, Sazonov concluded the audience with a thinly veiled threat: “Do not engage yourselves on that road; it is dangerous.”
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Sazonov spoke still more frankly with Germany’s ambassador, Friedrich Pourtalès, shortly after the Sarajevo incident. As Pourtalès reported to Berlin on 13 July, Sazonov “dwelt only briefly on his condemnation of the crime, while he could not find enough words to condemn the behavior of the Austrian authorities, who had permitted excesses against the Serbs . . . and deliberately given free rein to popular fury [against Serbia].” Sazonov squarely denied that the murders could have resulted from some “pan-Serbian plot”; rather it was the work of “a few callow youths” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a territory in which, Sazonov claimed in a seeming contradiction, “only a few Muslims and Catholics were loyal to [Austria-Hungary].” The Serbian government was not merely innocent but behaving with “perfect correctness.” When Pourtalès tried to win a familiar point by reminding Sazonov of the importance of monarchical principle for a country like Tsarist Russia, and how this was threatened by royal assassinations like the one in Sarajevo, he noted that “Sazonov could not but agree to this remark but with less warmth than I usually find [on this subject].” Interpreting Sazonov’s unsympathetic remarks about the slain Habsburg heir, Pourtalès told Berlin that the hostile tone could only be explained “by the Minister’s irreconcilable hatred of
Austria-Hungary, a hatred which here more and more clouds all clear, calm judgment.” Overall, the attitude in Russian official circles vis-à-vis Vienna, Pourtalès concluded, was one of “boundless contempt for the conditions prevailing there.” The German ambassador observed further that “not only in the press, but also in society, one meets almost only with unfriendly judgments on the murdered archduke.” If Pourtalès was right, then it appeared that Sazonov, riding a wave of popular anti-Austrian indignation, had been jolted over to the war party no less dramatically than had Berchtold in Vienna.
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Coming as it does from the ambassador of a hostile country, and written nearly two weeks after the conversations it purports to describe, Pourtalès’s 13 July 1914 dispatch would be easy to dismiss as a biased and unreliable report of Russian reactions to the Sarajevo incident. Filtered through the German ambassador’s own fears and concerns, it may not accurately render what Sazonov truly said, any more than such a dispatch can tell us what the Russian was really thinking.

Whatever Sazonov and other officials may or may not have said after Sarajevo, we may still draw a picture of Russian intentions based on what they
did
. Actions speak louder than words, and Russia’s actions, upon hearing the news about the assassination, were decisive.

Whether or not Serbia’s government was behaving with “perfect correctness” as Austria investigated the crime in Sarajevo, Pašić was preparing for the worst. Since February, he had been appealing to Petersburg, with increasing desperation, for arms and supplies to replenish stocks depleted in the Balkan Wars—aside from rifles, cannon, and ammunition, the Serbian army needed clothing for 250,000 soldiers, along with “telegraphs, telephones and four wireless stations.” Sazonov had responded favorably in March, only to be overruled by V. A. Sukhomlinov, the imperial war minister, who did not want to deprive Russia’s
own army of needed supplies. By early June, when the plot to murder the archduke was being launched from Belgrade, Pašić’s requests for arms became almost feverish. At last, on 30 June, two days after the Sarajevo incident, the General Staff, under pressure from Tsar Nicholas II, approved the dispatch of 120,000 three-line rifles, with 120 million rounds, to Serbia.
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On the same day, Sazonov dispatched a “very secret and urgent” request to Russia’s naval minister, I. K. Grigorevich, for information regarding the war-readiness of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The context and content of this request were significant. Specifically, the foreign minister wanted to know what had been done so far to implement the measures ordered by a warplanning conference held in Petersburg on 21 February 1914—a gathering of Russia’s leading generals, admirals, and diplomats, which Sazonov had himself chaired. The February war council had originally been called at the end of December 1913, at the height of international tensions surrounding the Liman affair, but the conference was postponed until late February because of the illness of an important admiral, who had previously chaired the Naval Staff. On 13 January 1914, Sazonov had convened an emergency meeting of the Council of Ministers at which the war party, led by Krivoshein, had nakedly discussed the idea of provoking a European conflict over Liman and the Straits question. At one point, then-chairman of the Council of Ministers V. N. Kokovtsov asked Russia’s war minister pointblank, “Is a war with Germany desirable, and can Russia wage it?” Sukhomlinov answered without hesitation that “Russia was perfectly prepared for a duel with Germany, not to speak of one with Austria.” Kokovtsov then asked Sazonov whether England and France would back Russia. Sazonov replied that France’s departing ambassador, Théophile Delcassé, had told him that “France will go as far as Russia wishes.” Of British intervention on Russia’s behalf, Sazonov said he was personally confident,
but less certain and unable to guarantee. With Sazonov leaning toward the war party but refusing, as usual, to take a strong stand, Kokovtsov had enough political cover to veto the idea of intervening, issuing a resolution to the effect that Russia would risk war over the Straits question only if “the active participation of both France and England in joint measures were . . . assured.”
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