The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  In the autumn, only months after the two countries signed an agreement on the Pamirs, the British Foreign Office received reports that Russian troops had been sighted on the borders of Tibet. Then came rumours—constantly denied by the Russian foreign minister, Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky, a very grand, clever, rather haughty aristocrat from a rich old St. Petersburg family, but confirmed by Chinese sources—that they had made a secret “loan” of £8 million to the cash-strapped Chinese, who, having lost the war with Japan, had been left with a huge war indemnity. In return the Russians demanded trading concessions and the right to extend the Trans-Siberian railway through Manchuria, the large northern Chinese province that pushed deep into Siberia. The British hated the thought of Russia sniffing around in China, where they had made a great deal of money by propping up the imperial government with their own loans, selling the Chinese British goods (opium in particular), and in return for their loans taking control of Chinese customs taxes. They feared a partition or African-like scramble would disrupt their position there. The suave and irritatingly evasive Prince Lobanov, they decided, was “at heart unfriendly.”13 After a year of negotiations, the British ambassador described him as having “almost a diseased mistrust14 of England and of British machinations.” In 1896 the British discovered that Russia was, as the queen put it, “encouraging France15 against us with regard to Egypt.” It seemed that however warm the Russian avowals of friendship, nothing had really changed at all. When the queen met Nicholas’s mother, Minny, on her annual trip to the South of France in April, she told her how “very unhappy”16 she was that things seemed worse now than in Alexander’s time, and “begged her to mention this to Nicky.”

  To be honest it was hard to know what was going on in the Russian government. One reason was that the whole functioning of the administration was chaotic. Not unlike Germany, no one organ coordinated policy; ministers reported singly to the tsar, acted unilaterally, and frequently in contradiction with each other. Intrigue was rife. Another reason was that, like most autocracies, the regime felt little need to explain itself to its subjects—or anyone else. The press, tightly controlled by the government, was either official propaganda or unreliable. It had none of the authority of the British press, which covered and discussed government business, debate and policy. Communicating with foreign powers, the Russian government never disclosed internal disagreements or the reasons for delay, and seemed to feel no obligation to be straightforward. The American president, Theodore Roosevelt, would wearily describe it as “a government17 with whom mendacity is a science.” When the German ambassador in St. Petersburg complained a Russian minister had never been honest with him, Wilhelm scribbled on the report, “No impossible18 demands! No Russian has ever done that!”

  Another reason for Russian opacity was that Nicholas himself was extraordinarily hard to get access to—unlike Wilhelm, whose endless opinions were printed in the press, and who dropped into the British embassy to let off steam whenever he felt like it. From the start the new tsar shied away from public scrutiny. How active he was in government—whether he was making the decisions or was leaving ruling to a cabal of ministers—and what his position was on a whole range of political issues, were extremely hard to gauge. What he was actually like was just as moot.A rumour that “the Tsar drinks,”19 the German ambassador informed Holstein in November 1895, was “a false scent. It transpired he had been confused with his brother, who drank a great deal …” In fact Nicholas was inscrutable even to his own ministers. He rarely lost his temper, he spoke calmly, he deflected confrontation and difficult subjects, he almost never directly disagreed with or contradicted the person he was talking to—though he might in reality completely disagree with them. He was, his finance minister Sergei Witte later wrote, “exasperatingly polite.”20 He “possessed in a21 supreme degree,” a Russian diplomat observed, “the art of agreeing with his interlocutor in such a way as to make him believe that he had been much impressed and quite convinced by what he had been told—a most delicate kind of flattery.” Often the opposite was true. Nicholas’s sister Olga felt this inscrutable courtesy had become a shield to hide the constant “nervous strain” and anxiety he felt about his inadequacy for the job. “The Grand-Duchess held that the Emperor’s impassivity was a mask he wore to hide his feelings; [she said] ‘ … none of them [his people] knew that their Tsar felt everything so deeply that he was afraid he might break down in public … perhaps only Alicky and I knew how deeply he suffered and worried.’”22 It also, of course, cut him off even more from the people he dealt with, as if he had personally ingested the physical barriers to the world set up during his childhood, and erected more of his own. It was hardly surprising that diplomats resorted to collecting gossip, tapping foreign correspondents, and weighing the murmurings of ministers with their own agendas. “Nothing remains secret23 here long,” a senior British diplomat wrote, “the difficulty here is to sift the truth from the lies.”

  The truth was Lobanov did harbour a very traditional Russian hostility to the British, and the Russians were trying to insinuate themselves into China. Lobanov had refused to cooperate with the British over the Armenian massacres because he was convinced that the British wanted to stir up tension in eastern Europe and hoped to grab a sizeable piece of Turkey if the Ottoman empire came tumbling down by itself. The British had a bad habit of moving in their troops on high moral grounds and then accidentally taking over—as they had done in Egypt in 1882. It was also the case that the Russians had an Armenian community of their own and had no desire to stir up demands for self-determination at home by encouraging the Turkish Armenians. Moreover, despite Nicholas’s words about the two countries having no real areas of conflict, the Russian government was raring to pursue an expansionist policy in Asia and the Far East—where Britain was Russia’s chief imperial rival. Only lack of funds had held it back. The Russian finance minister, Sergei Witte, perhaps the smartest official in Nicholas’s government, however, had studied the way the British had acquired their colonies and markets without armies and on the cheap—through “peaceful penetration”—and was following their model, with loans and railways. He regarded himself as a new economic imperialist—unlike most of the Russian ruling elite, who saw the empire primarily in terms of armies, status and land. There was a certain irony in the fact that in order to make loans to the Chinese, he in turn was having to take out huge loans with the French.

  Just like the British, Wilhelm nursed hopes of breaking the chill between Russia and Germany. In mid-1894 Germany had signed a trade treaty with Russia which had reduced German tariffs on Russian grain. (One of its consequences had been to enrage the Junker parties but that, for the moment, was another story.) Wilhelm planned to continue the thaw with a new friendship with “charming, agreeable24 and dear” Nicholas. “I can only25 repeat the expression of absolute trust in you and the assurance that I shall always cultivate the old relations of mutual friendship with your House, in which I was reared by my Grandfather,” he’d written to the young tsar a week after the death of the (to him) unlamented Alexander. Wilhelm was convinced that if he could appeal to Nicky’s monarchical instincts, dazzle him with his personality and his winning way with an argument, the tsar’s natural German sympathies would rise to the surface. He would throw over the French alliance, stop flirting with the British and jump into the German fold. Wilhelm decided that the vehicle for his new diplomacy would be a secret correspondence—emperor to emperor—not unlike the early letters he had sent to Alexander III. Not even Eulenburg was to know. (The kaiser’s friend, however, soon realized that something was up. “Our relations with26 the new Tsar do not please me a bit, and I am watching HM’s family politics with real anxiety,” he wrote.) Though he’d written to Alexander in French, the traditional language of Russian diplomacy (Russian ambassadors still made their reports in French) and a legacy of the tsarist admiration for pre-revolutionary France, Wilhelm wrote to Nicholas in English. Why isn’t immediately clear. Nicholas was certa
inly proficient in German. Perhaps Wilhelm spurned French because he was keen to demonstrate his scorn for all things Gallic, and chose English because it was neutral territory for both.

  Just as he’d tried to turn Alexander against the British, Wilhelm’s first letter in February 1895 denounced the latest French administration for “opening the doors to all the worst malefactors the former people with difficulty had managed to imprison.” He congratulated Nicholas on his hard line to the Tver zemstvo: “I am so glad at the capital speech you made the other day to the deputation in response to some addresses for Reform!” He complained that his own Reichstag was behaving “as badly as it can, swinging backwards and forwards between the socialists egged on by the Jews, and the ultramontane Catholics [sic]; both parties being soon fit to be hung all of them as far as I can see.” He described the British Liberal government collapsing “amidst universal derision! In short everywhere the ‘principe de la Monarchie’ is called upon to show itself strong.”27

  The kaiser was far from the only German who believed that Germany could and should detach Russia from France. “I have great hopes, incidentally, that the German sympathies of the Tsar will come to the surface …,” the German ambassador in Paris wrote to Holstein. “The quite unnatural love affair between the Republic [France] and the absolute Tsar is like the bastard of a lioness and a tiger, not the product of love but of evil.”28

  While the British refused to join Russia’s campaign to get the Japanese out of Manchuria, Germany pointedly supported it. More than that, Wilhelm urged Nicholas to make a bigger effort in the Far East—to take on “the great task”—“to cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow race.”29 The second goal of his diplomatic correspondence was, he told his Foreign Office, “to tie Russia down30 in East Asia so that she pays less attention to Europe and the near East.” He told Nicholas he would “do all in my power to keep Europe quiet, and also guard the rear of Russia so that nobody shall hamper your action.” He proposed they meet that summer on their yachts to “have a quiet little chat between ourselves … It would be so nice.”31 He repeated his offer to guard Russia’s western front if there was a war in the East to various visiting Russian grandees, while failing to inform any of his own ministers that he’d done so. This promise was an extraordinarily serious one, since it presumably included countering Austria if necessary. When Eulenburg eventually found out about it, he was horrified. “His Majesty has thus32 committed himself—without Hohenlohe. This gives me yet more problems to solve, which fill me with dread! … If Hohenlohe hears of the letter from someone other than me, he will go [i.e., resign] at once. And yet he must know about it!”

  Wilhelm’s promises and professions of intimacy, however, brought nothing concrete from the Russians, just Nicholas’s relentless politeness. He charmed every German,33 including the chancellor, whom Wilhelm sent to pay their respects, and complained, gratifyingly, about the perfidiousness of the English. But there was no distancing from France. In fact, Lobanov made a much publicized visit to Paris in September 1895 which Wilhelm complained about at length to—among others—the foreign minister himself, and repeatedly to the tsar. Lobanov’s visit had encouraged those “damned rascals” the French to start moving troops around on the border, one letter complained. “One day my dearest Nicky, you will find yourself nolens volens suddenly embroiled in the most horrible of wars Europe ever saw! Which will by the masses and by history be fixed on you as the cause of it,” he wrote a few days later. “… Think of the awful responsibility for the shocking bloodshed!” The letter was accompanied by an allegorical drawing,34 “Against the Yellow Peril,” Wilhelm had drawn (it had, in fact, been “sketched” by him and “finished” by the artist Hermann Knackfuss), in which Germany, shield and sword in hand, stood ready to defend Russia—a beautiful woman leaning on Germany’s arm—while England and France hung back, dazed by smoke and flames from a vast plain below in which faceless masses held aloft a Buddha and a Chinese dragon. Only weeks later he sent an aide-de-camp to St. Petersburg to repeat his warning, along with yet another letter lecturing Nicholas on “the danger which35 is brought to our Principle of Monarchism through lifting up the Republic on a pedestal by the form under which the friendship is shown … Nicky take my word on it the curse of God has stricken that People for ever!”*

  Nicholas continued to smile. By November Wilhelm was losing patience. “HM is beginning37 to be quite angry with the Tsar,” Holstein wrote to the new German ambassador in St. Petersburg, Prince Radolin, “because of the repeated cool rebuffs …”

  The truth was the Russian government didn’t want to alienate the Germans, but it had no wish to abandon the French alliance. The French had proved useful. They might be ghastly republicans (which was how the Russian regime regarded them) but this was outweighed by their keenness to provide the huge loans on which the Russian state depended—stepping in when Bismarck had refused to. They shared Russia’s suspicion of Britain, and most of all their antipathy to Germany meant that Russia had a reliable ally to counterbalance Germany in Europe. Slavophilia was gaining ground in government and at court, where influential conservative figures, such as Nicholas’s uncle and brother-in-law Grand Duke Sergei, who once would have seen Germany as an ideological ally, now regarded it as a political, territorial and ideological rival.

  As for Wilhelm’s personal charms, Nicholas was thoroughly familiar with his parents’ distrust of the kaiser. Minny’s dislike had certainly played its role, but Nicky was himself irked by the kaiser’s pushy, often brutally obvious, attempts at manipulation. He found him patronizing. “I received Moltke,38 the aide de camp who brought me a letter and drawing from the irritating Monsieur Wilhelm,” he wrote in his diary after yet another of Wilhelm’s urgent missives in September 1895. He would tell Lord Salisbury that he found Wilhelm nervous and excitable, and as “a quiet man39 … he could not stand nervous men. He could not endure a long conversation with the Emperor William, as he never knew what he would do or say. I understood him to say that the Emperor William’s manners were bad; that he would poke him in the ribs, and slap him on the back like a schoolboy.” Alix had nothing good to say about Wilhelm either. Though Wilhelm liked to take the credit for bringing her and Nicholas together, she remembered his childhood visits to Hesse-Darmstadt: he’d been boorish and bossy.40 He’d been rude to her father, who had been one of the few public figures who had stood by Vicky after his father’s death, and to her brother Ernie; and she couldn’t forgive him and Dona for publicly branding her sister Ella (on whom Wilhelm had once had a childhood crush) as a “traitor to her faith41 and her Fatherland” for converting to Russian Orthodoxy.

  There was a part of Nicky, however, that was susceptible to Wilhelm. Wilhelm was one of the few people who understood what it felt like to be emperor, and he had an odd ability to home in on people’s preoccupations and vulnerabilities. The “monarchical principle” was one of the few supranational ideas that appealed to Nicky. Like many upper-class Russians, he found the alliance with republican France made him uneasy, and he instinctively distrusted the British. There were moments when Wilhelm’s probings hit a nerve and when Nicholas was persuaded to confide in the German emperor. “I quite agree42 with what You say in the end of Your letter about the Britishers,” Wilhelm replied to a complaint from Nicky. “Their fanfaronades against us make them supremely ridiculous.” Nor was a move towards Germany unthinkable. Amid the many factions in the Russian government was a pro-German one which included men such as Nicky’s Germanophile uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir, as well as the tsar’s minister of court, Count Fredericks, who considered Germany “the last stronghold43 of the monarchical idea; we need her just as she needed us.”

  The finance minister, Sergei Witte, believed that Russia needed to be on good terms with her neighbour, if only to decrease the vast sums spent on arming the frontier with Germany since the lapse of the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890.

  By 1896 both the Germans and the
British were frustrated by their failure to make any headway with the Russians. Instead of blaming the tsar, both pinned the responsibility on his ministers—specifically Lobanov, the foreign minister. Wilhelm and Holstein concluded the tsar was “uninterested”44 in politics and Lobanov was running foreign policy; they saw him as a protégé of the dowager empress, whom they regarded as notoriously anti-German. But the truth was that Nicholas’s views were indivisible from his foreign minister’s, and he liked Lobanov, who was famously witty and amusing. They shared the casual xenophobia which seemed to characterize the Russian court and the Foreign Ministry. The tsar called the Japanese yellow monkeys, and managed comfortably to separate his feelings for his English cousins from his instinctive suspicion of England—and Germany. When the Russian loan to the Chinese government went through in 1895, Nicholas was delighted, pausing only to grumble in his diary that it had been delayed by “the intriguing of45 the British and Germans at Peking.”