The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (36 page)

When Wilhelm and Nicholas met on their yachts again in the summer of 1907 both Bülow – who had graciously given way to Wilhelm’s plea to remain in office – and the new Russian Foreign Minister, Alexander Izvolsky, were in attendance. The visit went off with no difficulties beyond an unfortunate impromptu speech by the Kaiser in which he boasted of his mighty navy and hoped that the tsar would soon build a new one. ‘Now the only thing missing’, said a Russian aide sourly about the Kaiser to one of his German counterparts, ‘is for him to slap him in the face.’
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Björkö was the last significant episode of personal diplomacy between two monarchs, which would have seemed quite normal in the nineteenth century but was out of place in the twentieth when the increasing complexities of modern societies gave greater authority to officials even in absolute monarchies. An unfortunate consequence was to deepen suspicion of Germany and Wilhelm himself, both in Russian official circles and among the general public. The government found that it was increasingly handicapped when it tried to improve relations with its western neighbour. The British ambassador reported on a conversation with the tsar in 1908:

The Emperor admitted that from the point of view of the relations of Russia to Germany, the liberty of the press had caused him and his government considerable embarrassment since every incident that occurred in any distant province of the empire, such as an earthquake or thunderstorm, was at once put down to Germany’s account, and serious complaints had recently been made to him and the government of the unfriendly tone of the Russian press.
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At the start of 1906 Witte, who had inclined towards an alliance with Germany, had something of a change of heart, perhaps as a result of the Björkö affair, and told the British embassy in St Petersburg that what Russia needed at this critical juncture in its history was the sympathy and support of a great liberal power. It also helped that Britain
was a great financial power capable of making the loans that Russia so desperately required. If Britain could give tangible proof of its friendship, Witte felt, an overall understanding would soon follow.
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Loan negotiations were in fact going on between the Russian government and Barings Bank with the encouragement of the British Foreign Office, but because of political upheavals in both countries they were not concluded until the spring of 1906.
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Under pressure from Witte, Lamsdorff agreed to opening discussions on Persia and Afghanistan. These moved slowly; Lamsdorff was unenthusiastic and both countries were preoccupied by a crisis over Morocco which threatened to bring a major European conflict.

In the spring of 1906 the situation suddenly became more favourable to an understanding. Witte was dismissed and Lamsdorff asked the tsar to accept his resignation because he could not face the prospect of dealing with the new Duma. ‘You would have to wait a long time,’ he told Taube, ‘before I would deign to speak to those people there.’
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The new Prime Minister, Stolypin, was much more open to the idea of a détente with Britain, partly because of Russia’s weakness and partly because Britain had successfully hemmed Russia in along its eastern and southern frontiers by renewing its treaty with Japan in 1905, signing a convention with Tibet, and moving more aggressively into Persia. Izvolsky, Lamsdorff’s successor, was even more convinced that Russia’s interests lay in Europe and that the key to rebuilding its status as a power lay in maintaining the French alliance and coming to some sort of understanding with the British. Both men also agreed in the years after 1906 that, given the developments in Russia’s internal politics, the Duma and public opinion had to be involved in foreign policy.

Izvolsky and Taube had a long discussion shortly before he took up office. His goals, the new Foreign Minister told Taube, were to put relations with Japan on a solid and friendly footing and ‘liquidate the inheritance of Count Lamsdorff in Asia’. Then, he went on, ‘Russia could turn afresh, after an interval of many years, towards Europe, where its traditional and historic interests have been practically abandoned for the sake of these ephemeral dreams about the Far East for which we have paid too dearly …’
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Izvolsky was one of those Russians who saw Europe as the club they wanted most in the world to join. As he said in 1911 after he had left office, the policy of closer relations with
France and Britain was ‘perhaps less secure but worthier of Russia’s past and of her greatness’.
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He was more of a gambler than Stolypin but, unfortunately for Russian foreign policy, he also tended to lose his nerve at inopportune moments.

Izvolsky, almost everyone agreed, was charming, ambitious and intelligent as well as vain and easily flattered. He was also highly sensitive to criticism. He had Lamsdorff’s capacity for hard work and attention to detail but unlike his predecessor he was a liberal and had considerably more experience of the world outside Russia. In appearance, in the words of the future Austrian Foreign Secretary Leopold von Berchtold, he was of ‘middle height, blond hair parted and with a ruddy face, broad forehead, cloudy eyes, compressed nose, protruding brow, a monocle, and a faultless suit’.
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Although he was generally considered to be ugly, Izvolsky took great pride in his appearance, wearing well-cut suits from Savile Row in London and cramming his feet into shoes that were too small with the result, said one observer, that he walked like a pigeon.
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His family were minor nobility of modest means but they had managed to send Izvolsky to the best school in St Petersburg, the Imperiale Alexandre Lycée, where he had mixed with much grander and much richer young men. It had made him, Taube felt, snobbish, egotistical and materialistic. As a young man Izvolsky was desperate to marry well. One well-connected widow who turned him down was later asked if she regretted having missed the chance to marry someone who had done so well. ‘I have regretted it every day’, she replied, ‘but congratulated myself every night.’
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He eventually married the daughter of another Russian diplomat but there was never enough money for him to live in the grand style to which he aspired and there was always gossip in St Petersburg about the way in which rich men got their promotions under him.
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Taube, who worked with him closely over the years, always felt that there were two men with quite different values warring inside Izvolsky: the statesman and the greedy courtier.
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The British were initially apprehensive about Izvolsky’s appointment. The British ambassador in Copenhagen reported to London on a conversation with his French counterpart, who knew Izvolsky well; the new Russian Foreign Minister, it appeared, was lukewarm about the French alliance and inclined to be pro-German.
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This, fortunately for
the future of Anglo-Russian relations, was misleading. Izvolsky was determined to negotiate an understanding with Britain and the tsar, although he made a face at the idea, was now ready to give his approval.
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The situation in Russia was starting to improve and it looked as though a revolution had been averted so the British had a party with which to negotiate. On the British side, there was a new Liberal government and a new Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who were determined to pursue the opportunity. One of Grey’s first meetings after he took office in December 1905 was with Benckendorff to assure the Russian ambassador that he wanted an agreement with Russia. In May 1906 Sir Arthur Nicolson arrived as British ambassador in St Petersburg with authority from the Cabinet to sort out with Izvolsky the three main irritants in the relationship: Tibet, Persia and Afghanistan. The locals were not, of course, consulted while their fate was decided thousands of miles away.

The negotiations were long and tedious as might be expected between two parties, ‘each of which thought the other was a liar and a thief’, as one British diplomat put it.
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And there were moments when the talks were nearly broken off, when, for example, Izvolsky got worried that Germany was going to object, or when the British Prime Minister, Henry Campbell Bannerman, tactlessly made a speech saying ‘Vive la Douma’. Tibet, where part of the Great Game had been played out between British and Russian agents, was the easiest to settle. Both sides agreed not to try to get concessions out of the weak Tibetan government or to establish political relations with the Dalai Lama and, in a clause that would cast a shadow over Tibet’s future, Russia agreed to recognise China’s suzerainty over the country.

Afghanistan took longer and was not finally settled until the late summer of 1907. The Russians made the greatest concessions, accepting that Afghanistan was in the British sphere of influence and that Russia was only to deal with the Emir through Britain. In return Britain promised only that it would not occupy or annex Afghanistan – as long as the Emir kept to his treaty agreements with them. The most difficult issue of all to settle was Persia, although news of a German railway loan to the Shah helped to keep both sides focussed. It also helped that Izvolsky was prepared to go to considerable lengths to get an agreement. In the summer of 1906, when there was discussion in St Petersburg of promoting a Russian–Persian bank in Teheran (which would have
alarmed the British), he said firmly: ‘We are trying to conclude an alliance with England and, as a result, our policy in Persia must conform to that fact.’
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After much debate over demarcation lines, it was agreed that Persia would have a Russian zone of influence in the north, a British one in the south to protect the Gulf and the routes to India, and a neutral zone between them. The British ambassador in Teheran warned that the Persian government had heard rumours about the negotiations and would be seriously concerned and angry. With the insouciance towards the non-European world typical of the time, the British Foreign Office replied that the Persians should understand that the agreement was in fact respecting the integrity of their country.
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The Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which had caused so much trouble in the nineteenth century, were left out on the grounds that the convention only dealt with Asia but Grey gave Benckendorff to understand that the British would not make difficulties for the Russians in the future over their access to the Straits.
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On 31 August 1907 the Anglo-Russian Convention ‘containing arrangements on the subject of Persia, Afghanistan and Thibet [sic]’ was signed in the Russian Foreign Office.

Everyone understood that more was involved than the ‘arrangements’. Although Germany publicly welcomed the news on the grounds that it furthered peace, Bülow told the Kaiser that Germany was now the chief object of British anxieties and jealousy. Rumours of war went round Berlin and the German press carried stories about how the country was now encircled. The following summer Wilhelm made a belligerent speech at a military review: ‘We must be guided by the example of Frederick the Great who, when hemmed in on all sides by foes, had beaten them one after another.’
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He also gave an interview to an American journalist from the
New York Times
in which he talked bitterly about Britain’s ‘perfidy’ and how war was now inevitable. In an attempt to win over American opinion, he accused the British of betraying the white race by allying with Japan and said that one day Germany and the United States would have to fight shoulder to shoulder against the Yellow Peril. German officials were appalled when they saw the finished article. Fortunately, so were President Theodore Roosevelt and the editors at the
New York Times
and the article was never published. Its contents, however, reached the British Foreign Office and eventually
the French and the Japanese.
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The British saw the interview as more evidence of the Kaiser’s volatility and failed to take the underlying German concerns seriously. As so often happens in international relations, they could not understand that what looked like a defensive move on their part could look different from another perspective.

The British government, despite its many critics, remained pleased about the entente with Russia. Grey later wrote in his memoirs: ‘The gain to us was great. We were freed from an anxiety that had often preoccupied British Governments; a frequent source of friction and a possible cause of war was removed; the prospect of peace was made more secure.’
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Some friction remained, especially over Persia, where tensions continued to flare up until the Great War. The French were delighted and had hopes of building the Triple Entente into a strong military alliance. Both Britain and Russia were much more cautious and steered away even from using the term Triple Entente. Indeed, in 1912 Izvolsky’s successor, Sergei Sazonov, said firmly that he would never use it.
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As soon as the Anglo-Russian Convention had been signed, Izvolsky reached out to the Triple Alliance, signing an agreement with Germany on the Baltic and proposing to Austria-Hungary that they work together in the Balkans. Britain, likewise, continued to hope for a winding down of the naval race with Germany. In the end, however, it proved to be beyond the capacity of Russia’s leaders to bridge the growing chasm between Britain and France on the one hand and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other, or to keep Russia out of the mounting arms race. By 1914, in spite of periodic struggles to escape, Russia was firmly on one side. Bismarck had warned of this many years earlier: in 1885 he had written to Wilhelm’s grandfather that an alliance of Russia, Britain and France ‘would provide the basis for a coalition against us more dangerous for Germany than any other she might have to face’.
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