The Sleepwalkers (47 page)

These manoeuvres were performed against a background of mounting press agitation in Russia. Russian newspaper editors were electrified by the news of the struggle unfolding between the Balkan states and the ancestral enemy on the Bosphorus. No other issue possessed comparable power to trigger excitement, solidarity, indignation and anger in the Russian urban public. ‘If the Slavs and the Greeks prove victorious,'
Novoye Vremya
asked at the end of October 1912, ‘where is the iron hand that will [. . .] snatch from them the fruits of victories that they will have purchased with their blood?'
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Assessing the impact of these currents on Sazonov is difficult. The Russian foreign minister resented the press's interest in the details of his policy and affected an attitude of contempt towards journalists and their opinions. On the other hand, he appears to have been highly sensitive to press critique. On one occasion, he convened a press conference to complain at the hostile treatment he had received from journalists. In a circular of 31 October to Russia's ambassadors to the great powers, Sazonov declared that he had no intention of allowing nationalist voices in the Russian press to influence his handling of policy. But he went on to suggest that envoys might consider using reports of press agitation to ‘incline [foreign] cabinets to the idea of the necessity of taking into account the difficulty of our position'
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– in other words, while he denied that the press was a force in his own decision-making, he saw that adverse newspaper coverage could be exploited abroad to secure a certain room for manoeuvre in diplomatic negotiations. Few documents better evoke the complexity of the relationship between key decision-makers and the press.

Improvisation and frenetic vacillation remained a hallmark of Sazonov's policy during the First Balkan War. At the end of October he solemnly announced his support for Austria's policy of maintaining the territorial status quo on the Balkan peninsula. But then, on 8 November, Sazonov informed the Italian government that Serbian access to the Adriatic Sea was an absolute necessity, adding portentously: ‘It is dangerous to ignore facts.' Yet only three days later he told Hartwig that the creation of an independent
Albanian
state on the Adriatic coast was an ‘inevitable necessity', adding once again: ‘To ignore facts is dangerous.'
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Hartwig was ordered to warn Pašić that if the Serbs pushed too hard, Russia might be forced to stand aside and leave them to their own devices – a task the Russian minister performed under protest and with undisguised distaste. Copies of this message were forwarded by Sazonov to London and Paris.
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And yet by 17 November, he was arguing once again for a Serbian corridor to the coast.
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Notes were dispatched to Paris and London declaring that Russia might be obliged to intervene militarily against Austria-Hungary if the latter attacked Serbia; the two allied governments were asked to express their views.
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‘Sazonov is so continually changing his ground,' the British ambassador George Buchanan wrote from St Petersburg in November 1912, ‘that it is difficult to follow the successive phases of pessimism and optimism through which he passes.'
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‘I have more than once reproached Sazonov with inconsistency and with frequent changes of front,' Buchanan reported two months later. But to be fair, he went on, the Russian minister ‘was not a free agent' – he was obliged above all to take account of the views of the Tsar, who had recently fallen under the influence of the military party in St Petersburg.
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Robert Vansittart, former third secretary in Paris and Tehran, now serving in the Foreign Office in London, summed up the problem succinctly: ‘M. Sazonov is a sad wobbler.'
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While Sazonov wobbled, there were signs of a hardening of attitudes on the Balkans across the Russian leadership. The decision to announce a trial mobilization on 30 September 1912, just as the Balkan states were mobilizing, suggested that Russia intended to cover its Balkan diplomacy with military actions intended to intimidate Vienna. The Austrian General Staff reported that 50–60,000 Russian reservists had been called up in the Warsaw district of the Polish salient (adjoining Austrian Galicia) and that 170,000 further call-ups were expected, creating a massive concentration of Russian troops along the Austro-Hungarian border. When quizzed on these measures, Sazonov claimed to have had no knowledge of them; Sukhomlinov, by contrast, maintained that the foreign minister had been fully informed.
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Whether Sazonov was party to the decision or not (and both scenarios are equally plausible), the trial mobilization – and the decision to go ahead with it even as the Balkan War broke out – marked a departure from the caution that had previously restrained Russia's policy. Russian thinking had begun to embrace a strategy of ‘real power' in which diplomatic efforts were underwritten by the threat of military force. ‘We can probably rely on the real support of France and England,' Sazonov commented in a letter of 10 October 1912 to Kokovtsov, ‘only insofar as both of these states acknowledge the extent of our readiness to take possible risks.'
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Only the fullest measure of military readiness, he told Izvolsky in a paradoxical ratiocination characteristic of his policy in the last years before the outbreak of war, would enable Russia to apply ‘peaceful pressure' in pursuit of its aims.
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The move towards a more assertive Russian Balkan policy also marked a shift in the balance of power between Kokovtsov and Sukhomlinov. In the course of the negotiations over the 1913 military budget in October–November 1912, it became clear that the Tsar was no longer willing to support Kokovtsov in his calls for restraint on military expenditure. At a sequence of meetings on 31 October–2 November, the Council of Ministers agreed a supplementary military credit of 66.8 million roubles. The originator of this move was not Sukhomlinov, but Sazonov, who had written to Kokovtsov on 23 October saying that he intended to raise the army's readiness for a confrontation with Austria-Hungary or Turkey. Kokovtsov had no choice but to forward the letter to Sukhomlinov, who then formally requested the credit. This was a crucial step in the undermining of Kokovtsov's position: the premier was powerless to overrule an initiative backed both by the foreign minister and the minister of war, and supported from behind the scenes by the Tsar.
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After 5 November, when the Tsar authorized an order postponing the homeward rotation of the senior class of Russian conscripts, the number of reservists on extended duty rose to around 400,000.
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Frontier troop strengths – according to information passed by St Petersburg to the French – were now only a little short of the wartime level, and these steps were flanked by other Russian measures: the deployment of some units to forward positions near the Galician border with Austria, arms requisitions and the retention of rolling stock. The aim was to ensure, as Chief of Staff Zhilinsky told the French military attaché, that ‘we can [. . .] adjust to any eventuality'.
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The decisive step in the direction of a further escalation came in the fourth week of November 1912, when Minister of War Sukhomlinov and members of the military command nearly succeeded in persuading the Tsar to issue orders for a partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary. Kokovtsov recalled being told on 22 November that the Tsar wished to see him and Sazonov on the following morning. When they arrived, they found to their horror that a military conference had already resolved to issue mobilization orders for the Kiev and Warsaw military districts, which adjoined Austro-Hungarian territory. Sukhomlinov, it seemed, had wanted to mobilize on the previous day, but the Tsar had delayed the order so as to consult the relevant ministers first. Outraged at these high-handed manoeuvres by the military, Kokovtsov pointed out the idiocy of the proposed measure. Above all, a partial mobilization against Austria made no sense whatsoever, since Germany was obliged to assist Austria if it were attacked. And what about France? Since there had been no consultation with Paris, a sudden mobilization might well leave Russia facing the consequences of its folly alone. Then there was the constitutional issue: Sukhomlinov, Kokovtsov argued, had no right even to broach such a policy with the Tsar without first consulting the minister of foreign affairs. Nicholas II backed down and agreed to cancel the war minister's orders.
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On this occasion, Sazonov joined premier Vladimir Kokovtsov in denouncing the proposal as politically senseless, strategically unfeasible and highly dangerous. It was one of the last gasps of ‘united government' in Imperial Russia.

Yet the fact remains that during the winter crisis of 1912–13, Sazonov supported a policy of confrontation with Austria, a policy ensuring that the Russo-Austrian frontier remained ‘at the diplomatic storm centre'.
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There was a brief change of heart after the stand-off of 23 November between the civilians and the military command over the mobilization question, but the mood in St Petersburg remained belligerent. In mid-December, War Minister Sukhomlinov proposed to the Council of Ministers a raft of measures: the reinforcement of frontier cavalry units in the Kiev and Warsaw military districts, a call-up of reservists for training to bring frontier units to war strength, the transport of horses to the frontier areas, the reinforcement of military guards and a ban on the export of horses. Had all of these measures been carried out, they might well have pushed the winter crisis over the threshold to war – a pan-European escalation would have been certain, given that Paris was at this time urging the Russians to step up their measures against Austria and had promised its support in the event of a military conflict involving Germany. But this was going too far for Sazonov, and once again he joined Kokovtsov in rejecting Sukhomlinov's proposal. This time, the proponents of peace secured only a partial victory: the call-up of infantry reservists and the ban on horse exports were rejected as too inflammatory, but the other measures went ahead, with predictably unsettling effects on the mood in Vienna.
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In the light of what had passed before, Sazonov's offer in the last week of December 1912 to stand down a portion of the Russian reinforcements along the Galician frontier, but only on the condition that Vienna stood its forces down first, looked like a further act of intimidation rather than a genuine effort to achieve de-escalation and disengagement.
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When the Austrians failed to comply, St Petersburg stepped up the threat once more, hinting at the possibility of a further extension of the senior conscript class by means of a public announcement that would have triggered a general war panic. Sazonov even told the British ambassador George Buchanan at the beginning of January 1913 that he had a ‘project for mobilising on the Austrian frontier' and was planning to bring up more troops. There was renewed talk (by Sazonov this time, not just Sukhomlinov) of a mobilization of the Kiev military district and a Russian ultimatum to Vienna.
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The resulting Austro-Russian armed stalemate was politically and financially painful for both sides: in Vienna, the border confrontation imposed disastrous burdens on the monarchy's fragile finances. It also raised questions about the loyalty of Czech, South Slav and other national minority reservists, many of whom stood to lose their civilian jobs if the state of high alert continued. On the Russian side, too, there were doubts about the political reliability of the frontier units – insubordination among the reservists recalled for duty threatened to spread to the peacetime army and officers along the Galician front were demanding either war right now or the standing down of the reserves. The finance ministry and its chief, Vladimir Kokovtsov, also complained of the financial burden imposed by the retention of the reservists, although generally speaking, financial concerns appear to have played a less prominent role in St Petersburg, where the army was wallowing in money, than they did in Vienna, where ministers feared the total collapse of financial control.
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Kokovtsov succeeded in tilting the balance back in favour of de-escalation and persuaded the Tsar not to go ahead with further potentially provocative measures.

In the event, it was the Austrians who took the first step backwards, gradually reducing their frontier troop strengths from the end of January. In February and March, Berchtold followed up with concessions to Belgrade. On 21 February, Franz Joseph proposed a substantial reduction in Galician company strengths and Nicholas II in return agreed to propose the release of the senior conscript class. De-escalation became official in the second week of March, with major and publicly announced troop reductions on both sides of the border.
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The Balkan winter crisis of 1912–13 had passed, to general relief. But it changed in a lasting way the contours of politics in Vienna and St Petersburg. Austrian policy-makers became accustomed to a more militarized style of diplomacy.
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In St Petersburg, a Russian war party emerged. Among its most intransigent members were the Grand Dukes Nikolai Nikolaievich and Pyotr Nikolaievich, both senior military commanders and both married to Montenegrin princesses. ‘All the pacifism of the emperor,' wrote the Belgian minister in St Petersburg at the beginning of 1913, ‘cannot silence those [at court] who proclaim the impossibility of recoiling ever again before Austria.'
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Belligerent views gained ground, not just because the Tsar (intermittently) and senior military or naval commanders supported them, but also because they were also espoused by an influential coterie of civilian ministers, of whom the most important was the minister of agriculture, Alexander Krivoshein.