The Treaty of Berlin, concluded on 1 (13) July 1878, satisfied none of the signatories, least of all Prince Gorchakov. While the new pact yielded some territorial gains in the Caucasus and in Bessarabia, Russians regarded it as a humiliating setback. Gorchakov declared that Berlin was 'the darkest page of [his] life'.[181] Much like the Congress of Paris twenty-four years earlier, St Petersburg once again found itself diplomatically isolated. But this time there was a different scapegoat. Bismarck, who had hosted the powers as 'honest broker', bore the brunt of Russian resentment because of his failure to support his partner. In the coming years Alexander II would nevertheless instinctively look back to Germany for a new combination, culminating in a secret Three Emperor's Alliance in i88i. But over the longer term the damage to Russo-German relations proved to be irreparable.
Alexander III, who became emperor upon his father's assassination in March 1881, clearly understood the need to keep his realm at peace. A senior diplomat described the priority of the new tsar's foreign policy as 'establishing Russia in an international position that will permit it to restore order at home, to recover from its dreadful injury and then channel all of its strength towards a national restoration'.[182] Under his foreign minister, Nikolai Giers, Alexander III's diplomacy even more steadfastly pursued a course of recueillement. Tsarist caution even extended into Central Asia, where the threat of a confrontation in 1885 with Britain at Panjdeh on the Afghan border was quickly defused. Although his contemporaries regarded him as reactionary and unimaginative, Alexander III achieved his goal, and during his thirteen-year reign Russian guns remained at rest.
The most dramatic development of Alexander's comparatively brief rule was a definitive break with Germany in favour of a military alliance with France, which he ratified on i5 (27) December i893. Despite the tsar's ideological distaste for French republicanism, there were many sound reasons for the new alignment. Relations with the Hohenzollerns had already taken a distinct turn for the worse in the late 1880s over a German grain tariff and a boycott of Russian bonds. The rift between the two autocracies became inevitable when in 1890 Germany's new Kaiser Wilhelm II offended Alexander by refusing to renew a secret promise of neutrality, the Reinsurance Treaty. There were also dynastic considerations. Whereas Alexander II's fondness for his uncle, Kaiser Wilhelm I, had sustained friendship with Berlin, Alexander III had married a princess of Denmark, which still bore the scars of defeat by Prussia four decades earlier. But the basic reason for the Franco-Russian alliance was geopolitical logic. Russian generals understood that the German Empire, aggressive and militarily powerful, posed the most serious threat to its strategic security. Furthermore, Berlin's growing intimacy with Vienna seriously complicated St Petersburg's position in the Balkans. For its part, France also smarted from its more recent humiliation by German arms. To the Third Republic, alliance with Russia seemed the best guarantee of support in a revanchist war.
When Alexander III died in 1894 (of natural causes), contemporaries commemorated him as the 'Tsar Peacemaker' (Tsar' mirotvorets). With the exception of a few short-lived monarchs in the eighteenth century, he was the only Romanov whose reign had been unsullied by war. Alexander was also faithful to a nineteenth-century diplomatic traditionthat favoured consistency, caution and stability. Despite setbacks in the Crimea and at Berlin, over the past eighty years St Petersburg had largely steered a steady course in its international relations. During the reign of the last tsar, Nicholas II, the empire entered into distinctly stormier waters.
Decline and fall
Young and relatively unprepared to assume the responsibilities of autocrat, Nicholas was also subject to a much more restless and contradictory temperament than his immediate ancestors. The clearest sign of the unsettled diplomacy that characterised Nicholas's reign is the simple fact that, whereas three foreign ministers had served since 1815, no less than nine men held the post between 1894 and the dynasty's collapse in 1917.[183] However, to be fair to this oft-maligned monarch, the turn of the twentieth century was a time of fevered instability throughout much of Europe, ultimately leading to a catastrophic world war that also claimed three other imperial houses.
The first decade of Nicholas Il's rule was dominated by events on the Pacific. Much as the continuing decline of Europe's 'sick man', Ottoman Turkey, continued to attract the involvement of more vigorous powers, China, the sick man of Asia, increasingly also became the object of foreign ambitions at century's end. The immediate catalyst was the Qing military's defeat in a war with Japan over Korea during the first year of his reign. After debating the merits of joining Japan in 'slicing the melon' of China or supporting the Middle Kingdom's territorial integrity, Nicholas's ministers opted for the latter. Together with Germany and France, Russia pressed the Japanese into returning the Liaotung (Liaodong) Peninsula, with its strategically important naval base of Port Arthur (Liishun), near Peking.
The tsarist intervention against Tokyo in 1895 set in motion a chain of events that led to a disastrous war with the Asian empire within a decade. Like the Crimean debacle half a century earlier, confrontation with Japan was neither inevitable nor desired. However, bickering among his councillors, both official and unofficial, severely hampered Nicholas's ability to pursue a coherent policy in the Far East. At first, the tsar benefited from Peking's gratitude by concluding a secret defensive alliance with the Qing on 22 May (3 June) 1896. In August of that year he secured a more concrete reward in the form of a 1,500-kilometre railway concession through Manchuria, which considerably shortened the last stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway then nearing completion. Then, toward the end of 1897 the new foreign minister, Count Mikhail Murav'ev, tricked his master into seizing Port Arthur shortly after the German navy had taken another valuable harbour in northern China, on Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) Bay. While Nicholas's move did not technically violate the previous year's agreement, it effectively killed the friendship with the Middle Kingdom. At the same time, by acquiring the very port that its diplomats had forced Japan to hand back to China in 1895, Russia aroused the unyielding enmity of the Meiji government.
The more immediate cause of the Russo-Japanese War was the tsar's reluctance to evacuate Manchuria, which his troops had occupied in 1900 in concert with an international intervention to suppress the xenophobic 'Boxer' rising in north-east China that summer. Although Russia had formally pledged to withdraw its forces from the region in spring 1902, it failed to live up to the final phase of the agreement, scheduled for autumn 1903. Japan had already become alarmed when Nicholas appointed a viceroy for the Far East two months earlier, an action that seemed to signal a stronger tsarist presence on the Pacific. On 24 January (6 February) 1904, Tokyo recalled its minister to St Petersburg and two days later Japanese torpedo boats launched a surprise nighttime raid on Russia's Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur.
The combat itself eventually became a war of attrition involving increasing numbers of troops in Manchuria. As the fighting wore on, Russian public opinion began to oppose the distant war. An attempt to regain the initiative on the waves by sending the powerful Baltic Fleet around the world to the northern Pacific ended catastrophically when much of it was sunk by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Straits of Tsushima in May 1905. Humiliated at sea, unable to halt the adversary's advance into the Manchurian interior, financially exhausted and beset by revolutionary unrest on the home front, Nicholas readily accepted an American offer that summer to mediate an end to the conflict. Thanks to the brilliant diplomacy of the former finance minister, Sergei Witte, who headed the tsar's delegation to the peace talks in New Hampshire, Russia's penalty for defeat was comparatively light. Nevertheless, the Treaty of Portsmouth, which was concluded on 23 August (5 September) 1905, marked an end to Nicholas's dreams of Oriental
181
In David MacKenzie,
182
V N. Lamsdorff, 'Obzor vneshnei politiki Rossii za vremia tsarstvovaniia Aleksandra III', GARF, Fond 568, op. 1, d. 53,1.1.
183
Although Nesselrode had held the post jointly with Capodistrias from 1816 to 1822. Nicholas II's foreign ministers were: N. K. Giers (until 1895), Prince Aleksei Borisovich Lobanov-Rostovskii(1895-6), NikolaiPavlovich Shishkin(actingminister 1896-7), Count Mikhail Nikolaevich Murav'ev (1897-1900), Count Vladimir Nikolaevich Lambsdorff (1900-6), Aleksandr Petrovich Izvol'skii (1906-10), Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov (19101916), Boris Nikolaevich Sturmer (1916), Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1916-17). Ofthe nine, two, Lobanov-Rostovskii and Murav'ev, died in office.