The War that Ended Peace
Page 23
Modernity was challenging the old certainties in both the urban and rural areas. The religious still venerated icons and believed in miracles and ghosts; the new industrialists were busy buying up the work of Matisse, Picasso or Braque to build some of the world’s great collections of modern art. Russian traditional folk art coexisted with experimental writers and artists: Stanislavsky and Diaghilev were revolutionising theatre and dance. Daring writers were challenging accepted morality while at the same time there was a spiritual revival and a search for deeper meaning in life. Reactionaries wanted to go back to the time before Peter the Great opened up Russia to European influences; extreme revolutionaries, many of them in exile such as Lenin or Trotsky, wanted to smash Russian society.
Economic and social changes that had taken a century or more in western Europe were compressed into a generation in Russia. And Russia did not have strongly developed and deeply rooted institutions that might have helped to absorb and manage the changes. The most stable country in Europe, Britain, had had centuries to build its parliament, local councils, laws, and law courts (and had weathered crises including a civil war along the way). More, British society had grown incrementally and slowly, taking generations to develop attitudes and institutions, from universities to chambers of commerce, clubs and associations, a free press, the whole complex web of civil society which sustains a workable political system. Closer to home, Russia’s neighbour Germany may have been a new country but it possessed old institutions in its cities and states and had a confident and large middle class capable of sustaining a strong society. Austria-Hungary was more fragile and was also struggling with burgeoning nationalisms but it too had a society whose institutions were more fully realised than Russia’s.
There are two contemporary parallels for what Russia faced in the decade or two before 1914. One is the Gulf States which have gone in a single lifetime from a modest and manageable way of life where change came slowly, to an international world where their sudden wealth made them players, from one-storey mud-brick buildings to the glitter of Las Vegas and skyscrapers going higher and faster. But the Gulf States have the great advantage of being small both geographically and in terms of population, and are therefore, for better or worse, capable of being manipulated by strong forces or individuals, whether from outside or within. Their rulers were, with some external support, skilful enough to manage the rapid changes, or, if they were not, briskly replaced. For the tsar the challenge was infinitely greater: to somehow keep control of a Russia, so huge and so diverse, where everything, whether population or the distance from its European borders to the Pacific, was so vast.
The second contemporary parallel to the Russia before the Great War is therefore China. It too had faced the challenges of change with a regime that was sadly unprepared and it too lacked the robust institutions that might have eased the transition from one form of society to another. It took China nearly half a century and appalling human costs, from the collapse of the old dynastic system to the emergence of Communist rule, to get a stable government – and it could be argued that China is still struggling to build the lasting institutions it needs if it is not to regress to an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. It is not surprising that Russian society, caught as it was in a transition from the old to the new, creaked and started to buckle under the strains. Things might have worked out if there had been time and if Russia had managed to avoid costly wars. Instead it fought two, the second even more disastrous than the first, within a decade. Many of Russia’s leaders, including by 1914 the tsar himself, knew well the dangers of war but for some of them there was also the seductive temptation of rallying society around a noble cause and healing its divisions. In 1904 the Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav Plehve, is reported to have said that Russia needed ‘a small victorious war’ which would take the minds of the Russian masses off ‘political questions’.7
The Russo-Japanese War showed the folly of that idea. In its early months Plehve himself was blown apart by a bomb; towards its end the newly formed Bolsheviks tried to seize Moscow. The war served to deepen and bring into sharp focus the existing unhappiness of many Russians with their own society and its rulers. As the many deficiencies, from command to supplies, of the Russian war effort became apparent, criticism grew, both of the government and, since the regime was a highly personalised one, of the tsar himself. In St Petersburg a cartoon showed the tsar with his breeches down being beaten while he says, ‘Leave me alone. I am the autocrat!’8 Like the French Revolution, with which it had many similarities, the Russian Revolution of 1905 broke old taboos, including the reverence surrounding the country’s ruler. It seemed to officials in St Petersburg a bad omen that the empress had hung a portrait of Marie Antoinette, a gift from the French government, in her rooms.9
On 22 January 1905, a giant procession of workers and their families, dressed in their best clothes and singing hymns, wended its way towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to the tsar demanding sweeping political and economic reforms. Many of them still regarded the tsar as their ‘Little Father’ and believed that he only needed to know what was wrong in order to make changes. The authorities, already jumpy, called out the army which cracked down brutally, firing point blank into the crowd. By the end of the day some hundreds were dead or wounded. Bloody Sunday helped to set off what was a dress rehearsal for the revolution of 1917 and which very nearly became the real thing. Throughout 1905 – ‘the year of nightmares’, the dowager empress called it – and into the summer of 1906 – Russia was hit by strikes and protests. Some of the many nationalities within the Russian Empire saw a chance for freedom and there were mass popular demonstrations against Russian rule from the Baltic provinces and Poland down to the Caucasus. Peasants refused to pay rent to their landlords and in some parts of the countryside seized the land and animals and plundered the big houses. Some 15 per cent of Russia’s manor houses were burned in this period.10 Ominously, in the summer of 1905 sailors in the Black Sea Fleet on board the battleship Potemkin mutinied.
By the autumn the tsar was isolated in his country estate at Tsarskoye Selo outside St Petersburg as the railways and telegraphs stopped working. Shops ran out of supplies, electricity went off, and people were afraid to go out. For six weeks in the city itself a Soviet of Workers Deputies was an alternative authority to the government. A young radical, Leon Trotsky, was one of its leading members as he was to be again with another Soviet in the 1917 revolution. In Moscow the new revolutionary Bolshevik Party was planning its armed uprising. Under huge pressure from his own supporters, the tsar reluctantly issued a manifesto in October promising a responsible legislature, the Duma, as well as civil rights.
As so often happens in revolutionary moments, the concessions only encouraged the opponents of the regime. It appeared to be close to collapsing with its officials confused and ineffective in the face of such widespread disorder. That winter a battalion from Nicholas’s own regiment, the Preobrazhensky Guards, which had been founded by Peter the Great, mutinied. A member of the tsar’s court wrote in his diary: ‘This is it.’11 Fortunately for the regime, its most determined enemies were disunited and not yet ready to take power while moderate reformers were prepared to support it in the light of the tsar’s promises. Using the army and police freely, the government managed to restore order. By the summer of 1906 the worst was over – for the time being. The regime still faced the dilemma, though, of how far it could let reforms go without fatally undermining its authority. It was a dilemma faced by the French government in 1789 or the Shah’s government in Iran in 1979. Refusing demands for reform and relying on repression creates enemies; giving way encourages them and brings more demands.
The Russo-Japanese War and its aftermath left Russia seriously weakened at home and dangerously vulnerable abroad. Its navy was shattered and what was left of its army largely deployed against the Russian people themselves. Colonel Yury Danilov, one of Russia’s most efficient officers, said: ‘As an infantry r
egiment commander I was able to be in touch with real military life and the army’s needs during 1906–1908. And I cannot think of any better description for the period up to and including 1906–1910 and maybe even for a longer time than as one of total military helplessness.’12 Russia needed to rebuild and overhaul its armed forces but it faced two difficult if not insurmountable challenges: first, a strongly entrenched resistance to change in both the military and the civilian establishments and, second, the costs of such a refurbishment. Russia had the ambitions of a first-rate power with the economy of a developing but still backward country. To make matters worse, in the first decade of the twentieth century, military expenditures were climbing throughout Europe as military technology became more expensive and armies and navies grew bigger. The Soviet Union faced a similar challenge after 1945; it managed to keep up with the United States in the military area but at the cost of much sacrifice for Soviet society and in the end the effort helped to bring down the regime.
In Russia in the years after 1905 much hinged on what the man at the top decided to do. Nicholas II was an absolute monarch who could appoint and dismiss ministers at will, determine policy, and, in wartime, command the armed forces. Before 1905, unlike his cousin Wilhelm in Germany, he did not have to worry about a constitution, an elected parliament, or the rights of his subjects. Even after the concessions of that year, he had greater power than either the Kaiser or the Austrian emperor, both of whom had to deal with greater control over their governments and over spending from their legislatures and who, in addition, had states inside their empires with strongly entrenched rights of their own. Nicholas’s character and views are therefore of crucial importance in understanding Russia’s road towards the Great War.
Nicholas was only twenty-six in 1894 when he became tsar of Russia. Queen Victoria had yet to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee and her grandson, the future George V, was a naval officer. In Germany Wilhelm had been on his throne for just six years. No one including Nicholas himself had expected him to become ruler so early on. His father, Alexander III, was massive and strong; it is said that he had once saved his family by holding up the roof of their carriage in a train crash. He fell ill, though, in his late forties with kidney disease and perhaps hastened his end by continuing to drink hard.13 Nicholas, who had loved and admired his formidable father, was grief-stricken when he died. He was also in despair, said his sister, the Grand Duchess Olga: ‘He kept saying that he did not know what would become of us all, that he was wholly unfit to reign.’14
He was probably right. Russia at the turn of the century, with all its problems, might have been too much for any ruler, but Nicholas was better fitted to be a country squire or the mayor of a small town. Perhaps because his father had been such an overwhelming personality, he lacked confidence. He compensated, being rigid and stubborn where a wiser and more self-assured person would have been prepared to make compromises or be flexible. He disliked opposition or confrontation. ‘He grasps what he hears,’ said a former tutor, ‘but grasps only the meaning of the isolated fact, without relation to the rest, without connection to the totality of other factors, events, currents, phenomena … For him there exists no broad, general view worked out through the exchange of ideas, arguments, debate.’15 He was also notoriously indecisive. An observer reported that the common view was: ‘He has no character, that he agrees with each of his ministers in spite of the fact that they report the opposite of one another.’16 Under Nicholas, Russian policy at home and abroad was to be fitful, erratic and confused. He had an excellent memory and his courtiers claimed that he was intelligent but he sometimes showed a credulity which verged on the simple-minded. A foreign contractor, for example, once persuaded him that it was possible to build a bridge across the Bering Strait to join Siberia to North America. (The contractor was to get vast concessions of land along the proposed railway line leading to the bridge.)17
His upbringing had not equipped him with an understanding of Russia, much less of the wider world. Nicholas’s childhood was, unlike that of Wilhelm, a happy one. The tsar and tsarina adored their children but perhaps tried too hard to protect them. Nicholas and his brothers and sisters were educated at home and rarely mixed with other children. As a result Nicholas did not have what other monarchs such as Wilhelm, Edward VII and George V had, and that was some experience of education with other young men of his age and much less the opportunity to meet people of different classes. Nor did he know his country. The Russia of Nicholas and his siblings was a deeply unreal bubble of privilege, of palaces, special trains, and yachts. Occasionally another Russia intruded, horrifyingly so when their grandfather, Alexander II, was assassinated by a bomb and Nicholas was taken to his deathbed. For Nicholas and his family the real Russia was peopled by happy loyal peasants like those who worked on the imperial estates. There was little in their education or their lives to challenge that simplistic view or make them aware of the tremendous changes that Russian society was undergoing.18
Nicholas followed a course of studies like that of a young Russian nobleman. He acquired languages – he spoke French, German, English and Russian fluently – studied history, which he liked, and learned some mathematics, chemistry and geography. When he was seventeen he was given special courses in such subjects as law and economics, although he does not appear to have shown much enthusiasm for them. What he also learned were exquisite manners and strong self-control from an English tutor. ‘I had rarely’, said Count Sergei Witte, his Prime Minister, ‘come across a better-mannered young man than Nicholas II. His good-breeding conceals all short comings.’19 When he was nineteen, Nicholas was given a commission in the Preobrazhensky Guards. He loved being with the rich young aristocrats who were his fellow officers, loved the easy-going life in the mess with its many amusements and loved the uncomplicated ordered days in camp. He told his mother that he felt completely at home, ‘one of the genuine consolations of my life now!’20 Like Wilhelm, he kept a strong affection for the military for the rest of his life. (And he also loved to fuss about the details of uniforms.) As his cousin the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich said of Nicholas: ‘He developed an immense liking for military service. It appealed to his passive nature. One executed orders and did not have to worry over the vast problems handled by superiors.’21 After his military service, Nicholas was sent off on a world tour, which he liked rather less. He conceived a particular dislike for Japan and the Japanese when a policeman, who had gone mad, tried to kill him.
Even in his mid twenties Nicholas remained curiously callow. Witte, who was concerned about the education of the future tsar, suggested to Alexander III that he give Nicholas some experience by making him chair of the Commission for the Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. ‘Have you ever tried to discuss anything of real consequence with him?’ Alexander asked. Witte said he had not. ‘Well he’s an absolute child,’ said the tsar. ‘His opinions are utterly childish. How could he preside over such a committee?’22 Early in his reign Nicholas complained to his Minister of Foreign Affairs: ‘I know nothing. The late emperor did not foresee his death and did not let me in on any government business.’23
A slight, handsome man with blue eyes, Nicholas took more after his mother, a Danish princess whose sister had married Edward VII of Britain. He and George V, his first cousin, looked strikingly similar, especially when they both grew small, neat, pointed beards. His contemporaries found Nicholas charming but somehow elusive. Each time he met the tsar, said one of his diplomats, ‘I had carried away the impression of great kindness and extreme personal politesse, of a ready and subtle wit slightly tinged with sarcasm, and of a very quick though somewhat superficial mind’.24 Outside his immediate family and trusted courtiers, who were usually military men, he was guarded. As tsar, he would manifest a pattern of at first placing confidence in a particular minister and then coming to resent that dependence, which in turn would lead to the man being dismissed. Shortly before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the War Minister Gen
eral Kuropatkin tried to resign in protest against the tsar’s undermining of his authority. The tsar, he felt, might trust him more when he was out of office. Nicholas agreed: ‘It is strange, you know, but perhaps that is psychologically accurate.’25
Nicholas inherited one of Russia’s most outstanding statesmen of the prewar period, Sergei Witte, from his father. Witte was, as a British diplomat said, ‘a strong and energetic man, absolutely fearless, and of extraordinary initiative power’.26 As Minister of Finance between 1892 and 1903, Witte built his ministry into the core of Russia’s government with responsibility for the country’s financial management and its economy. He tried to make Russia’s agriculture and local government more efficient, partly so Russia could export grain in order to raise the necessary funds for development. He pushed Russia’s rapid industrialisation and the exploitation of its newly acquired territories in the Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railway was very much Witte’s project. As he accumulated power, however, he also attracted enemies and those came to include Nicholas. In 1903 Witte had a long and apparently amicable audience with the tsar: ‘He shook my hand. He embraced me. He wished me all the luck in the world. I returned home beside myself with happiness and found a written order for my dismissal lying on my desk.’27