Russia’s capabilities to wage war seemed to be exponentially improving. What of her intentions? Malice or disorganization, a desire to lead Germany by the nose, an inability to coordinate decision making—the motives behind St. Petersburg’s mixed signals seemed less and less important. Alfred von Kiderlin-Wächter was only the most coherent voice in the foreign office arguing for the particular necessity of speaking plainly and bluntly to Russia in times of crisis. Euphemisms and circumlocutions, not to say normal diplomatic good manners, lent themselves too readily to misinterpretation in the hothouse atmosphere of St. Petersburg. The question for Kiderlin, as for an increasing number of German diplomats and soldiers, was how far Russia’s entente partners would be willing to underwrite Russia’s behavior.28
German anxieties were further enhanced by Stolypin’s assassination in September, 1911. Stolypin, Russia’s premier since 1906, was no particular admirer of Germany. He had, however, accepted policies of peace and rapprochement as preconditions for the domestic reforms he considered necessary for the empire’s survival. As much to the point, Stolypin tended to equate nationalist enthusiasms anywhere in Europe with revolutionary idealism, regarding them as dangerous, disruptive factors. His successor, V. N. Kokovtzov, was also convinced that Russia’s vital interests demanded peace. He did not, however, have anything like Stolypin’s influence over the tsar, the war ministry, or the foreign office—and least of all over a Duma and a journalistic community that had responded to the Potsdam negotiations with unconcealed and massive hostility.29
It was in these dubious international and domestic contexts that Russia took a step decisive in further estranging her from Germany. Since 1908, direct involvement in the Balkans had seemed less desirable to St. Petersburg than developing a network of proxy relationships. Influence exercised through Sofia or Belgrade offered a plausible excuse for France, and even more for Great Britain, to deny to their domestic critics that they were underwriting Russia’s imperial ambitions. In the short run Russia was concerned less with fostering regional nationalism and nurturing Slavic unity than with establishing a diplomatic counterweight to what seemed heightened German and Austrian influence in the Near East.30 Far from intending to encircle the central powers, fulfill historic missions of liberating the Slavs, or open the way to Constantinople, the Russian foreign office hoped for a league of states strong enough to provide a regional check on any expansionist aspirations entertained by Austria-Hungary. Some proposals even included Turkey as part of the league.
Hindsight indicates that had this initiative succeeded, it would have been a seismic shock to Europe’s increasingly fragile power balance. Such a league could only function under Russian patronage, and would have represented a unilateral strengthening of Russia’s position that Paris and London could hardly have swallowed whole, to say nothing of reactions in Berlin or Vienna. More pragmatically, policy in the Balkan kingdoms was increasingly being made by men with no commitment to Russia’s visions. They dreamed instead of a regional offensive alliance strong enough to expel the Ottoman Empire from Europe and to secure its territory for themselves. Russia was viewed instrumentally: as an insurance policy against the consequences of defeat, and as a mediator with the great powers in case of victory.
Such aspirations were not likely to be modified by even subtle and forceful Russian diplomacy. Holstein had been uncomfortably accurate when he argued that a convoluted foreign policy in the style of Bismarck could only be administered by a Bismarck. Lesser talents must content themselves with simpler patterns. Sazonov was at best a mediocrity who hoped to thrust a hand into the Balkan wasps’ nest and emerge with a fistful of honey. Instead, he proved once again that industry and dullness are a dangerous combination.31
Russia’s approach to the Balkan question was also influenced by the pessimism of her generals. A constant in European diplomacy since the mid-nineteenth century had been the confidence of its soldiers that they could win, or at least draw, any war the statesmen initiated. Such warnings as they uttered were essentially self-serving admonitions that the situation would be even better were the military budgets increased as requested or current alliance relationships suitably adjusted. The Russo-Japanese War, however, had forced the Russian defense establishment into an agonizing reappraisal. As late as 1911, the Russian general staff bluntly informed the French that it would be two years at least before Russia would have any chance at all in a war with Germany.32
This was an attitude hardly calculated to inspire confidence in an ally. French generals, increasingly regarding a prompt and massive attack from the east as the Third Republic’s only salvation against superior German numbers, responded by encouraging an increased orientation of tsarist strategy directly against Germany and Austria, with the implied threat of financial and diplomatic sanctions in case of refusal. At the same time, from a Russian perspective, the war ministry and the general staff of a great power could not indefinitely proclaim the impotence of their armed forces to their closest ally. The Franco-Russian alliance incorporated significant elements of interdependence, but was not quite a relationship of equals. The growing Russian acceptance of a necessity for putting early pressure on Germany was a useful way of reassuring the French, while at the same time meeting Russian perceptions of the current strategic situation.33
Even minimal compliance with French wishes forced Russia’s Balkan and Caucasian frontiers to make do with leftovers. The Caucasus in particular tended to be a dumping ground for guards officers who had made Petersburg or Warsaw too hot to hold them. As a German observer put it, the Russians and the natives copied each others’ bad habits; wine, women, and debts were the order of the day. On the other hand, in the aftermath of the 1908 Young Turk Rebellion Turkey had begun a significant overhaul of her long-moribund military establishment. German training missions and German arms salesmen had long been fixtures in Constantinople. In 1910 the Germans went a step farther by selling the Turks two old battleships. The next year the Turkish government contracted for two more warships, state-of-the-art superdreadnoughts, to be built in Britain. French and American promoters were negotiating the construction of railways in Asia Minor that if completed would significantly expedite the movement of troops along the Black Sea littoral, and to the Russian frontier. Should even some of these improvements succeed Russia’s ability to exercise direct presssure on her southern neighbor would be significantly limited—so limited that good relations with the Slavic states of the Balkans seemed not desirable, but necessary from a military viewpoint.34
The destabilizing effects of these local power shifts on Europe as a whole became even plainer when, in the spring of 1911, France moved to consolidate its position in Morocco. The German government responded by forcing the issue. Domestic pressure played a role—pressure from Pan-Germans, industrialists, and assorted imperialists convinced either that Morocco represented too great an economic prize to abandon, or that it was a potential key to a future African empire. At the same time the foreign office desired to make a show of German power to a France that seemed all too confident of the strength of its alliances. Offensive diplomacy thus concealed a defensive stand. German policy did not take seriously the prospects of a conflict over North Africa. Neither the naval nor the military commands were consulted on anything more than a formal basis. At the height of the crisis the annual maneuvers, which made mobilization impossible for three weeks, were conducted as usual, and the reservists were discharged at their close.35
Some results of this policy of unsupported bluster were predictable. Britain and France drew even more closely together, congratulating each other on their solidarity in face of a threat that had proved ephemeral. Russia became correspondingly reluctant to risk becoming the odd state out in an entente. Far more serious, however, was an unexpected side effect. On December 16, 1900, France and Italy had agreed that should France extend her influence in Morocco, Italy could occupy Libya. At the time, it seemed to be one of those dead-letter, hypothetical-situation documents
that clog the files of nineteenth-century foreign offices. But over the years Italy had sought and secured affirmation from Germany and Austria, her alliance partners. She had obtained Russian assent as well. Her way thus cleared, Italy went to war with the Ottoman Empire in September, 1911. The great powers, their hands tied by their own actions, stood by.36
This collective inaction during an overt attack on Turkey was carefully noted in the Balkan capitals. Since the Bosnian Crisis, St. Petersburg had been under pressure to affirm its Slavic identity with more than words. Sazonov’s hopes of a half-million Slav bayonets forever barring the Teuton from southeast Europe combined with his personal indecisiveness to encourage an increasing number of contradictory, mutually exclusive assurances to his Balkan negotiating partners. Russia’s best and most forceful ambassador in the region, Nicholas Hartwig in Belgrade, was a committed Panslav and Austrophobe whose success in improving Serbo-Bulgarian relations made it correspondingly difficult for Sazonov to strike a balance between the Balkan states on one hand and the Dual Alliance on the other—not that Hartwig particularly cared. Ministers come and go, he was alleged to have said. Serbia should rely instead on a Russia that loved her, would always love her, and would not leave her in the lurch.37
By 1912 the Balkan tail was beginning to wag the Russian and European dogs. The network of alliances constituting the Balkan League, concluded between March and October, were negotiated independently of Russian ambassadors and the Russian foreign office. To Sazonov’s anxious inquiry whether things were still as they had been in 1910 at Potsdam, Bethmann replied that Germany was as little interested as ever in encouraging a forward policy in the Balkans from any quarter. But when the Balkan League went to war with Turkey on October 17, Russia faced a choice that was no choice at all.38
As states in whose welfare she had expressed constant interest won victory after victory, Russia could not very well deny her approval. Yet from the war’s first days Serbia’s determination to secure an Adriatic outlet clashed with Austria’s fear that a Serbian port might soon become a Russian one, and with Austria’s determination to maintain her Balkan position in the face of the League’s unexpected ascendancy. During a visit to Berlin a few days before the war’s outbreak, Sazonov had suggested that if Austria were only patient she might eventually act as the powers’ executor in limiting Serbian gains in the peninsula.39 But in October, 1912, the Russian general staff ordered a practice call-up of reserves in Russian Poland. On November 10 the war ministry authorized the temporary retention with the colors of 400,000 men whose terms of active service were expiring. Since the entire Austro-Hungarian army had no more than 350,000 men under arms on a normal peace footing, the gesture could hardly be ignored in Vienna. Reinforcements were dispatched to the major eastern garrisons: Cracow, Lemberg, Przemsyl. The formations stationed in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia were also put on a full war footing.40
Russia’s decisions contrasted sharply with Germany’s behavior during the Agadir crisis the previous year. Yet the entire process initially had a certain air of unreality as far as Germany was concerned. Reservist call-ups were common practice for all of Europe’s conscript armies. This one was accompanied by reports of discontent and indiscipline amounting to mutiny in some cases—reservists allegedly assaulting officers and declaring that in case of a war they would know whom to shoot first.41 When the Austrian chief of staff made a quick trip to Berlin to consult his colleague, it was without the knowledge of the German government, which instructed its ambassador in Vienna to make it clear that post facto reports of such conferences were highly inappropriate.42 In mid-November Pourtalès could still quote the Austrian military attaché in St. Petersburg as believing that Russia was not planning a mobilization. A “high general staff officer” expressed his preference for dealing with Austria in two years, but this was familiar rhetoric. The Austrians were even wondering whether they were not ahead of Russia in preparations for an eventual war. Then on November 22, Tsar Nicholas approved the ordering of mobilization in the military districts of Kiev, Odessa, and Warsaw.43
This decision, urged by the generals, was checked only by the impassioned pleas of Sazonov and Kokovtsov. Kokovtsov’s account, the most detailed and the most familiar, is an exaggerated contrast of bloodthirsty soldiers to peace-loving statesmen. Ernest R. May interprets the incident as manifesting the structural weakness of Russia’s decision-making process. May argues that bureaucratic infighting encouraged concealing information—in this case the information that no one at the meeting, civilian or military, actually wished or intended to start a war in support of Serbia’s regional pretensions.44 But the conference did not take place in a vacuum.
France had, on the whole, remained conciliatory in its direct relations with Germany after 1906. The republic’s long-time ambassador to Berlin, Jules Cambon, consistently and successfully warned his government against overreacting to the kaiser’s bluster. This, however, did not portend rapprochement. A reviving French nationalism was becoming an increasingly powerful force for anti-German sentiments and policies. Relations between the business and financial communities strained as they came into direct competition in the Near East. The French foreign office included a new generation of fire-eaters: young Germanophobes permanently convinced of Germany’s ultimately evil intentions. Moreover, if the ententes of 1904 and 1907 had considerably improved France’s diplomatic position, they were by no means ironclad guarantees. French diplomats recognized the instrumental character of their British connection. They retained enough respect for the German foreign office not to discount the possibility of Anglo-German rapprochement. The Franco-Russian relationship also seemed far more fragile in Paris than it appeared to Berlin, especially, in the minds of many professional diplomats, because it had to be defended against Radical politicians who dominated the cabinets after 1906, and tended to regard Tsarist Russia as morally and politically disgusting, an unreliable creditor and an ally from stark necessity. A major goal of French foreign policy in the three years before the outbreak of world war was to exercise a greater degree of control over her increasingly wayward eastern ally. This in turn meant maintaining, even enhancing, ties of friendship and good will45
This attitude was strengthened and supported by the evolution of the French army’s strategic and tactical doctrines after Joseph Joffre’s appointment as chief of staff in 1911. Joffre’s commitment to the offensive as the only way to break an enemy’s power and will was significant in view of the confidence he enjoyed in cabinet and parliament alike as a symbol of Republican virtue in uniform. Revised under his supervision, French strategy increasingly focussed on an all-out attack against Germany, an attack geographically limited to Lorraine only because Joffre’s repeated proposals to include south Belgium were rejected as fatal to France’s British connection.
Britain’s insistance that a pre-emptive French move into Belgium would result in a British declaration of neutrality only highlighted France’s concern for the military strength of the Dual Alliance. French prospects for success might not depend entirely upon the diversion of German troops to other theaters. They would, however, be significantly enhanced. This fact helps explain the optimism expressed by the French general staff in the summer of 1912 when considering the prospect of general war over the Balkans. With a good part of Austria’s army presumably pinned down by the forces of the League, with the bulk of Germany’s troops destined for the western theater, French experts reasoned that Russia should have excellent chances for victory in both Galicia and East Prussia—victories that would force Germany to reduce her strength on the French front and facilitate a decisive French breakthrough.46
France’s premier and foreign minister, Raymond Poincaré, was hardly interested in giving Russia a free hand in the Balkans or anywhere else. But his fear of German intentions temporarily outweighed his fear of Russian behavior. Far from concealing the soldiers’ potentially explosive vision, Poincarè not only circulated it to his ambassadors, but informed the Russian
envoy in Paris. That man was Izvolsky, whose fall from office had been cushioned by comfortable exile to the Quai d’Orsay. Still smarting over his humiliation in 1908, he was hardly likely to refrain from passing the information to his successor.47
Lest the implication be mistaken in Berlin and Vienna, Russia’s Grand Duke Nicholas was France’s guest at her grand maneuvers in September. The duke’s entourage, particularly his wife, a Montenegran princess, indulged in a spate of anti-German outbursts as extreme as anything heard at a French official function since the days of Boulanger. Senior Russian officers boasted to anyone within hearing that the military situation was highly favorable; all they needed to do was push the button—which they did in October and November. As late as December 26, War Minister V. A. Sukhomlinov described to the French military attaché’s adjutant his intention to rub Germany’s nose in Russia’s readiness for war—ironically, during a forthcoming official visit to celebrate the Russo-Prussian victory over Napoleon a century earlier.48
The war minister may have been seeking to impress his allies. He many have been the temporary victim of his own enthusiasm. But even if Sukhomlinov saw Russia’s partial mobilization as no more than a legitimate effort to take the current Balkan pot by raising the stakes, this kind of brinkmanship was fraught with risks against opponents who had put too much into the game not to call the bet.
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History) Page 8