The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (35 page)

If, on the other hand, Russia decided that its main threats and opportunities lay in Europe, then it needed to come to terms with its enemies in the east, both actual and potential. Peace with Japan needed to be accompanied by settlement of its outstanding issues with China and, much more importantly, with that other imperial power in the East, Great Britain. Few choices in foreign policy are irrevocable and in the decade before 1914 Russia’s leaders tried to keep their options open, maintaining the alliance with France, but making overtures to all three of Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary to try to remove sources of tension.

Although the French alliance had caused difficulties initially, Russian opinion had largely come around to seeing it as a good thing, a neat matching of Russian manpower with French money and technology. Of course, there were strains over the years. France tried to use its financial leverage over Russia to shape Russian military planning to meet French needs or to insist that Russia place its orders for new weapons with French firms.
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The Russians resented this ‘blackmail’, as they sometimes called it, which was demeaning to Russia as a great
power. As Vladimir Kokovtsov, Russia’s Minister of Finance for much of the decade before 1914, complained: ‘Russia is not Turkey; our allies should not set us an ultimatum, we can get by without these direct demands’.
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The Russo-Japanese War also brought strains, with the Russians thinking that France was not doing enough to support them and the French desperately trying to avoid getting dragged into a war on the side of Russia against Japan, the ally of their new friend Britain. On the other hand, France did prove helpful to Russia in negotiating the settlement of the damages arising from the Dogger Bank incident. Delcassé also allowed the Russian Baltic Fleet to use ports in France’s colonies in the Far East as it made its way towards Manchuria.

Even Russian conservatives who still hoped for a closer relationship with Germany consoled themselves by arguing that the alliance with France actually made Russia stronger and therefore more impressive in German eyes. In the opinion of Lamsdorff, the Foreign Minister between 1900 and 1906: ‘In order to have good relations with Germany and make her amenable, we need to
maintain an alliance
with France. An alliance with Germany would isolate us, most probably, and would become a disastrous slavery.’
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A small, fussy man, Lamsdorff was a bureaucrat of the old school, utterly loyal to the tsar and deeply averse to change. Count Leopold von Berchtold, the Austrian diplomat who later became Foreign Minister, met him in 1900:

Except for a short moustache, he was clean shaven and bare-headed, sat ramrod straight. He tried to impress at every opportunity, too polite, not unintelligent and also not without education, a wandering archive. Un rat de chancellerie. Through constant sniffing in dusty files he became a yellowed parchment himself. I could not help but get the impression of having an abnormality before me, an aged but inchoate nature, in whose circulation system ran watery jelly instead of red blood.
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Lamsdorff’s colleagues would have agreed: as one said unkindly, Lamsdorff was at least honest and hard-working but ‘brilliantly incapable and mediocre’.
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Nevertheless Lamsdorff was probably right in thinking that Russia’s long-term interests lay in balancing between the powers and he was open to discussions with any of the other powers
including Britain. As he told a member of the Foreign Ministry, Baron Marcel Taube, in 1905: ‘Believe me, there are times in the life of a great people when this absence of a too-pronounced orientation with regard to that power x or y is still the best policy. I call that, myself, the policy of independence. If it is abandoned, you will see one day when I am no longer here – that it will not bring happiness to Russia.’
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His successors could enter into new combinations and engage in new wars, which, he warned, ‘will end in a revolution’.
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Keeping a free hand in foreign policy after 1905 was almost impossible for Russia, however, partly because its own weakness meant it needed allies and partly because Europe was well along the road to dividing itself into opposing alliances.

After 1904, with its Entente Cordiale with Britain in place, France put considerable pressure on Russia to come to a similar understanding with Britain. ‘What horizons will open to us’, said Delcassé, the Foreign Minister, in 1904, ‘if we could lean simultaneously on Russia and England against Germany!’
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Of course, what France hoped for in the longer term was a full-blown military alliance between the three powers. While Russian liberals would have welcomed a friendship with the leading liberal power in Europe, the Russian leadership was reluctant. The tsar disapproved of British society and, while he had admired Queen Victoria, did not like Edward VII, whom he found immoral and dangerously free with his friendships. When, as a young man, he had stayed with Edward, he had been shocked to find, for example, that the fellow guests included horse-dealers and, worse, Jews. As he wrote to his mother: ‘The Cousins rather enjoyed the situation and kept teasing me about it; but I tried to keep away as much as I could, and not to talk.’
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More importantly, perhaps, Nicholas saw Britain as Russia’s chief rival around the world. He was also furious with the British for their hostility during the Russo-Japanese War, which he blamed, so he told Wilhelm II, on Edward VII, ‘the greatest mischief maker and the most dangerous intriguer in the world’.
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Until 1906, when they were replaced, his chief advisers, Witte and Lamsdorff, were also lukewarm if not hostile to the idea of an understanding with Britain. Witte would have preferred to revive the old German friendship and perhaps to join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Given the growing rivalries between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans, this last was highly unlikely. Even
less probable was Witte’s hope of creating a continental alliance with France, Russia and Germany to isolate Britain.
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The French made it clear that they were not prepared either to bury their differences with Germany or abandon their entente with Britain.

Germany, not surprisingly, did its best to drive France and Russia apart. The German Foreign Office made clumsy attempts during the Russo-Japanese War to create suspicions between France and Russia. The Kaiser wrote in English, one of their shared languages, to his dear cousin Nicky with much advice about how to conduct the war and sympathy for Russia’s mounting losses. Wilhelm, so he told the tsar at the beginning of June 1904, had expressed his amazement to the French military attaché in Berlin that France was not coming to the aid of its Russian ally against the rising Asian power.

After many hints and allusions I found out – what I always feared – that the Anglo-French agreement had the one main effect, viz.: to stop the French from helping you!
Il va sans dire
, that if France had been under the obligation of helping you with her Fleet or Army I would of course not have budged a finger to harm her; for that would have been most illogical on the part of the Author of the Picture ‘Yellow Peril’! [Wilhelm had given Nicholas this painting which was done to his instructions by his favourite artist.]

Wilhelm rather undercut these kind sentiments by ending his letter with a heavy-handed hint to his cousin that it was an opportune moment for Russia to sign a commercial treaty with Germany.
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That autumn, as Russia’s losses in the Far East mounted up, Wilhelm and Bülow secretly offered an alliance against an unspecified European power. Wilhelm wrote privately to Nicholas: ‘Of course the alliance would be purely defensive, exclusively directed against European aggressor or aggressors, in the form of a mutual fire insurance company against incendiarism.’ He was dismayed – ‘my first personal defeat’ – when Nicholas turned him down.
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Wilhelm liked to believe that he could manage Nicholas, who was some ten years younger and a less forceful personality. ‘A charming, agreeable and dear boy,’ Wilhelm wrote to Queen Victoria after one of their early meetings.
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In fact Nicholas found Wilhelm exhausting in
person and resented the stream of letters with their unsolicited advice. Witte discovered that a good way to get his master to agree to something was to tell him the Kaiser opposed it.
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Wilhelm’s gifts of what he described as his own paintings were typically tactless. The ‘Yellow Peril’ allegory, for example, showed a manly German warrior defending the swooning Russian beauty. Bülow had his own candidate for the most embarrassing: ‘Kaiser William, in magnificent attitude and shining armour, was standing in front of the tsar, with a huge crucifix in his raised right hand, while the tsar looked up admiringly at him in humble, almost ridiculous position, clad in a Byzantine garment, rather like a dressing gown.’
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As he did so often, the tsar retreated into polite disengagement. Wilhelm for his part was exasperated with what he saw as Nicholas’s lack of spine. When during the Russo-Japanese War he urged the tsar to go all out, Bülow warned him not to encourage Russia too openly lest Germany get dragged in. ‘From the point of view of the statesman you may be right,’ replied Wilhelm. ‘But I feel as a sovereign and as a sovereign I am sickened by the way Nicholas lets himself down through his flabby behavior. This sort of thing compromises all sovereigns.’
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In the summer of 1905, as Russia was suing for peace with Japan and the country was in turmoil, Wilhelm made another concerted effort to lure Nicholas away from the French alliance. The two rulers made a rendezvous with their yachts off the Finnish island of Björkö. Wilhelm sympathised with Nicholas over Russia’s predicament and joined him in railing against the perfidy of France and Britain. On 23 July Bülow received a delighted telegram from Wilhelm to say that Russia and Germany had made a treaty on board the tsar’s yacht. ‘I have received many strange telegrams from the Kaiser,’ Bülow later said, ‘but never one so filled with enthusiasm as this one from Björkö.’ Wilhelm described the scene at length. The tsar had said again how hurt he was by France’s failing to support Russia; in response Wilhelm had said why did not the two of them there and then make a ‘little agreement’. He pulled out a copy of the treaty Nicholas had turned down the previous winter. Nicholas read it through while Wilhelm stood silently by, making, he told, a short prayer and gazing out at his own yacht with its flags flying in the morning breeze. Suddenly he heard Nicholas say: ‘That is excellent. I quite agree.’ Wilhelm forced himself to be casual
and handed a pen to Nicholas. Wilhelm then signed in turn. A representative of the Foreign Office, who had been sent along to keep an eye on Wilhelm, countersigned for Germany and a Russian admiral, who was not allowed by Nicholas to read the text, obediently did the same for Russia. ‘Tears of joy stood in my eyes’, Wilhelm went on in his description for Bülow, ‘– to be sure, drops of perspiration were trickling down my back – and I thought, Frederick William III, Queen Louisa, Grandpapa, and Nicholas I must surely be near at the moment. At any rate they must have been looking down full of joy.’
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A month later he wrote to Nicholas to exult in their new alliance which would allow their two nations to be the centre of power and a force for peace in Europe. The other members of the Triple Alliance, Austria-Hungary and Italy, would of course support them and the smaller powers such as the Scandinavian countries would inevitably see that their interests lay in swimming into the orbit of the new power bloc. Japan might even join, which would serve to cool down ‘English self-assertion and impertinence’. And, the Kaiser went on, Nicholas need not worry about his other chief European ally: ‘“Marianne” [France] must remember that she is wedded to you & that she is obliged to lie and bed with you, & eventually to give a hug or a kiss now & then to me, but not to sneak into the bedroom of the ever intriguing
touche-à-tout
on the Island.’
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(This last was a dig at Edward VII, whose love affairs were notorious.)

When Bülow saw the treaty joy was the last thing he felt. He was annoyed that Wilhelm had acted without consulting him first, something the Kaiser had taken to doing rather too frequently, and dismayed when he saw that Wilhelm had made a change, limiting the scope of the treaty to Europe. One of Russia’s great advantages as an ally was that it could threaten India and so keep Britain in check in Europe. After consulting his colleagues in the Foreign Office, who shared his views, Bülow submitted his resignation, perhaps less in earnest than to teach his master a lesson.
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The Kaiser’s dreams fell to pieces and so did he. ‘To be treated like this by the best and most intimate friend I have had’, he wrote in a highly emotional letter to Bülow, ‘without any reasonable ground being given, has dealt me such a terrible blow that I have completely collapsed and fear that a serious nervous trouble may result from it.’
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The reaction of the Russian Foreign Minister, Lamsdorff, was less dramatic but equally damning. He suggested politely to
the tsar that the Kaiser had taken advantage of him and pointed out that the treaty was incompatible with Russia’s obligations towards France. In October, Nicholas wrote to Wilhelm to say that the treaty would need France’s approval. Since this was never going to happen, the Björkö agreement was effectively void.