For a long time such pan-Slavist dreams were seen as the stuff of poetry, not practical politics. The country’s military and economic weakness demanded a cautious foreign policy. As Polovtsov had put it in 1885, ‘Russia needs roads and schools, not victories or honour, otherwise we’ll become another Lapland.’44 It was left to the diplomats to defend Russia’s interests in Europe; and this, for the most part, meant conciliating her two powerful neighbours in Berlin and Vienna. The Romanov court had long been in favour of this pro-German policy, partly because of the strong dynastic ties between the ruling families and partly because of their mutual opposition to European liberalism. There was even talk of reviving the old Three Emperors’ League.
After 1905, however, foreign policy could no longer be carried out regardless of public opinion. The Duma and the press both took an active interest in imperial matters and increasingly called for a more aggressive policy in defence of Russia’s Balkan interests. The Octobrists led the way, seeking to stop the decline of their own political fortunes by sponsoring a nationalist crusade. Guchkov, their leader, condemned the diplomats’ decision not to go to war in 1908, when Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzogovina, as a betrayal of Russia’s historic mission to defend the Balkan Slavs. The Russian people, he declared, in contrast with the ‘flabby indolence of official Russia’, was ready for the ‘inevitable war with the German races’, and it was their patriotic sentiments that ‘foreign and indeed our own diplomats must reckon with’. Not to be outdone by such bluster, the rightwing Kadets fashioned their own liberal version of Slavic imperialism. Struve denounced the Bosnian affair as ‘a national disgrace’. Russia’s destiny, he argued in a celebrated essay of that year, was to extend its civilization ‘to the whole of the Black Sea basin’. This was to be achieved (contradictory though it may seem) by a combination of imperial might and the free association of all the Slavic nations — which in his view would look upon Russia as a constitutional haven from Teutonic oppression. Equally anxious to wave the patriotic flag was the liberal business élite of Moscow, led by Alexander Konovalov and the Riabushinskys, who in 1912 established their own Progressist Party on the grounds that the time had come for the bourgeoisie to assume the leadership of the nation. Russia’s control of the Black Sea and the shipping routes through the straits was a principal target of their trading ambitions.45
Much of this bourgeois patriotism was informed by the idea that Europe was heading unavoidably towards a titanic clash between the Teutons and the Slavs. Pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism were two mutually self-justifying credos: the one could not exist without the other. The fear of Russia united all German patriots, while the fear of Germany did the same in Russia. Germanophobia ran extremely deep in Russian society. The revolution was partly based on it — both as a reaction against the war and as a rejection of the German-dominated Romanov court. This fear of Germany stemmed in part from the Russians’ cultural insecurity — the feeling that they were living on the edge of a backward, semi-Asian society and that everything modern and progressive came to it from the West. There was, as Dominic Lieven has put it, ‘an instinctive sense that Germanic arrogance towards the Slavs entailed an implicit denial of the Russian people’s own dignity and of their equality with the other leading races of Europe’. The wealth of the Germans in Russia, their prominence in the Civil Service, and the growing domination of German exports in Russia’s traditional markets only served to underline this sense of a racial threat. ‘In the past twenty years’, declared a 1914 editorial in Novoe vremia, ‘our Western neighbour has held firmly in its teeth the vital sources of our well-being and like a vampire has sucked the blood of the Russian peasant.’ Many people feared that the Drang nach Osten was part of a broader German plan to annihilate Slavic civilization and concluded that, unless she now made a firm stand on behalf of her Balkan allies, Russia would suffer a long period of imperial decline and subjugation to Germany. This pan-Slavist sentiment grew as the public became frustrated with the government’s conciliatory approach towards the ‘German aggressors’. Novoe vremia led the way, denouncing the government’s decision, brought about by pressure from Berlin, to recognize the Bosnian annexation as a ‘diplomatic Tsushima’.fn5 The newspaper called on the government to counteract the growing influence of Germany in the Balkans with a Slavic campaign of its own. Numerous Slavic societies were established after 1908. A Slavic Congress was even convened in Prague, where the Russians attempted to persuade their sceptical ‘brothers’ from the Czech lands that they would be better off under the Tsar. By the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 this pro-Slav sentiment had brought together many elements of Russian society. Hundreds of public organizations declared their support for the Slavs, the capital cities witnessed huge demonstrations, and at a series of political banquets public figures called for a firmer assertion of Russia’s imperial power. ‘The straits must become ours,’ Mikhail Rodzianko, President of the Duma, told the Tsar in March 1913. ‘A war will be joyfully welcomed and it will raise the government’s prestige.’46
There is no doubt that the pressure of public opinion played an important part in the complex series of events leading towards Russia’s involvement in the First World War. By the beginning of 1914 the mood of pro-Slav belligerence had spread to the court, the officer corps and much of the state itself. Prince G. N. Trubetskoi, placed in charge of the Balkan and Ottoman sections of the Foreign Ministry in the summer of 1912, was a well-known pan-Slavist determined to gain control of Constantinople and its Balkan hinterland. Similar views were held by the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, a military man with a powerful influence over the Tsar who in August 1914 was appointed Commander-in-Chief. His father had fought in the Balkan campaigns of 1877–8 and his wife, an ardent Slav patriot, was the daughter of the King of Montenegro. Many generals shared the Grand Duke’s Slavic sympathies. Brusilov was a case in point. Concerned by Russia’s lack of moral preparation for the coming war, he looked to pan-Slav nationalism as a means of uniting the people behind the army. ‘If the Tsar had appealed to all his subjects’, he later wrote, ‘to combine to save their country from its present peril and deliver all their brother Slavs from the German yoke, public enthusiasm would have been boundless, and his personal popularity would have become unassailable.’47
The Tsar himself was slowly coming round to the pan-Slavist camp. By the beginning of 1914 he was of the view that the time had come for a firm stand against Austria, if not against her more powerful ally in Berlin. ‘We will not let ourselves be trampled upon,’ he told Delcassé in January. Foreign ambassadors explained this new resolve by the pressure of public opinion. But for the moment Nicholas supported the cautious approach of his Foreign Minister, S. D. Sazonov. Recognizing that a war with the Central Powers was almost certainly unavoidable, they sought to delay it by diplomatic means. Russia’s army, according to the military experts, would not be ready for war until 1917. Nor was the diplomatic groundwork complete: for while the support of France was assured, that of Britain was not. But by far the most pressing concern was the threat of a revolution if Russia got bogged down in a long and exhausting campaign. The memory of 1904–5 was still fresh, and there was nothing the revolutionary leaders would now welcome more than a war. ‘A war between Russia and Austria would be a very useful thing for the revolution,’ Lenin told Gorky in 1913, ‘but the chances are small that Franz Joseph and Nicky will give us such a treat.’48