Russia had always been big by comparison with other European countries but in the nineteenth century it ballooned out to become the biggest country in the world as Russian explorers and soldiers, followed by Russian diplomats and officials, pushed its borders southwards and eastwards, down towards the Black Sea and the Caspian, to Central Asia and across the Ural mountains into Siberia and on to the Pacific for 5,000 miles. The whole of the United States as well as the other European countries could fit comfortably into Asiatic Russia and there would still be lots of territory to spare. The American traveller and writer George Kennan (a distant relation of his namesake the great American Soviet expert) tried to explain the immensity of Russia’s new territories: ‘If a geographer were preparing a general atlas of the world, and should use, in drawing Siberia, the same scale that is used in Stieler’s “Hand Atlas” for England, he would have to make the Siberian page of his book nearly twenty feet in width to accommodate his map.’52
Empire brought prestige and the possibility, yet unrealised, of resources and wealth. It also brought more problems for Russia: its population was spread even more thinly and now included greater numbers of non-Russians, Muslims from Central Asia, Koreans, Mongols and Chinese in the East. New borders brought new and potentially unfriendly neighbours, in the Far East, China and Japan; in Central Asia, the British Empire; in the Caucasus, Persia (modern day Iran), which the British were also eyeing; and around the Black Sea, the Ottoman Empire, declining but propped up by other European powers. Moreover, in an age in which sea power was increasingly seen as the key to national power and wealth, Russia still possessed only a handful of ports which could be used all year round. Shipping from ports on the Black Sea and the Baltic had to go out through narrow straits which could be closed in time of war and the new Pacific port of Vladivostok lay thousands of miles away from the heart of Russia at the end of a fragile railway. As Russia became a major exporter, especially in food, the passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles – known collectively at the time as ‘the Straits’ – became particularly vital; 37 per cent of all its exports and 75 per cent of its crucial grain exports were flowing past Constantinople by 1914.53 If that pipeline were closed, say by Germany, Sergei Sazonov, who was by then Foreign Minister, felt that it would be a ‘death sentence for Russia’.54 From Russia’s point of view it made eminent sense to search for secure warm-water ports but, as Kuropatkin had warned Nicholas in 1900, it ran a great risk: ‘However just our attempts to possess the exit to the Black Sea, to acquire an outlet to the Indian Ocean, and to obtain an outlet to the Pacific, these missions touch so deeply on the interests of almost the entire world that in pursuit of them we must be prepared for a struggle with a coalition of Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, China, and Japan.’55 Of all Russia’s potential enemies, Britain, with its worldwide empire, seemed to be the most immediately threatening.
In Britain itself, public opinion was strongly anti-Russian. In popular literature, Russia was exotic and terrifying: the land of snow and golden domes, of wolves chasing sleighs through the dark forests, of Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great. Before he made Germany the enemy in his novels the prolific William Le Queux used Russia. In his 1894 The Great War in England in 1897, Britain was invaded by a combined French and Russian force but the Russians were by far the more brutal. British homes were burned, innocent civilians shot and babies bayoneted. ‘The soldiers of the Tsar, savage and inhuman, showed no mercy to the weak and unprotected. They jeered and laughed at piteous appeal, and with fiendish brutality enjoyed the destruction which everywhere they wrought.’56 Radical, liberals and socialists all had many reasons to hate the regime with its secret police, censorship, lack of basic human rights, its persecution of its opponents, its crushing of ethnic minorities and its appalling record of anti-Semitism.57 Imperialists on the other hand hated Russia because it was a rival to the British Empire. Britain could never come to an agreement with Russia in Asia, said Curzon, who had been Salisbury’s Undersecretary at the Foreign Office before he became Viceroy in India. Russia was bound to keep expanding as long as it could get away with it. In any case, the ‘ingrained duplicity’ of Russian diplomats made negotiations futile.58 It was one of the rare occasions on which he agreed with the chief of the Indian general staff, Lord Kitchener, who was demanding more resources from London to deal with ‘the menacing advance of Russia towards our frontiers’. What particularly worried the British were the new Russian railways, either built or planned, which stretched down to the borders of Afghanistan and Persia and which now made it possible for the Russians to bring force to bear. Although the term was not to be coined for another eighty years, the British were also becoming acutely aware of what Paul Kennedy called ‘imperial overstretch’. As the War Office said in 1907, the expanded Russian railway system would make the military burden of defending India and the empire so great that ‘short of recasting our whole military system, it will become a question of practical politics whether or not it is worth our while to retain India’.59
There were always those on both sides who would have preferred to lower the tensions, and the expense, by getting a settlement of the outstanding colonial issues. By the 1890s the British were prepared to recognise that they could no longer prevent Russia from using the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean for its warships and the Russians, in particular the military, were ready to adopt a less aggressive policy in Central Asia and Persia.60 In 1898 Salisbury had proposed talks to Russia to sort out the differences of their two countries in China, but these unfortunately had gone nowhere and indeed relations worsened again as Russia took advantage of the Boxer Rebellion to move its troops into Manchuria. In 1903, the appointment of a new Russian ambassador to London offered the opportunity for fresh talks. Count Alexander Benckendorff was very well connected (he had been a page to Tsar Alexander III), rich and indiscreet. He was Anglophile, liberal in his sympathies and deeply pessimistic about the future of the tsarist regime. ‘In Russia’, he told the French ambassador when they were both posted to Copenhagen, ‘on the surface, people are all sentiment; they have a tenderness for the Tsar etc. It is exactly as in France on the eve of the Revolution.’61 In London, he and his wife became part of society and Benckendorff set himself to improve relations between his country and Britain. Taking advantage of the considerable leeway that diplomats had in those prewar days, he encouraged both sides to think that the other was more amenable to discussions than was actually the case. In 1903 Lansdowne, the British Foreign Secretary, and Benckendorff held talks on outstanding issues such as Tibet and Afghanistan but again these did not reach any conclusion. With the worsening relations between Russia and Britain’s ally Japan, any talk of rapprochement was put on hold, not to be resumed until after the Russo-Japanese War.
The technological and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century added to Russia’s burdens as a great power. As one advance followed another, the arms race speeded up, and became more expensive. Railways and mass production made it possible to create, move and supply bigger armies. Once the other continental powers had gone down that road, Russia’s rulers felt that it had to follow suit even though its resources were not a match for its neighbours Austria-Hungary and the new Germany. The alternative, difficult if not impossible to contemplate, was to give up the attempt to be part of the club of great powers. Becoming a second-class power, worse ‘an Asiatic state’, said Alexander Izvolsky, Foreign Minister between 1906 and 1910, ‘would be a major catastrophe for Russia’.62
It was a dilemma similar to the one faced by the Soviet Union during the Cold War: Russia’s ambitions were fully developed but its economy and its taxation system were not. In the 1890s Russia was spending less than half the amount per soldier that France and Germany were.63 Every rouble, moreover, spent on the military meant less for development. In 1900, according to one estimate, the Russian government was spending ten times more on it
s army than on education and the navy received more than the key ministries of Agriculture and Justice.64 The Russo-Japanese War made the situation much worse. It nearly bankrupted Russia and left it with huge budget deficits. Although the armed forces badly needed re-equipping and retraining, the funds were simply not there. In 1906 the key military districts in the west around Warsaw, Kiev and St Petersburg did not receive sufficient resources even to carry out shooting practice.65
The war also reignited a debate over whether Russia’s true interests lay in Asia or Europe. Kuropatkin and the Russian general staff had long been concerned about the drain of resources away from the European frontiers to the east. While Witte was building the Trans-Siberian Railway, construction of railways in the west of Russia virtually stopped, and this at a time Germany and Austria-Hungary as well as smaller powers such as Rumania were continuing to build. In 1900 the Russian general staff estimated that Germany could send 552 trains a day to their common frontier while Russia could send only 98. For financial reasons, the increase of Russian armed forces in the west was also frozen. ‘To the delight of Germany’, Kuropatkin wrote in 1900, ‘in directing our attention to the Far East we are giving her and Austria a decisive preponderance in forces and materiel over us.’66 During the Russo-Japanese War one of the nightmares for the Russian military was the fear that Germany and Austria-Hungary would use the opportunity to move against Russia, perhaps to pinch off Russian Poland, which jutted out dangerously westwards. Fortunately for Russia, Germany decided on a policy of friendly neutrality in the war in an attempt to wean it away from France and, as one of Russia’s spies in Vienna confirmed, Austria-Hungary was more preoccupied with a possible attack on its ally Italy.67
As Russia faced the difficult years of recovery and rebuilding after the Russo-Japanese War ended, the fear remained, as did the need to make choices both in the allocation of resources and foreign policy. If Russia’s interests lay in the east then it needed stability in the west. What that implied was an alliance or at least a détente with Germany and Austria-Hungary. There were ideological and historical arguments in favour of such a move: the three conservative monarchies had an interest in the status quo and in resisting radical change. There were strong historical arguments too in favour of an alliance between Russia and Germany. The links between Germans and Russians went back centuries; Peter the Great had imported Germans to work for him, in his new industries, for example, and over the years German farmers had helped to settle the new lands opening up as Russia expanded. Russia’s upper classes had intermarried with their German counterparts and many old families bore German names such as Benckendorff, Lamsdorff, or Witte. Some, especially the Germans from Russia’s Baltic possessions, still spoke German rather than Russian. The tsars – including Nicholas II himself, of course – commonly looked to the German princely states for wives. For Russia to move towards Germany, though, would mean abandoning the French alliance and, almost certainly, access to French financial markets. It was also certain to be opposed by the liberals who saw the alliance with France, and perhaps in the longer run with Britain, as encouraging progressive forces for change within Russia. And not all conservatives were pro-German; landowners were hurt by Germany’s protective tariffs on agricultural products and foodstuffs. Germany’s seizure of Kiachow Bay in northern China in 1897 challenged Russian ambitions for dominating China and Korea and in subsequent years increasing German investment and influence in the Ottoman Empire on Russia’s doorstep caused further concern in official circles.68
If, on the other hand, Russia decided that its main threats and opportunities lay in Europe, then it needed to come to terms with its enemies in the east, both actual and potential. Peace with Japan needed to be accompanied by settlement of its outstanding issues with China and, much more importantly, with that other imperial power in the East, Great Britain. Few choices in foreign policy are irrevocable and in the decade before 1914 Russia’s leaders tried to keep their options open, maintaining the alliance with France, but making overtures to all three of Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary to try to remove sources of tension.
Although the French alliance had caused difficulties initially, Russian opinion had largely come around to seeing it as a good thing, a neat matching of Russian manpower with French money and technology. Of course, there were strains over the years. France tried to use its financial leverage over Russia to shape Russian military planning to meet French needs or to insist that Russia place its orders for new weapons with French firms.69 The Russians resented this ‘blackmail’, as they sometimes called it, which was demeaning to Russia as a great power. As Vladimir Kokovtsov, Russia’s Minister of Finance for much of the decade before 1914, complained: ‘Russia is not Turkey; our allies should not set us an ultimatum, we can get by without these direct demands’.70 The Russo-Japanese War also brought strains, with the Russians thinking that France was not doing enough to support them and the French desperately trying to avoid getting dragged into a war on the side of Russia against Japan, the ally of their new friend Britain. On the other hand, France did prove helpful to Russia in negotiating the settlement of the damages arising from the Dogger Bank incident. Delcassé also allowed the Russian Baltic Fleet to use ports in France’s colonies in the Far East as it made its way towards Manchuria.
Even Russian conservatives who still hoped for a closer relationship with Germany consoled themselves by arguing that the alliance with France actually made Russia stronger and therefore more impressive in German eyes. In the opinion of Lamsdorff, the Foreign Minister between 1900 and 1906: ‘In order to have good relations with Germany and make her amenable, we need to maintain an alliance with France. An alliance with Germany would isolate us, most probably, and would become a disastrous slavery.’71 A small, fussy man, Lamsdorff was a bureaucrat of the old school, utterly loyal to the tsar and deeply averse to change. Count Leopold von Berchtold, the Austrian diplomat who later became Foreign Minister, met him in 1900:
Except for a short moustache, he was clean shaven and bare-headed, sat ramrod straight. He tried to impress at every opportunity, too polite, not unintelligent and also not without education, a wandering archive. Un rat de chancellerie. Through constant sniffing in dusty files he became a yellowed parchment himself. I could not help but get the impression of having an abnormality before me, an aged but inchoate nature, in whose circulation system ran watery jelly instead of red blood.72
Lamsdorff’s colleagues would have agreed: as one said unkindly, Lamsdorff was at least honest and hard-working but ‘brilliantly incapable and mediocre’.73 Nevertheless Lamsdorff was probably right in thinking that Russia’s long-term interests lay in balancing between the powers and he was open to discussions with any of the other powers including Britain. As he told a member of the Foreign Ministry, Baron Marcel Taube, in 1905: ‘Believe me, there are times in the life of a great people when this absence of a too-pronounced orientation with regard to that power x or y is still the best policy. I call that, myself, the policy of independence. If it is abandoned, you will see one day when I am no longer here – that it will not bring happiness to Russia.’74 His successors could enter into new combinations and engage in new wars, which, he warned, ‘will end in a revolution’.75 Keeping a free hand in foreign policy after 1905 was almost impossible for Russia, however, partly because its own weakness meant it needed allies and partly because Europe was well along the road to dividing itself into opposing alliances.
After 1904, with its Entente Cordiale with Britain in place, France put considerable pressure on Russia to come to a similar understanding with Britain. ‘What horizons will open to us’, said Delcassé, the Foreign Minister, in 1904, ‘if we could lean simultaneously on Russia and England against Germany!’76 Of course, what France hoped for in the longer term was a full-blown military alliance between the three powers. While Russian liberals would have welcomed a friendship with the leading liberal power in Europe, the Russian leadership was reluctant. The tsar disapproved of Brit
ish society and, while he had admired Queen Victoria, did not like Edward VII, whom he found immoral and dangerously free with his friendships. When, as a young man, he had stayed with Edward, he had been shocked to find, for example, that the fellow guests included horse-dealers and, worse, Jews. As he wrote to his mother: ‘The Cousins rather enjoyed the situation and kept teasing me about it; but I tried to keep away as much as I could, and not to talk.’77 More importantly, perhaps, Nicholas saw Britain as Russia’s chief rival around the world. He was also furious with the British for their hostility during the Russo-Japanese War, which he blamed, so he told Wilhelm II, on Edward VII, ‘the greatest mischief maker and the most dangerous intriguer in the world’.78
Until 1906, when they were replaced, his chief advisers, Witte and Lamsdorff, were also lukewarm if not hostile to the idea of an understanding with Britain. Witte would have preferred to revive the old German friendship and perhaps to join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Given the growing rivalries between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans, this last was highly unlikely. Even less probable was Witte’s hope of creating a continental alliance with France, Russia and Germany to isolate Britain.79 The French made it clear that they were not prepared either to bury their differences with Germany or abandon their entente with Britain.
Germany, not surprisingly, did its best to drive France and Russia apart. The German Foreign Office made clumsy attempts during the Russo-Japanese War to create suspicions between France and Russia. The Kaiser wrote in English, one of their shared languages, to his dear cousin Nicky with much advice about how to conduct the war and sympathy for Russia’s mounting losses. Wilhelm, so he told the tsar at the beginning of June 1904, had expressed his amazement to the French military attaché in Berlin that France was not coming to the aid of its Russian ally against the rising Asian power.
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