by Jack Beatty
French diplomats signaled a willingness to transform the Franco-Russian alliance from a defensive to an offensive one, if that was the only way to keep Russia in it. “Leading French military men,” according to Wilson, went further; they wanted to get the big war with Germany over with now, when “in consequence of Balkan difficulties” they could count on “the whole-hearted support of Russia.” On November 17, a week before the Tsarskoe Selo conference, then prime minister Raymond Poincaré crystallized France’s new understanding of the Dual Alliance in a remark attributed to him (wrongly, he claimed after the war) by Izvolski: “If Russia goes to war, France too will go to war.” In speaking so boldly to Russia, Poincaré may have hoped to cue the Russians to speak as boldly to France.33
Poincaré not only shifted the alliance’s axis from defense toward offense, he also extended the alliance to Russia’s Balkan ally, and that security guarantee, made without consulting the French people, enabled the war. In July 1914, after Austria showed unmistakenly that it intended to attack Serbia, the British ambassador cabled London with the Russian reaction: “Russia cannot allow Austria to crush Serbia and, secure of support of France, she will face all the risks of war.” France had given her support because the implications of Russia’s post-1905 formula—“no war … no revolution”—made her fear for her own security.
At the Tsarskoe Selo conference Kokovtsov ended his recital of the mysteries of mobilization with a plea to Nicholas to face “the sad actuality.” Russia was “not ready for a war and our adversaries knew it well.” The mobilization signal was a suicide note. He proposed that Russia send an alternative signal by extending the term of military service for Russian conscripts by six months; that would increase Russian manpower by one fourth, rectifying the perceived imbalance of forces that concerned Nicholas.
Quickly resigned to God’s will when the Japanese sunk his fleet at Tsushima, Nicholas saved his anger for bad manners. Kokoktsov’s “sharp thrusts at the Minister of War” had displeased him. Now he thanked the prime minister for suggesting a “splendid way out of our difficulties.”
Nicholas then invited Sukhomlinov to speak.
“I agree with the views expressed by the Chairman of the Council and beg to be permitted to send telegrams to Generals Ivanov and Skalon that no mobilization should be undertaken,” he said, and fell silent.
“Of course,” Nicholas, ever emollient, responded.* How could he be angry with Sukhomlinov for dispatching the marching orders for continental war when they were his orders? Sukhomlinov habitually told Nicholas what he wanted to hear about the state of the Russian army—on one occasion, extolling as a success a failed horse mobilization in Kazan. Yet even after discovering that Sukhomlinov had lied about the Kazan exercise, after catching him in other trivial lies, Nicholas kept him on through the first year of the war. Later, in 1917, the Russian Provisional Government, in Russia’s first “show trial,” convicted Sukhomlinov of treasonable incompetence, corruption, and for having alleged Austrian spies as friends. Sentenced to life at hard labor, he was spared only by his young wife’s way with officials and by the Bolshevik Revolution.34
“Russia is not ready for war”… “war would be a catastrophe”… “war would bring revolution”: Russia’s would-be enemies overheard Russia’s leaders talking down Russian power and drew the conclusion reached by Wilhelm II. Russia “did not inspire him with any worry,” the kaiser told the Austrian foreign minister in 1913. “Haunted by the specter of revolution,” it could not make war for four or five years. German strategists had settled on 1917 as the year of danger. By then Russia’s railways to Germany’s frontier would be completed, the Russian army would be bigger by half a million men, and Stolypin’s reforms and an expanding economy would have pared the risk of revolution. Brooding on Russia’s future, the German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, turned fatalistic, telling his son that planting new trees on their estate near Berlin hardly made sense since “in a few years the Russians would be here anyway.” The perception of Russia as weak now, stronger later, encouraged “now or never” arguments for “preventive” war and emboldened reckless diplomacy.35
In this climate, Germany precipitated “the last (and decisive) diplomatic crisis between [it] and Russia before the war.” In December 1913, the kaiser sent General Liman von Sanders to command a Turkish army corps based in Constantinople on the Bosporus Strait. A. J. P. Taylor put what that meant for Russia dramatically: “Previously Germany had been estranged from Russia only indirectly because of Austria-Hungary; now the two countries had a direct cause of conflict for the first time in their history.”36
Nearly all of Russia’s grain, “the most important item in the Russian economy, which guaranteed Russia a positive trade balance and let the Russian state make regular interest payments on its foreign loans,” passed through the Bosporus. After the Balkan crisis Sazonov resolved that Russia should never go to war for one of the Slav states (a resolve he would break in July 1914 when Russia went to war for Serbia) but “only for her vital interests.” Asked by the French ambassador to identify one, he answered, “We shall not tolerate a change in the status quo in the Straits. On the Bosphorus [sic] there can only be either the Turks or ourselves.”37
Persuaded by Russia’s “peace at almost any price” foreign policy that Russia would stand for almost anything, Germany raised the price—and changed Russian minds irrevocably.
After the “Liman von Sanders affair,” Peter Durnovo would be the last Russian statesman to argue that there were no territorial or strategic issues preventing “the conservative powers” from building an alliance around their ideological bond. “It was commonly supposed that there was nothing to keep Germany and Russia apart,” the British ambassador reported Nicholas remarking in March 1914. “This was, however, not the case … From a secret source in Vienna he had reason to believe that Germany was aiming at acquiring such a position in Constantinople as would enable her to shut in Russia altogether in the Black Sea. Should she attempt to carry out this policy He would have to resist it with all His power, even should war be the only alternative.” In substance that was Nicholas’s rejoinder to the Durnovo Memorandum.38
The von Sanders appointment took flame only in November 1913, when the Russian Foreign Office first learned of it from a Turkish source and queried Berlin. General von Sanders and his retinue of officers would leave for Constantinople within the month, the Russians were told. His mission was a matter strictly between Germany and Turkey. It was a fait accompli—it would go ahead as planned.
The grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire had requested “a suitable Prussian officer” to organize the defenses of Constantinople. The city, on the European side of the Bosporus, was still vulnerable to attack by the forces of Bulgaria, one of the coalition of small states that in four months of war had pushed Turkey out of the Balkans.
A suitable Prussian officer was easily arranged: German officers had been instructing the Turkish army for decades (poorly, to judge from its rout by the Balkan states). But the German ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Hans von Wangenheim, saw imperialist possibilities in the new mission. Under the guise of “reforming” the Turkish army, he wrote in an April 26, 1913, cable to Berlin, Germany would transform Turkey into its protectorate as Britain had done with Egypt. “There is a large group of people here who would like to place Turkey completely under the direction of German instructors with the most extensive powers,” Wangenheim reported, alluding to the young turks around Enver Pasha, the minister of war, and Talaat Pasha, minister of the interior.* From atop a “reformed” Turkish army a suitable Prussian officer could not only secure German territorial and economic interests in the Near East, like the Berlin-Baghdad railway, but also plan the strategy and operations of a “future war.”39
Time would truncate the most grandiose features of von Wangenheim’s scheme (“Many good intentions but much that is fantastic!” the kaiser wrote in the margin of the cable), but not this one.40
When, on Au
gust 2, 1914, Turkey and Germany concluded an offensive and defensive alliance against Russia, General von Sanders, on the ground since December, assumed effective command of the Turkish army. As Wangenheim had foreseen, for the next four years “Liman Pasha” directed the Turkish war effort, including the defense of the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula, of sorrowful memory in Australia and New Zealand. Having prepared their gun emplacements beginning two months before Sarajevo, German artillerists closed the Straits against Russian shipping, severing the only all-season line of communications between Russia and its allies, stoppering its grain exports, and starving its army of supplies. Defeat, and revolution, followed. “In the perspective of history, Bolshevism may well appear as nothing more than the economic consequences of the closing of the Straits.”41
From the first, the Russians treated the von Sanders mission like a reconnaissance for Wangenheim’s “future war.” They could hardly believe it: Germany was trying to seize “the keys and gates to the Russian house.”
Kokovtsov was in Berlin when the von Sanders story broke. Returning home from Paris after weeks spent negotiating a 500-million-franc loan to build railroads, including those “strategic” lines to Russia’s borders with Germany so worrying to Bethmann, he had stopped in Berlin to thank the kaiser for decorating him with the Order of the Black Eagle. His rarely cited memoirs, as those by no other statesman of the time, present extended scenes with both the tsar and the kaiser.
Sazonov telegraphed the details. The tsar tasked Kokovtsov with “requesting an explanation from the German government regarding its intentions concerning General Liman von Sanders and with announcing that we shall on no account agree to its plan.”42
Carrying this peremptory demarche with him, Kokovtsov called on Bethmann Hollweg. The kaiser and his military cabinet had sent von Sanders; the chancellor had learned of it only at the same time as the Russians. German foreign policy was being made by the military clique that spurned government oversight in the Zabern Affair and with the same insouciance toward political complications. Now in the loop, Bethmann told Kokovtsov that he was at a loss to understand Russian protestations over von Sanders, since the tsar, in conversation with the kaiser, had approved the mission in May, when in Potsdam for the wedding of the kaiser’s daughter, the Princess Louise.* If Nicholas had not seen fit to share the information with his own government, Bethmann implied, the German government could hardly be blamed.
“I sensed that war was becoming inevitable,” Bethmann, speaking of this meeting, told a Berlin journalist in an off-the-record interview in 1915, and that it would start when Russia’s rail lines through Poland were finished. Bethmann claimed that he “sensed from [Kokovtsov] that he himself feared this would set the war in motion.”
The next day the emperor and empress received Kokovtsov at their Potsdam palace. Wilhelm wore the uniform of a colonel in a Russian regiment. As a private joke Nicholas had once given him the uniform of a “guard’s regiment” that, unbeknownst to Wilhelm, had occupied Berlin during the Seven Years’ War; perhaps this was the same one. Over lunch Kokovtsov voiced his “regret” that Germany had not informed Russia of the von Sanders mission “until this late date.” But he had informed Nicholas, the kaiser insisted, and he found the tsar’s “interference now that all the details had been arranged … inconsistent” and irritating.43
Kokovtsov sat on the kaiser’s right at the luncheon table; a Russian colleague, L. F. Davydov, the director of the Special Credit Office, on his left. Wilhelm vented his irritation on this subordinate. The French loan to finance commercial railways in Russia, the kaiser complained, could also be used to construct “strategic railways,” could it not? Next, he decried the “Germanophobia” in the French, British, and Russian papers. Then, the political unconscious punching through his vexation over a bad press, came a whiff of Armageddon: “The outbursts of your press … have become insufferable; they will lead inevitably to a catastrophe which I shall be powerless to avert.” Nodding at Kokovtsov, the kaiser said, “Tell this to your chief.”
Davydov began to explain about the “unruly … Russian press,” pointing out how many papers were against the government and how little under Russian law it could do to censor what they published. “Can I help it if the situation is as you say?” the kaiser broke in. “Nevertheless I must tell you frankly that I fear there will be a clash between Slav and German, and I feel it my duty to apprise you of this fact.” In a 1912 letter Wilhelm phrased this scenario more bluntly: “There is about to be a racial struggle between the Teutons and the Slavs who have become uppish.”
Verbal violence was habitual with the kaiser. “He’s raving mad!” Nicholas declared after suffering Wilhelm’s feverish talk, punctuated by slaps on the back and pokes in the Romanov ribs, through an interminable 1902 weekend at Reval. Still, even discounting for his chronic vehemence, the kaiser’s darkening mind licensed a dark Russian fear: Was the von Sanders mission the first move in a race war?44
Kokovtsov had not, after all, shown Sazonov’s cable to Bethmann, forfeiting visual impact. Worse, on the eve of his departure from Berlin, he undercut the message Sazonov wanted conveyed (“we shall on no account agree to its plan”) by remarks made in an interview with Theodor Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, remarks that can only have reinforced the kaiser’s belief that Russia’s instability meant Russia was not ready for war. Wolff asked if the Russian prime minister “thought Russia’s domestic peace could be preserved,” given the impression in Germany that “the revolutionary movement” was deeply rooted. Kokovtsov replied that “revolutionary outbursts” being reported in the German press were confined to a few industrial centers. But, yes, “Russia needed peace more than any other country” to continue her rapid growth of the last seven years. Russia needed peace more than any other country … Germany counted on it.45
On December 14, 1913, General Liman von Sanders and the forty officers of his mission arrived in Constantinople, met at the terminal of the Hamburg-Baghdad railway, Sanders recalled, “by a company of a regiment … which I found later in the Dardanelles campaign to be an elite body of troops.” Having vainly protested his going, the Russians now vainly protested his staying.46
They proposed a face-saving compromise: Sanders to stay but his command shifted to an army corps not based in Constantinople. The Germans suggested an alternative, one their Major von Strempel, the military attaché in Constantinople, had recommended in November when the Russian storm broke, as a more advantageous arrangement for Germany than the original Sanders mission: “If the German General were Inspector-General … then he would have much more to say than as a mere Chief of the Mission and Commanding General of a Corps.” Late in December 1913, Ambassador von Wangenheim cabled Berlin: “We must try our best to offer Russia a sop.” Sanders based in Constantinople as inspector general of the whole Turkish army was the sop.47
General Liman von Sanders. His presence in Constantinople was historic. It gave Russia and Germany something they never had before—a reason to fight.
Russia’s nationalist press was not fooled. Did Russia’s diplomats “really believe that by giving the German generals greater authority over the Turkish forces than originally envisioned they had gained a victory over anybody?” Novoe vremia asked. Nor was the Russian military attaché in Constantinople, who warned St. Petersburg: “The Germans weren’t training the Turkish army for a war with Greece but for a future European clash in which they counted on being able to throw it on the scales on Germany’s side.”48
But the Russians had no choice. Their entente partners were unwilling to back their hard line; with an adviser attached to the Turkish navy, Britain could not support Russia’s call for the removal of a German adviser to the Turkish army. It was the sop or war. They chose the sop, making one condition—that to assuage Russian opinion the change of mission be announced at once. The Germans were sorry; they could not do that. Their public was aroused, too. As the German deputy foreign minister Arthur Zimmerma
nn explained to Sazonov, the Reichstag debate over the army’s conduct in Zabern had placed the government in a “very precarious position.” It would be months before Germany could shift von Sanders to his new post, weeks before the deal could be publicly announced. Meanwhile, the Russians should trust in Germany’s good intentions.49
“The Opportunity of the Year 1914” by Alberto Martini. This Italian postcard depicts the kaiser’s courtship of Islam. The feathers allude to the sultan, who kept peacocks at his court. Wilhelm holds a cup of blood. The hairy figure on the left readying to ignite the globe is Death.
Germany had no good intentions toward Russia. Nicholas and Sazonov had now to face the implications of that epiphany. International relations theorists use the Liman affair as a case study in threat perception. Lacking trustworthy communication between them, rival states govern their behavior toward each other by observing mutually understood rules of the game. The von Sanders mission broke the rules. “The sign from which an intention is inferred consists of stepping over a ‘boundary’ on a conceptual dimension,” according to one theorist. “The boundary was created, whether tacitly or explicitly, as a mutually recognized and recognizable limitation of other actors’ behavior. Beyond it there is unlikely … to be another stopping place … Since the boundary … marks the only agreed restraint on action, the victim will understand the infringement as a statement of intent by his opponent to proceed further,” an action that he “would only have undertaken if he were prepared to risk conflict. Therefore, the victim will conclude, his action can only be interpreted as a challenge to the existing balance of relations as whole.” To Sazonov, Germany was breaking the “gentleman’s agreement” on equality of status among the Great Powers in Constantinople. Seeking a “privileged position,” it threatened to upset the “balance of powers” in the Ottoman Empire, he told the French ambassador.50
