by G. J. Meyer
Like Peter the Great before her and like many of her own descendants, Catherine was a perplexing mixture of reformer and tyrant. She was also a woman of great intellect and cultivation, as well as a libertine. She had multiple lovers before her husband’s death, and it is at best questionable whether her son and heir, Paul, was actually the son of Peter III. Her long string of handsome young lovers, most of them playthings whom she was far too shrewd to take seriously except in the boudoir, continued until her death of a stroke at sixty-seven. Unprovable stories about her sexual encounters with a horse have come down to the twenty-first century.
Catherine had no confidence in her son Paul; in fact, she despised him. She took charge of the upbringing of Paul’s sons, especially the eldest, Alexander. She carefully supervised his preparation for the throne. When she died, Paul succeeded. But he was soon murdered, just as his father had been—assuming that Peter III was in fact his father. He was then succeeded, as Catherine had intended, by the tall, handsome, and intelligent young Alexander I.
In what would become something of a Romanov pattern, Tsar Alexander began his reign as a reformer of whom great things were expected, then took alarm at the forces of change all around him, and finally turned into the most iron-handed kind of reactionary. His first fifteen years on the throne were turbulent in the extreme, with Napoleon marching his armies up and down Europe and finally occupying and burning Moscow. It fell to Alexander to save Russia and his dynasty, and he succeeded brilliantly. In the end he outwaited and outwitted the French emperor. At one point he even pretended to consider offering his sister to Napoleon, though in fact giving a Romanov princess to such an upstart was unthinkable. After Napoleon took an Austrian bride instead (even the mighty Hapsburgs turned out to be more submissive than Alexander) and finally was driven into exile, Alexander was more influential than any other monarch in restoring the old order.
Intriguing questions hang over the end of Alexander’s life. In 1825, childless but at the peak of his power, he was suddenly reported to have died in a town where he had been staying far from the capital. When his coffin arrived in St. Petersburg, his brothers refused to have it opened. There were rumors that he had not died at all but had done something that he had long talked yearningly of doing—withdrawn into a monastery in Siberia to spend the rest of his life in contemplation. Nothing of the sort was ever proved. But toward the end of the twentieth century, when his coffin was finally opened in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, it was found to be empty.
Alexander’s heir was his brother Constantine, but because this archduke refused the crown, it was passed to a third and much younger brother who thereby became Nicholas I. This Nicholas, lacking even ephemeral reforming instincts, was a reactionary in all ways from the start. When he died in 1855, he was called the man who had frozen Russia for thirty years.
His son Alexander II was also conservative but more intelligent and therefore able to understand the need for change. He began his career as a reformer and even something of an idealist, abolishing the serfdom that had long been the shame of Russia. Gradually he too turned in the direction of reaction and repression, taking such severe measures against a movement of young reformers that some became bomb-throwing radicals. In the last years of his reign there were repeated attempts on his life, but Alexander never completely abandoned his efforts to move Russia closer to if not quite into the modern world. In 1881, shortly after he had approved the creation of a parliamentlike body that was to be allowed to advise on legislation without actually passing laws, a bomb thrown by a young Pole blew him apart.
Still alive but oozing blood from every part of his body, one leg gone and the other shredded, his torso torn open and his face disfigured, the tsar was carried to his palace. There he died, horribly, in the presence of his family, including his eldest son, who then became Alexander III, and the latter’s eldest son, thirteen-year-old Nicholas. He was the third tsar to be murdered in six generations.
Alexander III was a huge and bearlike man, powerful enough to bend a poker and roll pieces of silverware into balls with his bare hands. On succeeding to the throne he declared his “faith in the power and right of autocracy,” and he was as good as his word. He dedicated himself unreservedly to reversing as many of his father’s reforms as possible (a restoration of serfdom was not among the possibilities), refusing any innovations that might reduce the power of the Romanovs, and clamping down in almost totalitarian fashion on every form of dissent. Newspapers were not even allowed to print the word constitution.
Alexander III’s son Nicholas was improbably unlike his father in almost every respect: physically slight, something of a playboy in his youth though in fairly innocent ways, and utterly lacking in self-confidence. He was, however, given the same tutor who had taught his father, an archconservative named Constantine Pobedonostsev, known as the High Priest of Social Stagnation. “Among the falsest of political principles is the principle of the sovereignty of the people,” Pobedonostsev taught. “It is terrible to think of our condition if destiny had sent us the fatal gift—an all-Russia Parliament. But that will never be.” Young Nicholas listened, and like his father he believed. He learned that it was not only the tsar’s right but his sacred duty to be a strong father to all the Russians, to yield power to no one. But he had a clear sense of his own limits, knew that he could never be like his father, and had absolutely no wish to succeed him.
There appeared to be no cause for worry on that score. In 1894, with Nicholas in his mid-twenties and preparing to marry Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt (his parents were not at all happy about the match, though the bride was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Britain and therefore Wilhelm II’s first cousin), Alexander III was not yet fifty and a fountain of vitality. It seemed likely that he would rule for another twenty years or more, and his own expectation that this would be so was reflected in his failure to do anything to prepare his heir for the responsibilities of government. (Nicholas himself demonstrated no wish to learn.) But then, abruptly, he went into a swift decline—the problem was diagnosed as nephritis—and soon died. His heir was shattered, and not only because he had lost the father he idolized.
“What am I going to do?” he asked. “I am not prepared to be a tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.”
Chapter 5
July 29 to 31:
Fear Is a Bad Counselor
“Think of the responsibility which you are advising me to take! Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their death!”
—TSAR NICHOLAS II
Wednesday, July 29
At one o’clock in the morning Tsar Nicholas sent a telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm. It was signed “Nicky,” and it expressed indignation that an “ignoble war has been declared on a weak country.” It asked the kaiser “in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far.” While this wire was making its way to Potsdam, Wilhelm sent one of his own to the tsar. It was signed “your very sincere and devoted friend and cousin, Willy.” In it the kaiser declared his hopes for peace and said, “I am exerting my utmost influence to induce the Austrians to deal straightly to arrive to [sic] a satisfactory understanding with you.”
This exchange was promising, though in his marginal scribblings the kaiser dismissed Tsar Nicholas’s message as “a confession of his own weakness, and an attempt to put the responsibility on my own shoulders.” The two monarchs wrote to each other in English, a language in which they could not have been more fluent if born and raised in London. In any case, like every glimmer of hope during this exhausting and interminable week, the exchange would soon be submerged in the rush of events. The tsar’s foreign minister, Sazonov, continued to be under intense pressure from all sides. He needed little persuading when, later in the morning, War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov and the army’s chief of staff came to him with their solution to the crisis: mo
bilization. Mobilizing the army, they said, would put Austria-Hungary on notice in the strongest possible way. Not mobilizing, on the other hand, would leave the army unable to respond if Austria’s troops entered Serbia. In case of a wider war, the army would be totally unprepared. Sazonov was quick to agree.
The chief of staff then took the train to Tsar Nicholas’s summer palace (the tsar, capable of a strange degree of detachment when terrible things were happening around him, had not visited the capital once since Franz Ferdinand’s assassination) and got his signature on two decrees. One ordered the mobilization of twelve army corps, fifty-five divisions, in the four military districts where secret preparations were already most advanced. This was a massive force, bigger than the entire Austro-Hungarian army, but it would include less than half of Russia’s troops and so was not intended as a threat to Germany. The other decree would put in motion a general mobilization involving all districts including those nearest Germany and thereby drastically escalate the crisis. Nicholas believed he was merely putting in place the paperwork necessary for possible action later. He told his visitor that neither order was to be executed without specific authorization from him. That night army headquarters was preparing for execution of the general mobilization—and Sazonov was telling lies to the British ambassador, assuring him that Russia was considering no action that could possibly distress the Germans—when the tsar sent word that he had made a decision. Only a partial mobilization, he said, would be allowed; there must be no move against Germany. Nicholas was continuing to exchange telegrams with “Willy,” who was continuing to assure him—truthfully—that he was trying to slow the Austrians down.
Raymond Poincaré President of France Determined to bring Britain into the war.
On this same day President Poincaré of France and Prime Minister Viviani landed at Dunkirk and hurried to Paris by train. They were surprised to learn that Austria had declared war, surprised too by the crowds that had gathered to greet them and were shouting “To Berlin!” Here as in other capitals, the man in the street was giving every appearance of being eager for the fighting to begin. Crowds were gathering in Vienna too and in Berlin and Hamburg and London, where a young bank clerk returning from vacation observed that the city was in “a state of hysteria.” The enthusiasm was not universal, however. Bertrand Russell, also in London, said he “discovered to my horror that average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war.” Across Europe Socialist leaders were mustering their followers in opposition to the impending conflict. Even among the political and military elites, the mood was generally grim. Sir Edward Grey, from his office at the foreign ministry, made his famous comment that “the lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” (Ironically, long before the war’s end Grey would have to retire from public life because he was going blind.) Poincaré, though touched by the fervor of the Paris crowds and determined to give the Russians no reason to doubt his government’s support, was equally determined to avert hostilities if possible. He and Viviani sent a telegram to St. Petersburg urging that the Russians do nothing that might provoke a German mobilization; this arrived, however, after the tsar’s approval of partial mobilization.
Among the holders of high office, one man at least did not share the sense of glum foreboding: the ebullient—sometimes excessively ebullient—young Winston Churchill. “I think a curse should rest on me,” he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith’s wife, obviously believing nothing of the kind, “because I love this war. I know it’s smashing & shattering the lives of thousands every moment—& yet—I can’t help it—I enjoy every second of it.”
Churchill was still a little premature in writing of “this war.” As Wednesday ended, the outlook appeared to be slightly less dark, the likelihood of war diminishing if only slightly. The kaiser and the tsar were not only communicating but cooperating in an attempt to impose restraint. Only two things now seemed necessary for a resolution of the crisis to remain possible. Russia must refrain from general mobilization; the kaiser seemed willing to accept, temporarily, limited Russian measures that did not threaten Germany directly. And Austria must agree to something akin to the Stop-in-Belgrade plan. This second condition was likely to be met eventually, simply because Germany wanted it to happen; Austria would find it difficult to proceed without Berlin’s support. It all came down, therefore, to the question of whether the Russians would mobilize and stampede the Germans into doing likewise. The German military authorities remained divided. War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn, frightened by the dangers of allowing a Russian mobilization to go unanswered, was urging preliminary steps toward mobilization. But for Chief of Staff Moltke (sometimes accused, unjustifiably, of having plotted from the start to provoke a preventive war), the greatest fear at this point was of doing anything that might cause the Russians to mobilize. In a memorandum dated July 29 he told Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg that if war came, “the leading nations of Europe would tear one another limb from limb…in a struggle that would destroy the culture of almost all of Europe for decades to come.” Bethmann, who needed no persuading, sent an evening telegram instructing Ambassador Pourtalès to “kindly impress upon M. Sazonov very seriously that further progress of Russian mobilization measures would compel us to mobilize and that then European war could scarcely be prevented.”
Thursday, July 30
The European public was now fully awake to the possibility of war. Runs on banks were becoming widespread. Austria, Germany, and Russia were all withdrawing their reserves from foreign banks. The financial markets in Berlin and Brussels had to be shut down because of panic selling.
Even the Nicky-Willy telegrams were beginning to go wrong. In one of his middle-of-the-night messages, in a maladroit attempt to assure the kaiser that Russia had no hostile intentions where Germany was concerned, Tsar Nicholas told him that “the military measures which have now come into force were decided on five days ago for reasons of defense on account of Austria’s preparations.” Wilhelm concluded from this that Russia “is almost a week ahead of us,” and that “that means I have got to mobilize as well.”
In the morning the leaders of the Russian general staff came back to Sazonov with bad news. They said there was no acceptable way of executing the kind of partial mobilization that the tsar had approved, one supposedly directed at Austria-Hungary alone. Any such mobilization would have to be done off the cuff and would throw Russia’s armed forces into a state of confusion that might leave them helpless in case of a German attack. In practical terms only general mobilization was possible, and it must be postponed no longer. When Sazonov accepted this argument—its validity has been a bone of contention ever since—the chief of the general staff telephoned the tsar and again asked him to approve a general mobilization. Nicholas refused, saying that the question was closed. He was persuaded, grudgingly, to meet with Sazonov at three P.M. Sazonov was soon on his way.
The meeting was a long one, with the foreign minister arguing the generals’ case. Austria, Sazonov said, was preparing to destroy Serbia and refusing to talk. Germany was playing a double game, appearing to restrain the Austrians but really just trying to buy time for its own preparations: Germany was far along with an undeclared mobilization of its own. Russia could not afford not to respond. Russia also could not mobilize in any way short of fully—the result of trying such a thing could be disastrous. Sazonov was wrong about almost everything except Austria’s determination to attack Serbia. He was not lying, but he was dangerously misinformed.
Nicholas continued to refuse, and Sazonov continued to plead. The tsar, conscious of the magnitude of what he was being asked, agonized aloud. “Think of the responsibility which you are asking me to take!” he declared. “Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their death!”
Finally, probably inevitably, Nicholas was worn down. He was a stubborn but not a strong man, and even the strongest of men would have found it difficult to resist when being told that war could
no longer be avoided regardless of what they did and that nothing less than national survival was at stake. Perhaps Sazonov’s most powerful argument—another falsehood that he believed to be true—was that a general mobilization would not necessarily drive Germany to war. What neither Sazonov nor Nicholas understood was that Russia’s mobilization would arouse in Germany’s generals a panic indistinguishable from the fears driving the Russians, and that those generals would demand a German response. Far worse, neither of them had any way of knowing how fast the Germans would be able to mobilize, or how inflexible and therefore dangerous the German mobilization plan was. Not even Kaiser Wilhelm or Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg understood clearly at this point that Germany was literally incapable of mobilizing without invading its neighbors to the west and thereby igniting the continental war that all of them dreaded. The final tragedy is that the tsar’s decision was based largely on the things that Sazonov told him about Germany’s preparations for war, when in fact Germany remained the only one of the continental powers to have taken no military action at all.
Russia’s general mobilization, decided just a little more than forty-eight hours after Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia, added nine hundred thousand active-duty troops to the number that would have been affected by partial mobilization. It also called up the Russian reserves—a staggering total of four million men, enough to frighten any nation on earth. By making German mobilization—and therefore war—a near-certainty, it drastically reduced the possibility that the Willy-Nicky telegrams or any of the other increasingly desperate efforts to defuse the situation (cables were flying among the capital cities around the clock) could produce results before it was too late. It all but ended the hope of negotiations, or of a compromise based on Stop-in-Belgrade.
Tragically, Russia’s mobilization, while dictated by military considerations, was not only militarily unnecessary but counterproductive. Tactically it was a gift to the Austrians (or would have been, if Conrad had taken advantage of it), relieving them of the anguish of not knowing whether they needed to prepare to fight the Russians or were free to focus on Serbia alone. Strategically it was an act of high folly. In no real sense had the security of Russia ever been threatened by the July crisis. Even the destruction of Serbia—something that certainly could have been averted without resorting to war—would have had little impact on Russia’s strategic position. Russia would still have had the biggest army in the world by a huge margin, and it would still have been in the beginning stages of a program aimed at expanding that army by 40 percent within three years.