The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (33 page)

The Russo-Japanese War came about largely because Nicholas had come to resent Witte’s control of policy in the Far East and so listened to a group of ambitious reactionaries who wanted to get their hands on Far Eastern resources. They urged that Russia extend its influence into northern Korea and consolidate its hold in Manchuria, even at the risk of a confrontation with Japan. They played on both Nicholas’s mistrust of his own officials and his contempt for Japan, strengthening his view that it was best to be firm with such ‘a barbarous country’.
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With their enthusiastic support, Nicholas dismissed Witte in 1903 and appointed a special Viceroy for the Far East who promptly made relations with Japan even worse. The Russian Foreign Office, which had been sidelined in the Far East, unsuccessfully tried to reassure international opinion, which was growing increasingly concerned about the incoherence of Russia’s foreign policy and the possibility of war. Even Nicholas showed some concern. ‘I do not wish war between Russia and Japan,’ he ordered, ‘and will not permit this war. Take all measures so that there is no war.’
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Matters by this point were out of control: the Japanese, whose proposals for an understanding over Korea and Manchuria had been repeatedly rebuffed, decided on war. As Russia’s Foreign Minister, Count Vladimir Lamsdorff, said in 1904, ‘The complete disorganization of our political activity in the Far East, the occult intervention of a pack of irresponsible adventurers and intriguers, has led us to a catastrophe.’
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In the course of his reign, Nicholas’s ministers found themselves in an almost impossible situation as servants of both Russia and the tsar. Even when they felt strongly that a particular policy should be adopted they could not bring themselves to disagree with the tsar. Vladimir Lenin, as yet a little-known revolutionary, perceptively called it the ‘crisis of the heights’.
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Yet because the regime was highly personalised when matters went wrong, as they did in the Russo-Japanese War and, on a much greater scale, in the Great War, Russian public opinion, an increasingly important force, tended to place the blame on the tsar himself.

What made matters worse and added to Nicholas’s isolation was his marriage. Not that it was unhappy, quite the opposite, but it created a cocoon of cosy domesticity and an increasingly effective barrier against the world. Nicholas and Alexandra had loved each other since they
were teenagers. She was German, from the small duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, although as a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra preferred to describe herself as English. Queen Victoria, who was strongly anti-Russian, fortunately took a liking to Nicholas and gave her approval. Alexandra herself was the main obstacle because she could not at first face giving up her Protestant faith and converting to Russian Orthodoxy. After a tremendous struggle with herself and much pressure from her family, who wanted such a glorious alliance, she gave way and, in floods of tears, accepted Nicholas. (It may be too, as some unkindly said, that she wanted to get away from her oldest brother’s new wife.
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) Like converts often do, she was to become more Orthodox and more Russian than the Russians. She also devoted herself heart and soul to Nicholas and to his interests, as she conceived them to be.

Their wedding was both magnificent and sombre. It had been planned before Alexander III’s sudden decline and death and took place a week after his funeral. Was that a bad omen, as people later said? If so, the coronation which followed a year and a half later was much more so. The ceremony itself went off well but there was a disaster at the great public celebration on the outskirts of Moscow which followed, where beer and sausages and commemorative presents were going to be distributed. Russians had come from all over the country, many of them on the new railways, and by early morning some half a million people had assembled. The crowd panicked at rumours that there was not enough to go round and in the ensuing stampede thousands were trampled and over a thousand, perhaps more, crushed to death. That evening, the French embassy was holding a ball on which France had lavished millions of roubles. Reluctantly, under pressure from their ministers who wanted to celebrate the French alliance, the young tsar and tsarina attended. It was a bad mistake which helped to give the young couple a reputation for heartlessness.
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Alexandra was more intellectual than Nicholas and loved discussions, especially about religion. She had a strong sense of duty and believed that, as a good Christian, she had an obligation to help the less fortunate. As tsarina, she set an admirable example by working with charities from famine relief to care for the sick. She was unfortunately also highly emotional, neurotic, and painfully shy. Where her mother-in-law had entered easily into St Petersburg society and had presided
with aplomb over the elaborate court balls and receptions, Alexandra was awkward and clearly unhappy in public. ‘She never spoke a single pleasant word to anyone,’ said a critical grande dame. ‘She might have been a block of ice, freezing everyone round her.’
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Like Wilhelm’s wife, she was also prudish and unforgiving of the sins of others. She decided to invite only women with spotless reputations to court balls; the result was the elimination from the list of most of the leaders of society.
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She was equally determined when it came to supporting her favourites for posts, even when they were manifestly unsuited. As one of the senior court officials said, she had ‘a will of iron linked to not much brain and no knowledge’.
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Alexandra also brought another disadvantage to her new position, but it was one that did not become apparent for several years. Through Queen Victoria, she was a carrier of the gene for haemophilia, a disease which normally strikes only males. Haemophiliacs lack the substance which makes blood clot with the result that any cut, any bruise, virtually any accident, might cause their death. Alexandra’s and Nicholas’s only son Alexis had the disease and nearly died on several occasions during his childhood. His frantic mother scoured Russia and Europe for a cure, calling to the child’s bedside doctors, charlatans, savants, reputed miracle workers, and, fatally for the reputation of the imperial family, the corrupt and degenerate Rasputin.

As Alexandra’s health deteriorated, partly as a result of frequent pregnancies, she withdrew from much social life. Nicholas rarely visited his capital, especially after 1905. Even his mother, who rarely criticised him, said: ‘The Emperor sees no one, he ought to see more people.’
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By preference and for security reasons, the family lived outside St Petersburg on the imperial estate at Tsarskoye Selo, behind high spiked fences which, after 1905, were topped by ten feet of barbed wire. In the summers they migrated to the equally secluded estate at Peterhof beside the Baltic Sea. There were also trips on the imperial yacht, to imperial hunting lodges or the imperial palace in the Crimea.

The family at the heart of all this grandeur, surrounded by a rigid and complicated etiquette and served by thousands of servants, guards and courtiers, was a simple and happy one, its members intensely private and curiously unworldly. Alexandra prided herself on her thrift and the tsar proudly wore out his clothes. The court doctor’s son later wrote of
their world: ‘The enchanted little fairyland of Tsarskoye Selo slumbered peacefully on the brink of an abyss, lulled by the sweet songs of bewhiskered sirens who gently hummed “God Save the Tsar”.’
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Both were devoted to their sick son and their four daughters, excessively so in the opinion of Charles Hardinge when he was British ambassador to Russia during the Russo-Japanese War. Nicholas seemed oddly unmoved, he reported, by the events of Bloody Sunday and the upheavals in his capital and rather than seeing advisers spent his time hunting, his great passion, and playing with the baby Alexis. ‘I can only explain’, Hardinge told London, ‘by that mystic fatalism which is deeply imbued in his nature, together with the idea that a miracle will be performed & that all will come right in the end.’
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In 1905 it took the visible and mounting evidence that his regime was losing control over Russia as well as strong pressure from virtually everyone close to him including his mother to convince Nicholas that he had to make substantial concessions and that he had to bring back Witte to lead the government. At the beginning of October he reluctantly agreed to see his former Finance Minister, who set as his condition for taking up office the granting of a constitution and civil liberties. Nicholas tried to persuade his cousin Nicholas Nikolayevich to set up a military dictatorship instead but after a fearful scene in which the Grand Duke apparently threatened to shoot himself on the spot if Witte was not appointed gave way. ‘My only consolation,’ the unhappy tsar wrote to his mother, ‘is that such is the will of God, and this grave decision will lead my dear Russia out of the intolerable chaos she has been in for nearly a year.’
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After 1905 Nicholas continued to hope that miracles would happen and that he could go back on his promises. In the years before the war, he did his best to undermine the constitution and to limit civil liberties. He opened the first Duma in April 1906 and dissolved it that same July. In 1907, he issued a decree which changed the electoral laws so that conservative landowning forces had greater representation in the Duma and liberals and the left considerably less. Nicholas also did his best to ignore Witte (although he was duly grateful to him for getting a large loan from France which saved Russia from going bankrupt) and was successful in getting rid of him shortly before the Duma met for the first time.

Nevertheless it was impossible to reverse course completely. From
1905 onwards the government had to deal with the new factor of public opinion. The press, in spite of attempts by the authorities to censor it, was increasingly outspoken. Deputies in the Duma had the freedom to speak there without fear of prosecution. Political parties were still weak and without deep roots in Russian society but they were capable, if only given time, of developing into more formidable political forces. True, the new constitution described the tsar as the Supreme Autocratic Power and he still controlled foreign policy, the military and the Orthodox Church, and had the right to appoint and dismiss ministers, veto any piece of legislation, dissolve the Duma and declare martial law. Yet the fact that there
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such a document implied that there were limits to his power. The Duma was largely a talking shop with ill-defined powers but it did have the right to ask government ministers to come before it for questioning and to appropriate money for the army and navy if it chose (although it could not refuse to approve the government’s military budget).

Nicholas also had to accept a Council of Ministers which was intended to function like a Cabinet to co-ordinate and direct government policy and whose chair would be the link between all the ministers and the tsar. Witte, its first chair, found his position impossible because Nicholas continued to consult individual ministers as he pleased. His successor, Peter Stolypin, lasted until 1911, partly because the tsar, at first, trusted him, and partly because Nicholas withdrew from much day-today involvement with policy after 1905. Nicholas also admired him, as did many in the ruling circles, for his physical courage. In 1906 terrorists blew up his summer villa near St Petersburg; some dozens were killed or wounded and two of his own children seriously injured but Stolypin bore himself with great fortitude and self-control.
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Tall, erect, sombre, with correct and formal manners, Stolypin impressed almost everyone who came into contact with him. He was as talented and energetic as Witte and like him was dedicated to bringing about reform and progress in Russia. And like his predecessor he was naturally authoritarian and determined to crush the revolutionaries. He recognised, though, that the government would have to work with at least some of the new political forces emerging in Russia and he tried with some success to build a conservative coalition in the Duma. To undercut the appeal of the revolutionaries among the peasants, he
promoted reforms to allow peasants to own the land they worked. In the long run, though, the old pattern asserted itself and Nicholas became envious and resentful of the power of his Prime Minister. By 1911, a British diplomat reported, Stolypin was depressed and felt his position to be insecure. In September his fate was settled, with dreadful finality, when a terrorist, who seems also to have been a police agent, walked up to him at the opera in Kiev and shot him point blank. Mortally wounded, Stolypin is reported to have said, ‘I am done for,’ or, more dramatically, ‘I am happy to die for the Tsar.’
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He died four days later. It is just possible that, if he had survived, he would have provided strong leadership for the next years, perhaps even acting as a force for caution and moderation when the great European crisis came in the summer of 1914.

There had always been an element of bluff in Russia’s claim to be a European power. As Alexander II’s Foreign Minister said in 1876: ‘We are a great, powerless country. True. There is nothing more fortunate than knowing that truth. One can always dress up finely but one needs to know that one is dressing up.’
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Sometimes Russia had dressed up to spectacular effect, when, for example, it had helped to defeat Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I marched his troops through Paris at the end of the Napoleonic Wars or when Russian troops had helped to save the Habsburg monarchy during the revolutions of 1848. It had also known defeat with the Crimean War in the middle of the nineteenth century and of course most recently the Russo-Japanese War. Stolypin was deeply aware of Russia’s weakness both domestically and internationally after the war and how the two were linked. ‘Our internal situation,’ he commented shortly after he became Prime Minister, ‘does not permit us to conduct an aggressive foreign policy.’
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He was determined, unlike his successors, to avoid provocative international moves. Any more failures abroad were likely to set off fresh revolutions at home. On the other hand an appearance of weakness might encourage the other powers to take advantage of Russia.