Hartwig, meanwhile, was in town that fateful day, hosting his soon-to-be-notorious bridge party. From postwar confessions, we know that Prime Minister Pašić knew of the assassination plot; in fact he had tried discreetly, via an emissary, to warn Vienna in early June, not wanting to provide Austria with a pretext for war, while Serbia was still recovering its strength from the Balkan Wars. (Pašić’s warning was either ignored or later erased from memory by Habsburg officials, such as the minister for Bosnia-Herzegovina, Biliński, who were embarrassed not to have heeded it.) Serbia’s prime minister and his Russian advisers were thus not complicit in the Black Hand plot to assassinate the archduke, but they almost certainly knew that some kind of plot had been hatched prior to his visit, and Pašić had done nothing decisive to foil it.5
Franz Josef was therefore not wrong to point the finger at Hartwig as an abettor of Serbian aggression and a menace to peace in the Balkans. It was still not clear, however, whether the views of the minister in Belgrade were representative of Russian policymakers in St. Petersburg. During the Balkan Wars, Hartwig had behaved as something of a free agent, frequently overstepping the bounds of the brief laid down by Russia’s more cautious foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov. Shortly before the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October 1912, Hartwig had all but questioned Sazonov’s manhood: after the foreign minister issued a preemptory declaration guaranteeing the territorial status quo in the Balkans, Hartwig told the Serbs to go ahead and attack Turkey and not worry about “foolish Sazonov.”6
Sergei Sazonov, Russia’s beleaguered and much-pilloried foreign minister, trying to live down a reputation for cowardice. Source: Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bazili Papers, Envelope A, Hoover Institution Archives.
Sazonov had never been anyone’s idea of a strongman. To begin with, he did not look the part. Slim and small in stature, with a bland face and receding hairline, Sazonov had a classic Russian bureaucrat’s mien: he could have been the inspiration for Gogol’s empty overcoat. The foreign minister had been pilloried by pan-Slavists in Petersburg for his mild-mannered timidity during the Balkan Wars, even as Hartwig emerged as their conquering hero. For a time there were serious rumors in Petersburg that Hartwig would replace Sazonov, but in the end Tsar Nicholas II had stuck by his man out of simple loyalty.
Like Berchtold in Vienna, Russia’s foreign minister was in a precarious position at the time of the Sarajevo incident, having just barely survived in office through the tumult of the Balkan Wars. There was a Francophile (that is, anti-German) “war party” in Petersburg akin to Conrad’s belligerent faction in Vienna, led by the agriculture minister, A. V. Krivoshein. It might seem odd that a minister of agriculture would favor a belligerent foreign policy, but then Tsarist Russia was something of an odd country.
Imposing in appearance—with her demographic and economic growth rates convincing the Germans that she was an unstoppable “steamroller”—the empire of the tsars was, in reality, fragile and ramshackle, capable of cracking apart under pressure, as had very nearly happened in the Revolution of 1905, following her humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. Although Russian industrialization continued apace, the peasantry still comprised 80 percent of the population. Land reform was the key element of social policy, which gave outsized importance to the Agriculture Ministry. Krivoshein was the star protégé of Peter Stolypin, chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1906 to 1911, who had aimed, through reforming the laws of land tenure, to create a stable and prosperous class of peasant smallholders to serve as a bulwark against another anarchic social revolution. The “Stolypin program” required aggressive tariffs to block German wheat imports, French capital investment in Russian railways, and unimpeded access to grain export markets. Because most of Russia’s wheat was grown in her southern regions abutting the Black Sea, and her Baltic and Arctic Sea ports were icebound most of the year (Vladivostok, on the Pacific, was too far afield to be a practical option), exporters desperately needed warm-water access to the Mediterranean for Russian grain exports, by way of the Ottoman Straits (the Bosphorus, Sea of Marmara, and Dardanelles). Through the Straits, in the other direction, flowed imported components critical to Russian industry, paid for by Russian grain exports. Any interruption of Russia’s access to the Mediterranean would undermine the Stolypin land reform program, on which everything else depended.
After Stolypin was assassinated in 1911, Krivoshein became the senior member of the Council of Ministers, considerably more senior than Sazonov. While Stolypin had famously advocated “twenty years of peace” to complete Russia’s economic modernization, the Italian and Balkan Wars of 1911–1913 suggested to Krivoshein that Petersburg would not have so much time. In summer 1912, the beleaguered Ottoman government had briefly closed the Straits to commercial shipping, exposing the vulnerability of Russia’s grain-export economy: the volume of her Black Sea exports dropped by one-third, and heavy industry in the Ukraine nearly ground to a halt. Even more worrisome was the “Liman von Sanders affair” of December 1913–January 1914, when a German general had been appointed to command the Ottoman army corps in charge of defending the Straits. German officers had been training the Ottoman army since the 1880s, and relations between Berlin and Constantinople were usually warm, but this was something new: Liman’s Straits command would leave Russia’s access to the Mediterranean at the mercy of Germany, her most powerful enemy.7
Little wonder that Krivoshein was edgy in 1914. The agriculture minister was, anyhow, a temperamental Germanophobe: he was France’s favorite Russian. Sazonov, to be sure, was a Francophile too, seeing the military alliance with France, which was concluded in 1894, as an essential part of Russia’s foreign policy and France as something of a model for backwards Russia—not for her radicalism so much as for her passionate nationalism. Sazonov’s was the Russian “national liberal” position, which opposed the conservative or “Germanophile” antiwar opposition, best represented by Sergei Witte, the statesman presiding over Russia’s industrialization drive since the 1890s, whose star had gone into eclipse after his fall from power in 1906. Krivoshein and his French admirers did not really disagree with Sazonov’s Francophile foreign policy, but they suspected him of being yellow, just as Conrad did not trust Berchtold’s mettle. Austria’s foreign minister, as we have seen, had been jolted out of his passive funk by the Sarajevo outrage. Would Sazonov likewise be nudged toward Krivoshein and the war party by the drama in the Balkans, or would he back down yet again when Austria made her move?
A great deal depended on the answer to this question in July 1914. And yet it remains just as difficult to answer today as it was for the Austrians then. Sazonov, unlike Berchtold, draws a veil over this entire period in his memoirs, skipping straight from a pro forma mention of the Sarajevo incident until July 24, revealing nothing about his thinking or intentions in between. Documents from the time are no help. After the war, the Bolsheviks, seeking to impugn the benighted “imperialism” of the Tsarist Russian regime, published hundreds of volumes of secret diplomacy relating to the origins and course of the First World War. These volumes cover, in tremendous depth, events large and small from the nineteenth century to 1917—everything except for the days following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, when they fall virtually silent. Likewise, in the French diplomatic archives, the dispatches of Maurice Paléologue, France’s ambassador to Russia, simply disappear between 28 June and 6 July 1914.8
Stranger still are the missing letters of Alexander Izvolsky, Sazonov’s predecessor as foreign minister and, in 1914, ambassador to France, Russia’s most important ally. Forced to resign as foreign minister after his humiliation in the First Bosnian Crisis, Izvolsky had been given the consolation prize of the Paris embassy, from which grounds he worked to avenge himself against Vienna. (When he learned that Russian mobilization had been declared in July 1914, Izvolsky reportedly exclaimed, “This is my war!”) Some in Paris saw Izvolsky’s hand in France’s nationalist revival and her push toward rearmament in t
he years before 1914. As one Socialist leader asked, “has [France] no other glory than to serve the rancors of M. Izvolsky?” After World War I, an entire “black book” was published of Izvolsky’s secret correspondence, which comes thick and fast: many days have five or more dispatches. But between 19 June and 22 July 1914, there is a single letter to Sazonov, and it concerns not Sarajevo or Russian foreign policy but French domestic affairs.9
Likewise, Britain’s ambassador to Russia, Sir George Buchanan, in whom Sazonov rarely confided anyway, did not report on Russian reactions to Sarajevo until 9 July 1914, eleven days after Sarajevo. Even then he offered only a typically unsourced and unenlightening opinion that “the general impression” in Petersburg was “one of relief that so dangerous a personality [e.g., Franz Ferdinand] should have been removed from the succession to the throne.”10
Owing to the silence of Russian, French, and British sources, Sazonov’s thinking in the days after Sarajevo must be puzzled out of reports from “hostile” Austrian and German diplomats. These are more informative, although still ambiguous. Otto Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian legation secretary in Petersburg filling in for Ambassador Friedrich Szapáry in the latter’s absence, reported to Berchtold on 3 July that Sazonov had expressed sincere and heartfelt condolences for the loss of the Habsburg heir. Slyly, however, Russia’s foreign minister had also suggested that his own warm sentiments were not shared widely in Russia, where Franz Ferdinand was universally (and incorrectly) viewed as a “Russia-hater.” The death of the archduke would not, Czernin concluded sadly, do anything to halt the “extravagant anti-Austrian baiting Russian nationalists had been indulging in for years.”11
In a follow-up audience held over the weekend, Sazonov’s sympathy evaporated quickly. After he warned Czernin that Austrian press “attacks” on Serbia were producing a “disquieting irritation” in Russia, Czernin informed Sazonov that Austria-Hungary might indeed seek redress by bringing her investigation of the crime onto Serbian territory. Hearing this, Sazonov “cut him off short” and unleashed a tirade. “No country has had to suffer more than Russia from outrages prepared on foreign territory,” the Russian told Czernin. “Have we ever claimed to employ against any country the procedure with which your newspapers threaten Serbia?” To ensure the Austrians got his point, Sazonov concluded the audience with a thinly veiled threat: “Do not engage yourselves on that road; it is dangerous.”12
Sazonov spoke still more frankly with Germany’s ambassador, Friedrich Pourtalès, shortly after the Sarajevo incident. As Pourtalès reported to Berlin on 13 July, Sazonov “dwelt only briefly on his condemnation of the crime, while he could not find enough words to condemn the behavior of the Austrian authorities, who had permitted excesses against the Serbs . . . and deliberately given free rein to popular fury [against Serbia].” Sazonov squarely denied that the murders could have resulted from some “pan-Serbian plot”; rather it was the work of “a few callow youths” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a territory in which, Sazonov claimed in a seeming contradiction, “only a few Muslims and Catholics were loyal to [Austria-Hungary].” The Serbian government was not merely innocent but behaving with “perfect correctness.” When Pourtalès tried to win a familiar point by reminding Sazonov of the importance of monarchical principle for a country like Tsarist Russia, and how this was threatened by royal assassinations like the one in Sarajevo, he noted that “Sazonov could not but agree to this remark but with less warmth than I usually find [on this subject].” Interpreting Sazonov’s unsympathetic remarks about the slain Habsburg heir, Pourtalès told Berlin that the hostile tone could only be explained “by the Minister’s irreconcilable hatred of Austria-Hungary, a hatred which here more and more clouds all clear, calm judgment.” Overall, the attitude in Russian official circles vis-à-vis Vienna, Pourtalès concluded, was one of “boundless contempt for the conditions prevailing there.” The German ambassador observed further that “not only in the press, but also in society, one meets almost only with unfriendly judgments on the murdered archduke.” If Pourtalès was right, then it appeared that Sazonov, riding a wave of popular anti-Austrian indignation, had been jolted over to the war party no less dramatically than had Berchtold in Vienna.13
Coming as it does from the ambassador of a hostile country, and written nearly two weeks after the conversations it purports to describe, Pourtalès’s 13 July 1914 dispatch would be easy to dismiss as a biased and unreliable report of Russian reactions to the Sarajevo incident. Filtered through the German ambassador’s own fears and concerns, it may not accurately render what Sazonov truly said, any more than such a dispatch can tell us what the Russian was really thinking.
Whatever Sazonov and other officials may or may not have said after Sarajevo, we may still draw a picture of Russian intentions based on what they did. Actions speak louder than words, and Russia’s actions, upon hearing the news about the assassination, were decisive.
Whether or not Serbia’s government was behaving with “perfect correctness” as Austria investigated the crime in Sarajevo, Pašić was preparing for the worst. Since February, he had been appealing to Petersburg, with increasing desperation, for arms and supplies to replenish stocks depleted in the Balkan Wars—aside from rifles, cannon, and ammunition, the Serbian army needed clothing for 250,000 soldiers, along with “telegraphs, telephones and four wireless stations.” Sazonov had responded favorably in March, only to be overruled by V. A. Sukhomlinov, the imperial war minister, who did not want to deprive Russia’s own army of needed supplies. By early June, when the plot to murder the archduke was being launched from Belgrade, Pašić’s requests for arms became almost feverish. At last, on 30 June, two days after the Sarajevo incident, the General Staff, under pressure from Tsar Nicholas II, approved the dispatch of 120,000 three-line rifles, with 120 million rounds, to Serbia.14
On the same day, Sazonov dispatched a “very secret and urgent” request to Russia’s naval minister, I. K. Grigorevich, for information regarding the war-readiness of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The context and content of this request were significant. Specifically, the foreign minister wanted to know what had been done so far to implement the measures ordered by a warplanning conference held in Petersburg on 21 February 1914—a gathering of Russia’s leading generals, admirals, and diplomats, which Sazonov had himself chaired. The February war council had originally been called at the end of December 1913, at the height of international tensions surrounding the Liman affair, but the conference was postponed until late February because of the illness of an important admiral, who had previously chaired the Naval Staff. On 13 January 1914, Sazonov had convened an emergency meeting of the Council of Ministers at which the war party, led by Krivoshein, had nakedly discussed the idea of provoking a European conflict over Liman and the Straits question. At one point, then-chairman of the Council of Ministers V. N. Kokovtsov asked Russia’s war minister pointblank, “Is a war with Germany desirable, and can Russia wage it?” Sukhomlinov answered without hesitation that “Russia was perfectly prepared for a duel with Germany, not to speak of one with Austria.” Kokovtsov then asked Sazonov whether England and France would back Russia. Sazonov replied that France’s departing ambassador, Théophile Delcassé, had told him that “France will go as far as Russia wishes.” Of British intervention on Russia’s behalf, Sazonov said he was personally confident, but less certain and unable to guarantee. With Sazonov leaning toward the war party but refusing, as usual, to take a strong stand, Kokovtsov had enough political cover to veto the idea of intervening, issuing a resolution to the effect that Russia would risk war over the Straits question only if “the active participation of both France and England in joint measures were . . . assured.”15
By the time the war-planning conference convened on 21 February, the immediate danger posed by the Liman affair had passed. But there was still a sense of strategic urgency to the proceedings, not least because Kokovtsov, the man who had blocked the war party in January, had been ousted on 12 February and replaced by an elde
rly figurehead, I. L. Goremykin, widely seen as Krivoshein’s creature. As the conference subject heading put it, Russia must reckon with the “Possibility of the Straits Question Being Opened, Even Quite Possibly in the Near Future.” No one knew, of course, precisely how the Straits question would be opened, but opened it would be at some point, and Russia would have to be ready.16
As Sazonov recalled in his memoirs, everyone in attendance “considered an offensive against Constantinople inevitable, should European war break out.” To this end, Sazonov, Sukhomlinov, and Grigorevich had drawn up a detailed plan for readying Russia to seize Constantinople and the Ottoman Straits in case of war. The plan covered the expansion of amphibious forces available on the Black Sea littoral; heightened artillery training in the Odessa military district; the acceleration of the mobilization timetable, which would see the first day troops could put ashore at the Bosphorus speeded up from Mobilization Day (M) + 10 to M + 5; the acceleration of dreadnought construction in (or their sudden importation into) the Black Sea, where Russia did not currently have any (two state-of-the-art British dreadnoughts, made to order for Turkey, were expected to arrive shortly in Constantinople, the first in July 1914); and finally the extension of rail lines in the Caucasus up to the Turkish Anatolian border. In May and June, Sazonov had fought a desperate rearguard campaign, via Russia’s ambassador in London, to block delivery of the British dreadnoughts to Turkey, only to be rebuffed. Time was running out. After learning the news from Sarajevo, Sazonov asked Grigorevich to tell him how soon Russia’s Black Sea dreadnoughts would be ready. More urgently, he wanted to know whether, in accordance with the measures ordered in February, the first Russian troops would now be able to land in the Bosphorus within “four or five days” of mobilization.17
July 1914: Countdown to War Page 6
