The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  In an emergency meeting on January 13, 1914, amid not-yet-confirmed reports that the Germans would shortly announce von Sanders’s transfer to inspector general after all, the tsar’s ministers met to decide what to do.51

  In a long memorandum to Nicholas, Sazonov set the agenda, advocating coercing the Turks to expel von Sanders—perhaps by occupying a Turkish city on the Black Sea coast. Act forcefully over Germans at the Straits, Sazonov urged, or risk losing Russia’s allies: “In France and England there would be strengthened the dangerous conviction that Russia will accept any conditions whatever for the preservation of peace” because of her internal condition “and each of them would endeavor to seek security … by making agreements with the powers of the opposite camp.” France ally itself with Germany because Russia declined to attack Turkey? Offended that Bethmann had told him nothing about the von Sanders mission when they met in Berlin in October (Bethmann knew nothing about it then), Sazonov let his pique rule his judgment.

  At the conference on the thirteenth, Kokovtsov, stipulating that “the potential for revolutionary unrest” remained strong, rallied his divided cabinet against Sazonov’s daft proposal. Seizing a Turkish city “would inevitably be followed by war with Germany.” Then he came up with an inspired framing: “Is war with Germany desirable and can Russia wage it?” There could be only one answer to that—how can any war be desirable?—and the cabinet gave it, unanimously. It was Kokovtsov’s final service to Nicholas, who fired him two weeks later, “like a domestic,” Nicholas’s uncle remarked, sending him his notice by messenger.52

  “Strange as it may seem,” Vladimir Kokovtsov wrote in his 1935 memoirs, “the question of Rasputin” not only convulsed public life during his two years as prime minister, it entangled Kokovtsov and pulled him down.

  Notorious still, Rasputin wandered into history as the “starets from Siberia,” the type of self-anointed holy man venerated by simple folk like the “many thousands of Orthodox people” of Tsaritsyn who signed a petition attesting that Rasputin bore “the marks of divine vocation” and listing “thaumaturgy” among his “gifts of grace.” Stopping bleeding, perhaps through hypnosis, was his signature gift. Beginning in 1905, it made him a fixture at the court of Nicholas and Alexandra, a power behind the throne, and a scandal to Russia’s educated classes. He won royal favor by stopping the internal bleeding of the hemophiliac tsarevich, Alexis. Where doctors failed, Rasputin succeeded. Neither the testimony of their governess that he spied on the tsar’s four daughters as they changed into their nightgowns, nor allegations by the Orthodox hierarchy that he belonged to a banned sect of flagellants “who preached that sinning reduced the quantity of sin in the world,” nor dossiers of his misdeeds compiled by Stolypin could break the royal couple’s attachment to the manipulative “Man of God,” who, sensing a chill, reminded the empress: “If I am not there to protect you, you will lose your crown and your son within six months.”53*

  Grigori Rasputin (1869–1916). This Russian book cover from 1922 captures the rogue’s hypnotic stare. According to French president Raymond Poincaré, who twice visited Russia, Rasputin “so completely dominated [the Empress] that every evening in her presence, under pretext of exorcising the Grand Duchesses, he slips his hands for some moments under their bedclothes.”

  Public comment on Rasputin was conducted in whispers and euphemisms. It took a sensational incident late in 1911 to surface the “Rasputin question.” “This incident was discussed everywhere—in the newspapers, in high circles of society, in government offices, and in the lobbies of the Duma,” according to Kokovtsov. On December 29, two disillusioned former allies of Rasputin, a monk and a bishop, aided by one Mitya Kolyaba, a deformed holy fool, lured Rasputin to the monk’s room in Petersburg to grill him over accusations that he had raped a nun. With his good hand Mitya grabbed Rasputin by the penis and held it in his fanatic grip while the bishop, shouting, “Is this true? Is this true?” clubbed him with a heavy cross. Bludgeoned into a confession, Rasputin burst out. “It’s true, it’s true, it’s all true!” It almost certainly was.54

  With material like this to run with, the press taboo on Rasputin, enforced by fines, broke down. To quote a leading Moscow journal, that “cunning conspirator against our Holy Church, that fornicator of human souls and bodies—Gregory Rasputin” sold newspapers. The Rasputinshchina roiled politics. In the duma, voices called for the government to do something.55

  In early February 1912, Kokovtsov “was amazed” to receive a note from Rasputin: “I am thinking of leaving forever and would like to see you so as to exchange some ideas; people talk much of me nowadays. Say when.”

  Rasputin sought the meeting at Alexandra’s behest to “examine [the] soul” of the new prime minister. Hoping against probability to “show Rasputin that he was digging a grave for the Tsar,” Kokovtsov sent for him.56

  With his deep-set, small gray eyes, the bearded starets first turned his mesmeric stare on Kokovtsov; then tried his luck with the ceiling; then the floor. All without saying a word. At length Kokovtsov asked, “You wanted to tell me something?”

  “Well, shall I go? Life has been hard for me here …”

  “Indeed, you would do well to go away,” Kokovtsov recalled saying. He spoke unguardedly: Rasputin’s presence harmed the monarchy and Russia. “I do not insist on going to the royal palace—they summon me,” Rasputin insisted. He would return to his village. “But mind, let them take care not to call me back.” The next day, reporting on his conversation with Kokovtsov, he poisoned the well with Alexandra. Within hours word reached Kokovtsov that he was in trouble.57

  To set things right he met with the tsar, who asked if he had threatened to deport Rasputin if he did not leave St. Petersburg voluntarily. Kokovtsov assured him he had said nothing of the kind. Relieved, Nicholas solicited his impressions of the “little peasant.”

  Kokovtsov “held nothing back,” telling Nicholas what he testified to a committee set up after the February revolution to investigate Rasputin’s influence on state policy. In the eleven years he served in the Central Prison Administration, he saw “many Rasputins among the Siberian vagrants … men who, while making the sign of the cross, could take you by the throat and strangle you with the same smile on their faces.” Nicholas stared out the window as Kokovtsov ripped the one person on earth who could stop his son’s bleeding and stay his wife’s despair.58

  Nicholas assured Alexandra that Kokovtsov intended no threat to Rasputin. If he left, it would be by his own wish. That failed to mollify her. She could not fathom why Kokovtsov permitted the press to attack her “Friend,” and could only imagine that, in his words, he was “a tool of the enemies of the state and, as such, deserving dismissal.” On Kokovtsov’s next visit to the summer palace at Yalta, the empress spoke to officials of lesser rank to his left and right in the greeting line but ignored the prime minister. Kokovtsov owed his appointment partly to her advocacy; she had come to loathe Stolypin for ordering Rasputin to return to Siberia. Bogrov’s bullet saved Stolypin from certain removal. Now Kokovtsov joined Stolypin in the Siberia of her affections.59

  By the fall of 1913, having come to see the dual appointment of Kokovtsov as prime minister and finance minister as a mistake, Nicholas kept him on primarily to negotiate the French railroad loan. Subordinating the higher to the lower office, Kokovtsov reduced all issues to rubles. To hear him talk, Russia could not afford to be a Great Power. Kokovtsov’s policies amounted to “the politics of financial aversion,” a friendly member of the duma remarked. What finally girded the “pathologically polite” Nicholas to fire Kokovtsov was their clash of perspectives over a controversial social issue.

  To commemorate the tercentenary of Romanov rule, in May 1913 Nicholas traced the route taken by the newly crowned tsar Mikhail Romanov from his home on the Volga to Moscow. Nicholas and his party traveled in the royal train, its bathroom equipped with a “special device to prevent His Imperial Majesty’s bathwater from spilling when the train was movi
ng.” But to visit out-of-the way places, they had to rough it in caravans of thirty open-topped Renaults. Through the dust kicked up by the tires Nicholas saw enough signs of drunkenness in the villages to be disturbed. He resolved to ban drink in Russia. He was poised to become tsar of the worldwide temperance movement, and Vladimir Kokovtsov told him that Russia could not afford his zeal.60

  Starting in 1894 the state held a monopoly on the vodka trade. By 1910, one third of its revenue (the equivalent of two trillion dollars in today’s U.S. budget) derived from the sale of vodka at state liquor stores. The “drunken budget” lights up the parasitism of the tsarist order. The monarchy, the nobility, the intelligentsia, and the bureaucracy lived off the peasant sober and drunk.

  Drink was the “Joy of the Rus,” the opium of the Russian peasant, and a surer tool of “pacification” than Stolypin’s gallows. In the villages, on the farms, the “Pomoch”—work for “hospitality,” not pay—structured a way of life. “The work begins with vodka, it continues with vodka, it ends with vodka,” a priest wrote of the harvest in his parish. Folk cures for “alcoholism,” a word coined by a Kiev psychiatrist in 1892, testify to its tenacity: “The drunkard seeking to break his addiction gulped down his vodka with eels, mice, the sweat of a white horse, the placenta of a black pig, vomit, snakes, worms, grease, maggots, urine, and the water used to wash corpses.” Foreign holders of Russia’s debt banked on the drunkard’s craving for vodka surviving the eels—and so did Kokovtsov. When calls arose in the duma to curb the state’s vodka addiction, he dug in. Russia needed the revenue for military modernization; drunkenness would wane with economic development. Yet when even Rasputin plumped for temperance (“It’s time to close the Tsar’s saloon,” he reportedly told Nicholas), change was at hand.61

  To mitigate the human damage, the government had closed the saloons, but this forced drinkers onto the streets. From the late 1890s, drunken young idlers had terrorized St. Petersburg. To describe this crime wave, the Russians borrowed a word from the English, who had borrowed it from the Irish—“hooliganism.” For the knife-wielding hooligan only an American word would do—“apache.” Hooligan and apache crimes against persons—assaults, robberies, rapes, murders—climbed apace. A state commission found that “alcohol was not only the irreplaceable companion of hooliganism but practically its primary cause.”62

  The crime and premature death statistics, the “children, priests, women, and army officers” ruined by drink, Novoe vremia charged, were the “fruit” of Kokovtsov’s policy of milking rubles from misery.

  It was “with profoundest grief” that Nicholas, on his royal progress, glimpsed the besotted sources of his revenue stream. “We cannot make our fiscal prosperity dependent on the destruction of the spiritual and economic power of many of my subjects,” he wrote in an imperial rescript to the new finance minister, Kokovtsov’s replacement, in February 1914.63*

  After the duma passed a law in July giving localities the option of going dry, Nicholas moved swiftly. Starting with the mobilization of the army in August, Russia banned the sale of liquor in all but first-class restaurants. The masses seethed over this exception and drank varnish, moonshine, and a Chinese-made concoction that killed hundreds—but the government received no revenue from these vodka substitutes. As it pained an American temperance activist ruefully to note, “The financial receipts of the monopoly collapsed like a pricked bladder.” Prohibition deprived the treasury of nine hundred million rubles to pay for the war, some 28 percent of the state’s income, leaving Russia “with unarmed soldiers and unfed citizens,” the latter because peasants, to supply the black market, diverted grain from bread to vodka. Thus Nicholas’s crusade against drink helped bring on the “bread riots” in St. Petersburg in February 1917 that began the revolution that drove Nicholas from power. As he confided to Stolypin, “Peter Arkadevitch … I succeed in nothing I undertake.”63

  “It is not a feeling of displeasure but a long-standing and deep realization of a state need that now forces me to tell you that we have to part,” Nicholas wrote Kokovtsov at the end of January. At a farewell meeting, the tsar remarked, by way of justifying Kokovtsov’s dismissal, “I wanted a man fresh for the work.” From that description few political-class Russians would have identified Ivan Goremykin, a seventy-five-year-old reactionary who had won Rasputin’s favor, “the quickest way up the greasy pole.” When briefly prime minister in 1906, Goremykin had nodded off in his ministerial seat during duma sessions. When he appeared before it for the first time in 1914, the deputies rioted in protest.64

  If Durnovo is to be believed, Nicholas asked him to head the government before resuscitating Goremykin. Durnovo declined, telling Nicholas that his authoritarian “system” would take too long to achieve results—the rollback of the constitutional monarchy created after 1905 and a return to rule by ukase and the knout. In the meantime, Durnovo predicted, Russia would be in a “complete rumpus” with “dissolution of the Duma, assassinations, executions, perhaps armed uprisings … Your majesty … would not endure these years and will dismiss me.” His refusal of the premiership belongs to the tormenting annals of what might have been. Durnovo’s domestic repression might have provoked the revolution postponed by his foreign policy, a tragedy for Russia. But if, by following the path marked out by his memorandum (no war, no revolution) or by creating a “complete rumpus” in Russia with his “system,” Durnovo had kept Russia from mobilizing, World War I would not have happened in August 1914 and perhaps not at all.65

  What of Kokovtsov? Could he have slowed the rush to war long enough for events foreclosed by the mobilization to stop it? To Berlin he was a force for peace, his firing seen by Germany’s ambassador in St. Petersburg as a triumph for the “anti-German party.” To Baron Taube, a former legal council at the foreign ministry, Kokovtsov was “a convinced partisan of international peace, capable of casting his veto in a critical moment in the council of ministers.” Without him, “there was no such restraining brake in the council.” Bethmann Hollweg used the same word, regretting the removal of a “brake” on war. The American historian Sidney Bradshaw Fay, writing in 1928, argued that Kokovtsov’s dismissal was “an incalculable misfortune for Russia and the world”… because without him no one in the Council of Ministers could “stand against M. Sazonov and the Russian Pan-Slavs and militarists” during the July crisis.

  The humiliating settlement of the von Sanders crisis had embittered Sazonov toward the diplomats of the Central Powers. “From the psychological point of view this … is far from unimportant for the just appreciation of the crisis of July 1914,” according to Taube, “Sazonov’s state of mind in 1913–1914 contributed greatly to that over-agitated handling of the Serbo-Austrian crisis which precipitated the final catastrophe … A little more cool-headedness would perhaps have sufficed once more to keep the peace.” At the July 24 meeting of the council of ministers convened to decide Russia’s response to Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, Kokovtsov not only would have supplied “cool-headedness,” but also in Sidney Fay’s words “might have been able to prevent the over-hasty steps which helped cause the war.”66

  The fatal “over-hasty” step was to order partial mobilization of the southern military districts opposite Austria. Through this move, Sazonov intended to send an intimidating signal to Austria, not to attack her. Kokovtsov was not there to remind him of their joint position on partial mobilization against Austria in 1912—that it meant war with Germany. “Had Sazonov known [or been reminded] that for Germany any mobilization was equivalent to war there is no doubt he would have shaped his course differently,” Luigi Albertini concluded in his exhaustive diplomatic history, The Origins of the War of 1914 (1953).* As it was, Sazonov unknowingly set Russia’s course toward war. For on discovering that a south-only mobilization against Austria would impede a northern mobilization against Germany, exposing Russian territory to a German attack, the Russians faced an “all-or-nothing choice”: back down and destroy their credibility, or commit “t
he decisive act leading to war,” the order for general mobilization that Nicholas issued on the evening of July 30.

  That night, Alexandra and Count Vladimir Fredericks, minister of the Imperial House, confronted Nicholas in his study, where he was conferring with Sazonov, to plea for peace. The count told a member of his circle that Alexandra burst out: “Give the orders about demobilization, do it, Nicky, do it!” Nicky wavered. Then Sazonov, addressing Fredericks, cut in: “You … who ought to be watching His Majesty’s interests, you are asking him to sign his death warrant; for Russia would never forgive him this humiliation.” Did fear of a deadly Russian version of the Staatsstreich nerve Nicholas to side with his foreign minister over his wife? He did not cancel the mobilization order. Forty-eight hours later Germany answered it with a declaration of war.67