The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (32 page)

The Russo-Japanese War and its aftermath left Russia seriously weakened at home and dangerously vulnerable abroad. Its navy was shattered and what was left of its army largely deployed against the Russian people themselves. Colonel Yury Danilov, one of Russia’s most efficient officers, said: ‘As an infantry regiment commander I was able to be in touch with real military life and the army’s needs during 1906–1908. And I cannot think of any better description for the period up to and including 1906–1910 and maybe even for a longer time than as one of total military helplessness.’
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Russia needed to rebuild and overhaul its armed forces but it faced two difficult if not insurmountable challenges: first, a strongly entrenched resistance to change in both the military and the civilian establishments and, second, the costs of such a refurbishment. Russia had the ambitions of a first-rate power with the economy of a developing but still backward country. To make matters worse, in the first decade of the twentieth century, military expenditures were climbing throughout Europe as military technology became more expensive and armies and navies grew bigger. The Soviet Union faced a similar challenge after 1945; it managed to keep up with
the United States in the military area but at the cost of much sacrifice for Soviet society and in the end the effort helped to bring down the regime.

In Russia in the years after 1905 much hinged on what the man at the top decided to do. Nicholas II was an absolute monarch who could appoint and dismiss ministers at will, determine policy, and, in wartime, command the armed forces. Before 1905, unlike his cousin Wilhelm in Germany, he did not have to worry about a constitution, an elected parliament, or the rights of his subjects. Even after the concessions of that year, he had greater power than either the Kaiser or the Austrian emperor, both of whom had to deal with greater control over their governments and over spending from their legislatures and who, in addition, had states inside their empires with strongly entrenched rights of their own. Nicholas’s character and views are therefore of crucial importance in understanding Russia’s road towards the Great War.

Nicholas was only twenty-six in 1894 when he became tsar of Russia. Queen Victoria had yet to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee and her grandson, the future George V, was a naval officer. In Germany Wilhelm had been on his throne for just six years. No one including Nicholas himself had expected him to become ruler so early on. His father, Alexander III, was massive and strong; it is said that he had once saved his family by holding up the roof of their carriage in a train crash. He fell ill, though, in his late forties with kidney disease and perhaps hastened his end by continuing to drink hard.
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Nicholas, who had loved and admired his formidable father, was grief-stricken when he died. He was also in despair, said his sister, the Grand Duchess Olga: ‘He kept saying that he did not know what would become of us all, that he was wholly unfit to reign.’
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He was probably right. Russia at the turn of the century, with all its problems, might have been too much for any ruler, but Nicholas was better fitted to be a country squire or the mayor of a small town. Perhaps because his father had been such an overwhelming personality, he lacked confidence. He compensated, being rigid and stubborn where a wiser and more self-assured person would have been prepared to make compromises or be flexible. He disliked opposition or confrontation. ‘He grasps what he hears,’ said a former tutor, ‘but grasps only the meaning of the isolated fact, without relation to the rest,
without connection to the totality of other factors, events, currents, phenomena … For him there exists no broad, general view worked out through the exchange of ideas, arguments, debate.’
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He was also notoriously indecisive. An observer reported that the common view was: ‘He has no character, that he agrees with each of his ministers in spite of the fact that they report the opposite of one another.’
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Under Nicholas, Russian policy at home and abroad was to be fitful, erratic and confused. He had an excellent memory and his courtiers claimed that he was intelligent but he sometimes showed a credulity which verged on the simple-minded. A foreign contractor, for example, once persuaded him that it was possible to build a bridge across the Bering Strait to join Siberia to North America. (The contractor was to get vast concessions of land along the proposed railway line leading to the bridge.)
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His upbringing had not equipped him with an understanding of Russia, much less of the wider world. Nicholas’s childhood was, unlike that of Wilhelm, a happy one. The tsar and tsarina adored their children but perhaps tried too hard to protect them. Nicholas and his brothers and sisters were educated at home and rarely mixed with other children. As a result Nicholas did not have what other monarchs such as Wilhelm, Edward VII and George V had, and that was some experience of education with other young men of his age and much less the opportunity to meet people of different classes. Nor did he know his country. The Russia of Nicholas and his siblings was a deeply unreal bubble of privilege, of palaces, special trains, and yachts. Occasionally another Russia intruded, horrifyingly so when their grandfather, Alexander II, was assassinated by a bomb and Nicholas was taken to his deathbed. For Nicholas and his family the real Russia was peopled by happy loyal peasants like those who worked on the imperial estates. There was little in their education or their lives to challenge that simplistic view or make them aware of the tremendous changes that Russian society was undergoing.
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Nicholas followed a course of studies like that of a young Russian nobleman. He acquired languages – he spoke French, German, English and Russian fluently – studied history, which he liked, and learned some mathematics, chemistry and geography. When he was seventeen he was given special courses in such subjects as law and economics, although he does not appear to have shown much enthusiasm for them.
What he also learned were exquisite manners and strong self-control from an English tutor. ‘I had rarely’, said Count Sergei Witte, his Prime Minister, ‘come across a better-mannered young man than Nicholas II. His good-breeding conceals all short comings.’
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When he was nineteen, Nicholas was given a commission in the Preobrazhensky Guards. He loved being with the rich young aristocrats who were his fellow officers, loved the easy-going life in the mess with its many amusements and loved the uncomplicated ordered days in camp. He told his mother that he felt completely at home, ‘one of the genuine consolations of my life now!’
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Like Wilhelm, he kept a strong affection for the military for the rest of his life. (And he also loved to fuss about the details of uniforms.) As his cousin the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich said of Nicholas: ‘He developed an immense liking for military service. It appealed to his passive nature. One executed orders and did not have to worry over the vast problems handled by superiors.’
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After his military service, Nicholas was sent off on a world tour, which he liked rather less. He conceived a particular dislike for Japan and the Japanese when a policeman, who had gone mad, tried to kill him.

Even in his mid twenties Nicholas remained curiously callow. Witte, who was concerned about the education of the future tsar, suggested to Alexander III that he give Nicholas some experience by making him chair of the Commission for the Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. ‘Have you ever tried to discuss anything of real consequence with him?’ Alexander asked. Witte said he had not. ‘Well he’s an absolute child,’ said the tsar. ‘His opinions are utterly childish. How could he preside over such a committee?’
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Early in his reign Nicholas complained to his Minister of Foreign Affairs: ‘I know nothing. The late emperor did not foresee his death and did not let me in on any government business.’
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A slight, handsome man with blue eyes, Nicholas took more after his mother, a Danish princess whose sister had married Edward VII of Britain. He and George V, his first cousin, looked strikingly similar, especially when they both grew small, neat, pointed beards. His contemporaries found Nicholas charming but somehow elusive. Each time he met the tsar, said one of his diplomats, ‘I had carried away the impression of great kindness and extreme personal
politesse
, of a ready and subtle wit slightly tinged with sarcasm, and of a very quick though
somewhat superficial mind’.
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Outside his immediate family and trusted courtiers, who were usually military men, he was guarded. As tsar, he would manifest a pattern of at first placing confidence in a particular minister and then coming to resent that dependence, which in turn would lead to the man being dismissed. Shortly before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the War Minister General Kuropatkin tried to resign in protest against the tsar’s undermining of his authority. The tsar, he felt, might trust him more when he was out of office. Nicholas agreed: ‘It is strange, you know, but perhaps that is psychologically accurate.’
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Nicholas inherited one of Russia’s most outstanding statesmen of the prewar period, Sergei Witte, from his father. Witte was, as a British diplomat said, ‘a strong and energetic man, absolutely fearless, and of extraordinary initiative power’.
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As Minister of Finance between 1892 and 1903, Witte built his ministry into the core of Russia’s government with responsibility for the country’s financial management and its economy. He tried to make Russia’s agriculture and local government more efficient, partly so Russia could export grain in order to raise the necessary funds for development. He pushed Russia’s rapid industrialisation and the exploitation of its newly acquired territories in the Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railway was very much Witte’s project. As he accumulated power, however, he also attracted enemies and those came to include Nicholas. In 1903 Witte had a long and apparently amicable audience with the tsar: ‘He shook my hand. He embraced me. He wished me all the luck in the world. I returned home beside myself with happiness and found a written order for my dismissal lying on my desk.’
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Nicholas brought to his reign three key beliefs: in the Romanovs, the Orthodox religion and Russia. And for him they were virtually interchangeable. In his mind, his family had been entrusted with Russia by God. ‘If you find me so little troubled,’ Nicholas said to one of his officials during the troubles of 1905, ‘it is because I have the firm and absolute faith that the destiny of Russia, my own fate and that of my family are in the hands of Almighty God who has placed me where I am. Whatever may happen, I shall bow to His will, conscious that I have never had any other thought but that of serving the country he has entrusted me with.’
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Reverence for his father and a determination to conserve the regime as it had been handed down by his ancestors made Nicholas deeply conservative and noticeably fatalistic. In the first year
of his reign, he turned down a very moderate request from the representatives of the fledgling local governments, the
zemstvos
, for a greater say in running their own affairs. ‘Let everyone know that, devoting all my strength to the good of my people, I will preserve the principles of autocracy as firmly and undeviatingly as did my late unforgettable father.’
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To Nicholas as to his father, autocracy was the form of government that suited the Russian people, in all their diversity, best. He explained to his Minister of the Interior in October 1905 why he was resisting conceding a Duma and civil rights: ‘You know, I don’t hold to autocracy for my own pleasure. I act in this sense only because I am convinced that it is necessary for Russia. If it was simply a question of myself I would happily get rid of all this.’
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The problem was that Nicholas wanted to conserve the power bequeathed him but he had very little idea of what he wanted to do with it. Nor did he have an ability to pick good advisers or listen to them. He tended to rely on those who were close to him such as his mother or Romanov uncles and cousins who, with few exceptions, were venal and idle. He also had a series of pious advisers if not charlatans, one the Frenchman M. Philippe, a former butcher from Lyons, the most notorious of all the Russian holy man Rasputin, whose religious fervour did not make up for their many deficiencies. Already deeply religious, Nicholas also dabbled in the spiritualism which was so popular across Europe at the time. The tsar, said the British ambassador in 1906 ‘will not derive much useful counsel or assistance from planchette or spirit rapping’.
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His officials worried about the influence of the court on the tsar but had limited means to counteract it. When he was forced to have a Council of Ministers after 1905, he did his best to ignore it. He saw his ministers only when he chose to and most usually separately. He was invariably courteous but detached and uninterested except for matters involving foreign affairs, the military or internal security. Most felt, correctly, that he did not have confidence in them. As one said to another early in Nicholas’s reign: ‘God preserve you from relying on the Emperor even for a second on any matter; he is incapable of supporting anyone over anything.’
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His ministers and officials noticed that if they raised subjects that he did not want to discuss, he politely but firmly declined to take notice. As he gained in confidence over the years, Nicholas asserted himself more and became less likely to listen to unwanted advice.