These exchanges hardly count as prima facie evidence that Russia was ready to risk a general war to redraw Europe’s map to her advantage. Russia was not the only state where politicians said one thing in public while generals said something else in private. Nor does every speculation on possible future contingencies necessarily represent a sinister hidden agenda. The scenario outlined by the tsar and his war minister was more than familiar; it could have been developed by anyone with a schoolboy’s knowledge of central European ethnography. Dreams of natural future accretions to Russian power might well have been enhanced by the all-too-concrete failures of current Russian diplomacy. Nevertheless the evolution of the concept is not without interest: from Nicholas’s omission of any direct gains for Russia, through the Novoye Vremya’s discussion of a general settlement with something for all the continental survivors including France, to Sukhomlinov’s blunt statement of ultimate goals which Germany could like or lump as it pleased. The incidents illustrate the nature of the ideas unofficially discussed in St. Petersburg. They also demonstrate all too clearly Paul Schroeder’s argument that while by 1914 every great power expected the European system to work for its benefit, none were willing to work for the system.23
II
A loosely-structured group of top officials and ex-officials did suggest that Russia was wrong to sacrifice Berlin for London. These men respected the German Empire as a more reasonable model for their own than the Western parliamentary systems. In particular, Sergei Witte and former interior minister Peter Durnovo insisted that Germany and Russia had no differences that could not be negotiated. A Russo-German war, Durnovo argued, would bring revolution if it were lost, and a victory would be almost as disastrous. Russia would become financially and economically dependent on her allies, while having to cope with the anarchy sure to break out in the defeated states and likely to spread across their borders.24
Hindsight indicates the wisdom of the Witte-Durnovo forecasts. In the event Russia got the predicted negative effects of both winning and losing its German war—a fact arguably not lost on Stalin during the 1930s. At the time, however, this was a minority position. By 1913 Germany had captured almost 40 percent of Russia’s foreign trade. Russian critics of existing commercial relations presented their country as a virtual colony of her economically dominant neighbor, a source of cheap raw materials and a dumping ground for even cheaper finished products. Russia, in the words of one group of merchants, must emancipate herself from this humiliating dependence, preferably by cultivating improved relations with countries willing to establish more equitable trade relationships. Industrialists too regarded Germany as the principal foreign obstacle to Russia’s economic development, and decried their country’s dependance on German techniques and German machines. While the manufacturers were not enthusiastic at the prospect of a war, they more than any other group saw clear benefits arising from a German defeat. As it was more and more German firms were losing Russian contracts to French and British suppliers submitting higher bids, despite years of cooperative relationships with local authorities. The navy minister went so far as to urge the German director of the Putilov armament works to consider becoming a Russian citizen. Something of the relationship between business and patriotism at this period is suggested by the latter’s prompt willingness to make the change and his justification of it as making him better able to serve German industrial interests.25
By the spring of 1914 the German consul in Warsaw was reporting Polish students throwing rocks and bottles at his windows—a concrete affirmation of Slavic identity at sharp variance with the normal tensions between the nationalistic academicians and the heavy-handed Russian authorities.26 The Duma increased duties on all imported grain: a direct blow at German agricultural interests, carefully described as such by its supporters concerned lest the point be missed. Military budgets passed uncriticized and unprotested save from the far Left. In the public sphere, veteran journalists and diplomats were taken aback by the depth and breadth of newspaper hostility to Germany and Austria alike. Not only nationalist and Panslav sheets, not only the colportage of the Right, but more respectable middle-of-the-road papers took up the patriotic chorus. Everywhere voices described the inevitable clash between Slav and Teuton, a clash in which divine favor would rest with the younger, more vigorous race.
At the highest levels of government Sazonov was increasingly convinced that Germany’s ultimate goal was to bar Russia’s way to the world’s oceans not only in the south by establishing a de facto protectorate over Turkey, but in the north as well by extending her influence in Scandinavia. His views acquired new importance at the end of January when Kokovtsov was dismissed as premier. He had been less a friend of Germany and an advocate of peace than a pessimistic highlighter of military and economic shortcomings. Nicholas willingly sacrificed him to critics seeing no reason to be reminded of such things in their search for a great Russia.27
This assertiveness, paradoxically, was accompanied by a growing chorus from everywhere on Russia’s political, social, and cultural/intellectual spectrums affirming that Russia society was in the throes of a profound crisis. The objective validity of this belief was less important for German statesmen than its existence. Russia’s capacity to pursue anything like a coherent foreign policy had long seemed open to question. And if Russia was in fact only half as unstable an amalgam of conflicting forces as her own spokesmen insisted, she was a profoundly dangerous neighbor.
Unpredictability is the greatest single barrier to effective diplomacy. United with military power it will make even the calmest of neighboring governments uneasy. It can also affect journalists. The Kölnische Zeitung’s well-known “war in sight” article of March 2, 1914, was a think-piece rather than a reaction to specific events. Its assertion that Russia if left undisturbed would be ready for war by 1917 parallelled opinions in German military circles closely enough to support the assumption that the author had drawn some background information from at least the German embassy in St. Petersburg if not the general staff itself. The Russian press, the Times, and French and Scandinavian sources alike insisted that the article was officially inspired. The author was in fact a Pan-German sympathizer with extensive contacts among German officers. He had also been briefed by the German military attaché to Russia. Most of the information in his article was, however, available to a normally competent investigative reporter with a normal spectrum of Russian contacts. Nor did he invent his descriptions of extensive Russian military preparations combined with efflorescent public and official hostility to Germany. Finally, the alleged 1917 deadline for war was a product neither of German reasoning nor German imagination. In 1912 Russian officers had spoken of needing five years to complete their preparations for dealing with their enemies to the west and south. That period had ever since remained a familiar benchmark in informal conversations.28
Then Sukhomlinov entered the scene. On March 12 the Russian war minister published an article in a major St. Petersburg newspaper, denying the Kölnische Zeitung’s allegations and declaring that Russia wanted only peace, but was perfectly prepared for war, and would wage war offensively if it came.