The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (34 page)

The fundamental problem for Russia in its foreign relations stemmed from its geography. It had few natural defences against invaders. Throughout its history Russia had suffered repeated invasions whether Mongols (Tartars to the Russians), Swedes, Prussians, or French (and was to experience yet two more dreadful ones at the hands of Germany
in the twentieth century). The Tartars ruled over the Russian heartland for 250 years yet, unlike the Moors in Spain, said Pushkin, ‘having conquered Russia, they gave her neither algebra nor Aristotle’.
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Its vulnerability had left Russia another legacy in the centralised and authoritarian government which finally emerged. In the early twelfth century in the first work of Russian history, the people of Rus in today’s Ukraine are described as inviting a potential ruler: ‘Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.’
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Putin has recently made the same justification for Stalin in Russian history – that he and his regime were necessary to hold Russia together in the face of the challenges from its enemies. A related consequence was Russia’s unending search for security by pushing its frontiers outwards. By the end of the eighteenth century it had absorbed Finland and the Baltic states and its share of divided Poland. Although it increasingly turned eastwards, Russia still saw itself as a European power. Europe, after all, was seen as the centre not just of world power but of civilisation.

Russia had always been big by comparison with other European countries but in the nineteenth century it ballooned out to become the biggest country in the world as Russian explorers and soldiers, followed by Russian diplomats and officials, pushed its borders southwards and eastwards, down towards the Black Sea and the Caspian, to Central Asia and across the Ural mountains into Siberia and on to the Pacific for 5,000 miles. The whole of the United States as well as the other European countries could fit comfortably into Asiatic Russia and there would still be lots of territory to spare. The American traveller and writer George Kennan (a distant relation of his namesake the great American Soviet expert) tried to explain the immensity of Russia’s new territories: ‘If a geographer were preparing a general atlas of the world, and should use, in drawing Siberia, the same scale that is used in Stieler’s “Hand Atlas” for England, he would have to make the Siberian page of his book nearly twenty feet in width to accommodate his map.’
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Empire brought prestige and the possibility, yet unrealised, of resources and wealth. It also brought more problems for Russia: its population was spread even more thinly and now included greater numbers of non-Russians, Muslims from Central Asia, Koreans, Mongols and Chinese in the East. New borders brought new and
potentially unfriendly neighbours, in the Far East, China and Japan; in Central Asia, the British Empire; in the Caucasus, Persia (modern day Iran), which the British were also eyeing; and around the Black Sea, the Ottoman Empire, declining but propped up by other European powers. Moreover, in an age in which sea power was increasingly seen as the key to national power and wealth, Russia still possessed only a handful of ports which could be used all year round. Shipping from ports on the Black Sea and the Baltic had to go out through narrow straits which could be closed in time of war and the new Pacific port of Vladivostok lay thousands of miles away from the heart of Russia at the end of a fragile railway. As Russia became a major exporter, especially in food, the passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles – known collectively at the time as ‘the Straits’ – became particularly vital; 37 per cent of all its exports and 75 per cent of its crucial grain exports were flowing past Constantinople by 1914.
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If that pipeline were closed, say by Germany, Sergei Sazonov, who was by then Foreign Minister, felt that it would be a ‘death sentence for Russia’.
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From Russia’s point of view it made eminent sense to search for secure warm-water ports but, as Kuropatkin had warned Nicholas in 1900, it ran a great risk: ‘However just our attempts to possess the exit to the Black Sea, to acquire an outlet to the Indian Ocean, and to obtain an outlet to the Pacific, these missions touch so deeply on the interests of almost the entire world that in pursuit of them we must be prepared for a struggle with a coalition of Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, China, and Japan.’
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Of all Russia’s potential enemies, Britain, with its worldwide empire, seemed to be the most immediately threatening.

In Britain itself, public opinion was strongly anti-Russian. In popular literature, Russia was exotic and terrifying: the land of snow and golden domes, of wolves chasing sleighs through the dark forests, of Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great. Before he made Germany the enemy in his novels the prolific William Le Queux used Russia. In his 1894
The Great War in England in 1897
, Britain was invaded by a combined French and Russian force but the Russians were by far the more brutal. British homes were burned, innocent civilians shot and babies bayoneted. ‘The soldiers of the Tsar, savage and inhuman, showed no mercy to the weak and unprotected. They jeered and laughed at piteous appeal, and with
fiendish brutality enjoyed the destruction which everywhere they wrought.’
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Radical, liberals and socialists all had many reasons to hate the regime with its secret police, censorship, lack of basic human rights, its persecution of its opponents, its crushing of ethnic minorities and its appalling record of anti-Semitism.
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Imperialists on the other hand hated Russia because it was a rival to the British Empire. Britain could never come to an agreement with Russia in Asia, said Curzon, who had been Salisbury’s Undersecretary at the Foreign Office before he became Viceroy in India. Russia was bound to keep expanding as long as it could get away with it. In any case, the ‘ingrained duplicity’ of Russian diplomats made negotiations futile.
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It was one of the rare occasions on which he agreed with the chief of the Indian general staff, Lord Kitchener, who was demanding more resources from London to deal with ‘the menacing advance of Russia towards our frontiers’. What particularly worried the British were the new Russian railways, either built or planned, which stretched down to the borders of Afghanistan and Persia and which now made it possible for the Russians to bring force to bear. Although the term was not to be coined for another eighty years, the British were also becoming acutely aware of what Paul Kennedy called ‘imperial overstretch’. As the War Office said in 1907, the expanded Russian railway system would make the military burden of defending India and the empire so great that ‘short of recasting our whole military system, it will become a question of practical politics whether or not it is worth our while to retain India’.
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There were always those on both sides who would have preferred to lower the tensions, and the expense, by getting a settlement of the outstanding colonial issues. By the 1890s the British were prepared to recognise that they could no longer prevent Russia from using the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean for its warships and the Russians, in particular the military, were ready to adopt a less aggressive policy in Central Asia and Persia.
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In 1898 Salisbury had proposed talks to Russia to sort out the differences of their two countries in China, but these unfortunately had gone nowhere and indeed relations worsened again as Russia took advantage of the Boxer Rebellion to move its troops into Manchuria. In 1903, the appointment of a new Russian ambassador to London offered the opportunity for fresh talks. Count Alexander Benckendorff was very well connected (he had
been a page to Tsar Alexander III), rich and indiscreet. He was Anglophile, liberal in his sympathies and deeply pessimistic about the future of the tsarist regime. ‘In Russia’, he told the French ambassador when they were both posted to Copenhagen, ‘on the surface, people are all sentiment; they have a tenderness for the Tsar etc. It is exactly as in France on the eve of the Revolution.’
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In London, he and his wife became part of society and Benckendorff set himself to improve relations between his country and Britain. Taking advantage of the considerable leeway that diplomats had in those prewar days, he encouraged both sides to think that the other was more amenable to discussions than was actually the case. In 1903 Lansdowne, the British Foreign Secretary, and Benckendorff held talks on outstanding issues such as Tibet and Afghanistan but again these did not reach any conclusion. With the worsening relations between Russia and Britain’s ally Japan, any talk of rapprochement was put on hold, not to be resumed until after the Russo-Japanese War.

The technological and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century added to Russia’s burdens as a great power. As one advance followed another, the arms race speeded up, and became more expensive. Railways and mass production made it possible to create, move and supply bigger armies. Once the other continental powers had gone down that road, Russia’s rulers felt that it had to follow suit even though its resources were not a match for its neighbours Austria-Hungary and the new Germany. The alternative, difficult if not impossible to contemplate, was to give up the attempt to be part of the club of great powers. Becoming a second-class power, worse ‘an Asiatic state’, said Alexander Izvolsky, Foreign Minister between 1906 and 1910, ‘would be a major catastrophe for Russia’.
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It was a dilemma similar to the one faced by the Soviet Union during the Cold War: Russia’s ambitions were fully developed but its economy and its taxation system were not. In the 1890s Russia was spending less than half the amount per soldier that France and Germany were.
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Every rouble, moreover, spent on the military meant less for development. In 1900, according to one estimate, the Russian government was spending ten times more on its army than on education and the navy received more than the key ministries of Agriculture and Justice.
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The Russo-Japanese War made the situation much worse. It
nearly bankrupted Russia and left it with huge budget deficits. Although the armed forces badly needed re-equipping and retraining, the funds were simply not there. In 1906 the key military districts in the west around Warsaw, Kiev and St Petersburg did not receive sufficient resources even to carry out shooting practice.
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The war also reignited a debate over whether Russia’s true interests lay in Asia or Europe. Kuropatkin and the Russian general staff had long been concerned about the drain of resources away from the European frontiers to the east. While Witte was building the Trans-Siberian Railway, construction of railways in the west of Russia virtually stopped, and this at a time Germany and Austria-Hungary as well as smaller powers such as Rumania were continuing to build. In 1900 the Russian general staff estimated that Germany could send 552 trains a day to their common frontier while Russia could send only 98. For financial reasons, the increase of Russian armed forces in the west was also frozen. ‘To the delight of Germany’, Kuropatkin wrote in 1900, ‘in directing our attention to the Far East we are giving her and Austria a decisive preponderance in forces and materiel over us.’
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During the Russo-Japanese War one of the nightmares for the Russian military was the fear that Germany and Austria-Hungary would use the opportunity to move against Russia, perhaps to pinch off Russian Poland, which jutted out dangerously westwards. Fortunately for Russia, Germany decided on a policy of friendly neutrality in the war in an attempt to wean it away from France and, as one of Russia’s spies in Vienna confirmed, Austria-Hungary was more preoccupied with a possible attack on its ally Italy.
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As Russia faced the difficult years of recovery and rebuilding after the Russo-Japanese War ended, the fear remained, as did the need to make choices both in the allocation of resources and foreign policy. If Russia’s interests lay in the east then it needed stability in the west. What that implied was an alliance or at least a détente with Germany and Austria-Hungary. There were ideological and historical arguments in favour of such a move: the three conservative monarchies had an interest in the status quo and in resisting radical change. There were strong historical arguments too in favour of an alliance between Russia and Germany. The links between Germans and Russians went back centuries; Peter the Great had imported Germans to work for him, in
his new industries, for example, and over the years German farmers had helped to settle the new lands opening up as Russia expanded. Russia’s upper classes had intermarried with their German counterparts and many old families bore German names such as Benckendorff, Lamsdorff, or Witte. Some, especially the Germans from Russia’s Baltic possessions, still spoke German rather than Russian. The tsars – including Nicholas II himself, of course – commonly looked to the German princely states for wives. For Russia to move towards Germany, though, would mean abandoning the French alliance and, almost certainly, access to French financial markets. It was also certain to be opposed by the liberals who saw the alliance with France, and perhaps in the longer run with Britain, as encouraging progressive forces for change within Russia. And not all conservatives were pro-German; landowners were hurt by Germany’s protective tariffs on agricultural products and foodstuffs. Germany’s seizure of Kiachow Bay in northern China in 1897 challenged Russian ambitions for dominating China and Korea and in subsequent years increasing German investment and influence in the Ottoman Empire on Russia’s doorstep caused further concern in official circles.
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