The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  But no foreign minister could avert his eyes from the chessboard of Great Power politics for long, and in the British entente Izvolski saw an opening for a bold move. Anticipated “complications” in relations with Turkey, he declared at a January 1908 council meeting, raised anew Russia’s “historical tasks in the Turkish East and the traditions of our past”—circumlocution for Russia’s designs on the Turkish Straits. The foreign minister dangled the prospect of opening the straits to Russian warships—confined to the Black Sea by an international agreement of 1887, anti-Russian in origin, that had bottled up Russia’s Black Sea fleet during the war with Japan. As Russia’s new ally, Britain would support Russian diplomatic pressure to reopen the straits issue—perhaps even help Russia seize them by force. A border dispute between Turkey and Persia furnished the pretext for war. Unless Russia exploited this opportunity, Izvolski provocatively asserted, it would “no longer be a Great Power.”

  Stolypin and Kokovtsev were taken aback. The foreign minister had forgotten 1905. Stolypin, who felt “panicked terror” listening to Izvolski, italicized its lesson: “A new mobilization in Russia would lend strength to the revolution out of which we are just beginning to emerge … Any policy other than a purely defensive one would be at present the delirium of a Government which has lost its mind, and would bring with it danger for the Dynasty.”13

  Briefly humbled, Izvolski soon resumed his course toward the Straits. The Council of Ministers having rejected his approach to Britain, without informing the council he turned to Austria-Hungary. In September 1908, at the Austrian foreign minister’s castle in Buchlau, Izvolski and his host, Count Alois Aehrenthal, agreed on the outlines of a deal. Russia would look benignly on the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Dual Monarchy, which under a Treaty of Berlin mandate had occupied and administered the still notionally Ottoman province since 1878. In return, Vienna would support Russia’s attempt to seek a new international agreement opening the Straits to its warships. The one agreement would serve two imperialisms, Austria’s over Bosnia, the first territorial acquisition made by the emperor Francis Joseph, and Russia’s over the Turkish Straits.

  No records were kept of the Buchlau meeting. Izvolski claimed he accepted the deal subject to the tsar’s approval and the support of Paris and London. He thought he had the time to accomplish this. Two weeks after Buchlau he received the shock of his professional life. Aehrenthal wrote to him in Paris that in forty-eight hours Vienna would announce the annexation and counted on Russia to adopt a “friendly and benevolent attitude” toward it. A Vienna editor observed of Aehrenthal after the Buchlau meeting: “With almost rascally glee he related to me the trick he had played on Izvolsky to whom … he had formally announced the annexation without mentioning the moment chosen, which was imminent.”14

  “The Advance of Civilization.” A Turkish caricature depicting Austria-Hungary’s 1908 Annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Russia was humiliated; Austria-Hungary cursed.

  Aehrenthal had played Izvolski for a fool. Stolypin threatened to resign if Nicholas, who awkwardly enough approved the overture to Austria, did not repudiate him and his deal. To bargain away “two Slavic provinces” to Catholic Austria to advance Russia’s imperial interests—such jobbery must not stand. The Stolypin government refused to recognize the annexation and Serbia mobilized. A crisis gravid with war began that ended only in March 1909 when, lacking France’s support and faced with an ultimatum from Austria’s alliance partner, Germany, Russia formally recognized the annexation and at Berlin’s dictate made Serbia follow suit. “The form and method of Germany’s action—I mean toward us—has simply been brutal and we won’t forget it,” Nicholas confided to his mother.15

  Invoking the 1905 battle in which Admiral Togo sunk a Russian fleet, the nationalist press assailed the government’s capitulation as a “diplomatic Tsushima” and vociferated against the betrayal of Slavdom. “Be patient, Balkans, after Russia regains her strength she will take up her mission as protectress of the Slav world,” counseled a St. Petersburg conference of Pan-Slav groups, which called on Serbia to free its fellow Slavs in Bosnia. Confident of Russian opinion, Serbia took up the challenge; a secret society of military officers targeted Bosnia with anti-Austrian propaganda and recruited Bosnian insurgents and assassins. In the words of a Serbian historian, “The crisis of 1908–9 contains all the elements that were to recur in 1914 and were the direct cause of the Great War.”16

  A second baleful legacy of the crisis was a promise by the chief of staff of the German army to his Austrian opposite number that if Austria attacked Serbia and Russia mobilized against it in response, Germany would mobilize against Russia. Bismarck thought he had ruled out that kind of commitment; the alliance he forged with Austria in 1879 was a defensive one—only an unprovoked attack on Austria, not an attack by it, could trigger German belligerence. Bismarck considered Austria to be on its own in the Balkans, which he assured Russia was not “worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” Fatefully renewed in July 1914, the promise of 1909 steeled Austria to confront Serbia over the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.17

  In September 1910, Stolypin finally rid his government of Izvolski, consoled with the Paris embassy, where he schemed to revenge himself against the Central Powers. Taking no chances on another Izvolski, Stolypin secured the appointment of his brother-in-law, Serge Sazonov, Russia’s ambassador to the Vatican, as the new foreign minister. “You know my views,” Sazonov wrote Izvolski, miming Stolypin’s. “We need peace, war during the next years, especially for reasons the people would not understand, would be fatal for Russia and for the dynasty.” Because of illness, Sazonov had served with Stolypin for only a few months, when on August 31, 1911, the reforming prime minister, before Nicholas’s eyes, was shot by a young man in evening dress at the Kiev Opera during an interval in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of Tsar Sultan. “I am happy to die for the Tsar,” Stolypin, sinking, avowed, and looking up at the royal box blessed Nicholas with the sign of the cross.18

  In a system that selected for the toady, Stolypin’s successor spoke his mind. Described by a former imperial official as “an intelligent man, scrupulously honest, slightly pedantic, conservative without excess, deeply patriotic and devoted to the service of the state,” Vladimir Kokovtsov stood forth as the anti-Durnovo from his first decision as acting prime minister.19

  Durnovo was minister of the interior—Russia’s chief policeman—during the revolution of 1905 when his ministry subsidized pamphlets that blamed the revolution on Russia’s Jews, inciting “loyal” Russians “to tear them to pieces and kill them.” Encouraged to be beasts, vigilante gangs known as the Black Hundreds, carrying portraits of the tsar, mounted over three hundred pogroms (Russian for “devastation”) against Jewish communities that killed more than three thousand people. No evidence links the government directly to the Black Hundreds, but history is not a court of law. An accessory after the fact, Nicholas granted clemency to seventeen hundred of them, many convicted of murder, and characterized the pogromists in general as “loyal people … outraged by the audacity and insolence of the revolutionaries and socialists, and since nine-tenths of them were Yids, then all the hostility was directed at them.”20

  Kiev was the scene of a gruesome 1905 pogrom, “an orgy of looting, rapine, and murder.” Kiev would be the site of the medieval 1913 trial of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish clerk falsely accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy in headlines like THE DRINKER OF CHRISTIAN BLOOD. Jews lived in dread in Kiev, the birthplace of Russian Christianity. With rumors spreading that Stolypin’s assailant, D. G. Bogrov, a student revolutionary turned police informer turned terrorist, was a Jew, Kiev officials warned Kokovtsov that “the people … were preparing a tremendous Jewish pogrom” and that, since the local detachment of troops was away on maneuvers, nothing could stop it. Panic broke out in the Jewish neighborhoods. At first light whole families began to converge on the railroad station, anxiously watching the tracks for the first train. �
�Even as they waited, the terrified people heard the clatter of hoofs. An endless stream of Cossacks, their long lances dark against the dawn sky, rode past. On his own, Kokovtsov had ordered three full regiments of cossacks into the city to prevent violence.” Calm returned, Kokovtsov recorded in his memoirs, “the exodus … stopped, and on the following day life resumed its normal course.”21

  At a mass held to pray for the gravely wounded Stolypin’s recovery, a local member of the duma revulsed Kokovtsov by observing, “Well, Your High Excellency, by calling in the troops you have missed a fine chance to answer Bogrov’s shot with a nice Jewish pogrom.” Kokovtsov “could not conceal [his] indignation at such a remark,” which awoke him to the necessity of doing more. “Directly after the mass, therefore, I sent an open telegram to all governors of this region demanding that they use every possible means—force if necessary—to prevent … pogroms.” Rising above his prejudices (“An Englishman is a Yid!”), Nicholas gave Kokovtsov’s order his “full approval,” remarking, “What a nightmare to take revenge upon the guiltless mass for the crime of one Jew.”22*

  Vladimir Kokovtsov. Any system that produced leaders of his character could not be all bad.

  From 1911 to early 1914, Kokovtsov pursued Stolypin’s “peace at almost any cost” policy against strengthening nationalist sentiment in the duma, in the conservative press, and in a divided cabinet. A cabal of ministers portrayed Kokovtsov’s “policy of caution” to Nicholas “as a proof of my personal cowardice and as the professional ruse of a Minister of Finance to ensure at all costs the financial well-being of his country.”23

  Kokovtsov’s counsel of restraint in external policy had domestic roots. “No one dreaded war for Russia as much as Kokovtsov,” a Russian diplomat wrote of him, “for he was aware both of our lack of military preparation and of the revolutionary ferment which was penetrating ever more deeply into the lower classes and daily gaining ground.”

  As finance minister (he retained that portfolio after Nicholas named him prime minister), Kokovtsov monitored warily what the military did with the money he appropriated. In a 1913 meeting at his country house with the French chief of staff, Joseph Joffre, Kokovtsov showed Joffre figures documenting that the Ministry of War had yet to spend more than two hundred million gold rubles, or five hundred million gold francs, that Kokovtsov had earmarked for the military. “The amazement of the Frenchman at this knew no bounds,” he recalled.

  As chairman of a commission formed after Bloody Sunday to investigate the working conditions of industrial laborers, Kokovtsov learned firsthand why the revolution began in the factories. The petition carried by the Petersburg workers on Bloody Sunday protested hunger wages, punishing hours, no workers’ compensation for injuries, no pensions for old age. The reforms proposed by the Kokovtsov Commission—from state-mandated accident and health insurance to paid maternity leave to pensions for all workers over fifty-five—would have vaulted Russia ahead of other industrialized countries in lifting the burden on those Theodore Roosevelt called “the crushable elements at the bottom of our industrial civilization.” But familiar objections from industrialists—that a shortened working day would disadvantage Russia in international trade, for example—stalled progress until 1912, when the duma finally passed a watered-down version of the Stolypin-Kokovtsov program.24

  In subordinating foreign to domestic policy, Kokovtsov had the support of his foreign minister but, mercurial in temperament, Sazonov needed steadying. Their “Izvolski” was the minister of war, General V. A. Sukhomlinov.

  A rum character, Sukhomlinov captivated Nicholas by saucing his reports with jokes, anecdotes, and “surprise twists.” One court watcher marveled at the way he held the tsar “in suspense right up to the last minute, even if his audience lasted a couple of hours.” His colleagues, spared the raconteur, resisted his spell. In Sazonov’s view, “It was very difficult to make him work, but to get him to speak the truth was well-nigh impossible.”25

  To the French ambassador, Sukhomlinov (“a small chubby man with a fat feline face”) presented the spectacle of a sexually exhausted husband—his wife, described by an admirer as “a platinum blonde with wonderful blue eyes, a fascinating, intelligent, dangerous woman,” being thirty years his junior. To maintain her hundred-thousand-ruble-a-year taste for exotic travel, sable furs, Paris gowns, and Fabergé objets d’art, as well as to pay European doctors to treat her kidney condition, Sukhomlinov accepted bribes from Vickers, the Anglo-American weapons manufacturer. Since Vickers’ bid to produce light machine guns was 43 percent higher per weapon than that of Russia’s Tula Armament Works, Russia would enter World War I with only four thousand machine guns to Germany’s twenty-four thousand, owing in part to the exorbitant terms of the war minister’s marriage.26

  As war minister, Sukhomlinov reported above the prime minister to the tsar, a structural invitation to mischief that left Nicholas at the mercy of himself. A near-catastrophic incident in November 1912 that reverberated in the decision for war in 1914 dramatized the folly of that.

  Fecklessly encouraged by Sazonov, in early 1912 Serbia and Bulgaria formed a Slavic league; then, joined by Montenegro and Greece, a Balkan League. Its purpose was to make war on Turkey. “Slavic banquets” were held in Petersburg to raise money for “our little Slavic brothers” in the Balkans, fighting to drive the Turk out of Europe for the first time in five hundred years, and to pressure the government not to leave them “in the lurch.” Nicholas, who resented the idea of “public opinion,” dismissed the Pan-Slav agitation, blaming it, risibly, on the usual suspects: “In Russia no decent person wants war for the sake of the Slavs; only the wretched Jewish newspapers … write that public opinion is stirred—it is a lie and calumny,” he told his constant confidante.27

  Pan-Slav opinion was exercised not only against Turkey but also against another power threatening Serbia over its reach for an Adriatic port from the territory—modern Albania—vacated by the retreating Turks. Speaking in the duma, a leader of the extreme right declared that “the hour has struck to settle accounts with our historic enemy, with that patchwork monarchy”—with Austria-Hungary.28

  Such was the weave of events when, on the evening of November 22, 1912, Sukhomlinov telephoned Kokovtsov: The tsar wanted to see him and Sazonov the next morning. The minister of war had no idea why.

  Before a map spread out on a table in his Tsarskoe Selo study, Nicholas informed his incredulous prime minister that to rectify an imbalance of forces developing vis-à-vis Austria, he had ordered the mobilization of the army divisions assigned to Russia’s Austrian frontier, some 1.1 million men.29

  The minister of war wanted to dispatch the orders “yesterday,” but Nicholas thought it prudent first to sound out “those ministers who ought to be apprised of it”—Kokovtsov, Sazonov, and S. V. Rukhlov, the minister of communications.

  “We three looked at each other with the greatest amazement,” Kokovtsov recalled in his memoirs, “and only the presence of the Tsar restrained us from giving vent to the feelings which animated all of us … I spoke first and had to struggle to retain my composure.”

  The minister of war “apparently did not perceive” what European statesmen and generals had understood for a generation—that mobilization meant war with Austria and Germany. “The mobilization is the declaration of war,” the chief of the French General Staff, General Charles Boisdeffre, had told Alexander III the day after France and Russia concluded their military alliance in July 1892. “To mobilize is to oblige one’s neighbor to do the same,” the general explained. “If your neighbor mobilizes a million men on your frontier and you do nothing you are like the man who, with a pistol in his pocket, should let a neighbor put a weapon to his forehead without drawing his own.” Alexander agreed: “That is exactly the way I understand it.”30

  His son did not understand it at all. “I do not, just as yourself, Vladimir Nikolaevich, allow the thought of imminent war,” he said. The mobilization was a “simple measure of precaution
.” The Germans, Kokovtsov came back, would not care what the tsar called mobilization. They would counter it with “actual war.” Nicholas said he had no intention of mobilizing against Germany. Austria—which “is openly hostile and has taken a series of steps against us,” including partially mobilizing against Serbia and showing signs of mobilization near the Russian border in Galicia—was the intended recipient of this warning signal. But, Kokovtsov pointed out, Germany and Austria were bound together: “These two countries could not be considered separately.” Moreover, to mobilize against them without first consulting Russia’s ally, France, would “permit France to repudiate her obligations to us.” Russia would have to fight Germany and Austria-Hungary alone, the nightmare to escape which Alexander, overcoming his political aversions, so far as to listen bareheaded to the Marseillaise at the Kronstadt Naval Base in 1891, had forged what George F. Kennan termed “the fateful alliance” with republican France—the doomsday machine of World War I.*31

  Kokovtsov was righter than he knew about Germany. Days after the conference in the tsar’s study, Kaiser Wilhelm, anticipating an aggressive Russian response to the Austrian troop buildup in Galicia, instructed his secretary of state: “Should Russian counter-measures or protests ensue which force the Emperor Francis Joseph to begin war, then he will have the right on his side and I am ready … to apply the casus foederis [the catalyst for the terms of an alliance to come into play] in the fullest measure and with all its consequences.” He conveyed this message personally to the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, then visiting Berlin. “Emperor William says that as soon as our prestige demands it we should take energetic action in Serbia, and we can be certain of his support … More details Sunday verbally,” he cabled Vienna. So the Russian mobilization against Austria would, it seems, have triggered war with Germany.32

  But Kokovtsov was wrong about France, which, even without being consulted, might have joined in. Under their defensive military agreement, France was not obligated to aid Russia if Russia attacked Austria. But the French were in increasing doubt whether they could rely on a Russia frozen by fear of revolution to honor its side of the agreement and attack Germany if Germany attacked France. In the Morocco crises of 1905 and 1911, when as we will see Germany faced down France, the Russians signaled they were not ready for war; their internal condition would not permit it; they needed more time. General Joffre “questioned whether Russia could mobilize and implement her war plan without being paralyzed by internal disturbances.” Earlier in 1912 the Russians confided to their ally that “even if Austria should attack Serbia, Russia will not fight,” which could not have buoyed French confidence in Russia’s will to fight for France. “[General Ferdinand Foch] says that he doesn’t think Russia would actually interfere if Germany and France were to fight about Belgium,” Sir Henry Wilson, British liaison to the French General Staff, noted. “In short, Foch is of opinion that, in the coming war in Belgium, France must trust to England and not to Russia.”