The Lost History of 1914 Page 9
Kokovtsov would have challenged a second decision taken at the July 24 conference—that war would not bring revolution. “We live on a volcano,” an archconservative paper noted in April, expressing a sense of impending social eruption shared across the political spectrum. Novoe vremia’s provincial correspondents reported a surge of brutal murders, of assaults by gangs extorting tribute from gentry and peasant alike, of estates torched, crops plundered, forests despoiled. In February, the director of police had told a conference of criminologists that “the countryside was gripped by terror and the cities are anxious.” During the first six months of 1914 one million of Russia’s industrial workers went on strike, more than in any year since 1905; the factory inspectorate classified nine hundred thousand of these strikers as “political,” animated by buntarstvo, a violent opposition to all authority. In March, fifty thousand men “downed tools” in Petersburg to protest the regime’s prosecution of the radical press. Their temper, the British ambassador observed, “was distinctly menacing, the demonstrators going so far as to assault and disarm the police—a step which marks a distinct advance in the daring of the Petersburg mob who have hitherto stood in wholesome awe of that force.”68
In July “a strike as massive and explosive as any that had erupted among the workers in 1905 swept the outlying working-class districts of Petersburg.” Involving 130,000 workers, many from the massive ironworks and steel mills in the Vyborg District, it quickly grew into a general strike with political overtones. Strikers strung wires across the streets to trip up the cossacks’ horses. They axed down telegraph and telephone poles, ripped up paving stones, and carted out armoires to build street barricades. The striking workers were mostly former peasants drawn into the city by Kokovtsov’s remedy for Russia’s backwardness, rapid industrialization, and they acted on their own, without the guidance of the vanguard of the proletariat. The Bolshevik Party’s city committee (three of whose seven members were on the payroll of the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police) wanted no part of a political strike doomed by a “lack of weapons.” On July 22 and 23, police detachments, cossacks, and when they weren’t enough, a cavalry brigade, surged across the Neva to smash the barricades and disperse the thousands of workers behind them. With rocks and clubs, joined by women and children, they fought for each strongpoint. Order returned only on the twenty-fifth, as soldiers with fixed bayonets patrolled the shattered empty streets.69
In the midst of this convulsion, the French premier, René Viviani, and President Raymond Poincaré arrived on a state visit, welcomed by Novoe vremia with a special edition entirely in French. As they drove through St. Petersburg, “at each corner, a group of poor devils shout ‘hurrah’ under the eyes of a policeman,” the French ambassador observed. Sidney Fay highlighted the irony that “at the same moment when the Russian military bands, in the [tsar’s] camp at Krasnoe Selo, had been welcoming Poincaré with the Marseillaise, the Cossacks in the suburbs of St. Petersburg had been striking down working-men for singing the same martial anthem.” Yet, as Count Pourtalés, the German ambassador, cabled Berlin on July 25, he had it “from a trustworthy source” that “the majority of the ministers present” at the July 24 conference decided that the Petersburg street fighting and the nationwide strike wave “did not presage revolution, nor would war bring domestic upheaval.”70
The attack by a mob of five thousand on the Neva bridges between the industrial district and the city center, the cries of men whipped by mounted cossacks, the gunfire, the red banners made from French flags torn from the lampposts—from their offices close to the Neva embankment it was as if the ministers had seen, heard, sensed none of this. Reviewing twenty-six international crises between 1898 and 1967, the political scientist Richard Ned Lebow concludes, “These case histories suggest the pessimistic hypothesis that those policymakers with the greatest need to learn from external reality appear the least likely to do so.” The “shadow of the future” was on the reality outside their windows, but the ministers could not see it there and act. So they argued away Russia’s internal crisis.71
Though by Stolypin’s 1909 reform timetable, Russia still needed fourteen more years of peace to achieve stability, some ministers maintained that Russia was already “pacified.” Others conceded the current unrest, but held that war, if it came, would unite the nation against the common foe. At that moment in Berlin, the French ambassador, Paul Cambon, was hearing similar talk about the counterrevolutionary uses of war: “Some want war … for social reasons, i.e., to provide the external interests which alone can prevent or retard the rise to power of the socialist masses.” Yet others inside the narrow circle of decision in Petersburg were less alarmed by the violence in the streets than impressed by its efficient suppression. The French ambassador to Russia, Nicholas Paléologue, pushed that line with Paris, arguing that General Joffre’s apprehensions that internal disturbances would paralyze Russia’s mobilization were misplaced. The regime could still “drown the revolutionary forces in blood.”72
Policy makers’ beliefs follow their necessities. The government felt it had to assert Russia’s identity as a protector of the Slavs or cease its Great Power mummery. And Kokovtsov was not there to ask the ministers to weigh sentiment against survival; not there to stipulate that Russia still lacked the social cohesion “to speak in its former language” as a Great Power; not there to reiterate the lesson of 1905, seizing on the St. Petersburg workers’ revolt to shake the ministers from the death spell of foreign policy abstraction and make them confront “the sad actuality” outside their windows.
Meeting with Nicholas days later, the ministers inverted the lesson of 1905. In a rendition of the coup threat he deployed to beat back Alexandra, Sazonov warned Nicholas that “unless he yielded to the popular demand and unsheathed the sword in Serbia’s behalf, he would risk revolution and perhaps the loss of his throne”—a reversal of the maxim of Russian policy since 1905 that in Stolypin’s words “a new mobilization in Russia would lend strength to the revolution … and would bring with it danger for the Dynasty.” Sazonov insisted that “popular demand,” “public opinion,” demanded that Stolypin’s maxim “no war … no revolution” be turned on its head.
But which public? The Pan-Slav banqueters, the center-right politicians in the duma, and that sliver of Russians swayable by the printed word, including the two hundred thousand readers of Novoe vremia (which could assume its subscribers’ ease with French). In January, columnists and editorial writers of this persuasion had branded the von Sanders compromise “a diplomatic Mukden,” after the worst land defeat suffered by Russia in the war with Japan. Throughout the spring they had complained that “we seem only to be retreating” and that “our opponents have misused our love of peace to deal us a series of blows which for long will reflect on our position in Europe,” and conjured the specter of a Russia “encircled” by a “Teutonic ring.”73
This public greeted war with something like gratitude, to judge by Novoe vremia: “Our enemies helped us to find ourselves: we did not know it and nor did they.” In February 1915, a liberal review marveled at the way the polarization between “society” and the reactionary regime, widening month by month in 1914, had ended at the moment of war, “which like a magic knife divided the two halves of the year … bringing the nation to its senses.” A member of a Center Party in the duma, speaking at a congress of city officials, celebrated the war as an agent of domestic renovation: “The war, by revealing all our internal strength, will give us the opportunity to defeat not only the external enemy, but will also open up joyful hopes for solving the problems of internal construction and reform.” That deluded man would not have joined a revolution if deprived of his war. Nor would the other politicians, editors, lawyers, and liberal aristocrats in the official “opposition.”74
Nicholas had nothing to fear from this chattering-class elite. Danger came from below, from the peasant masses dreaded by Durnovo. The “narod” only wanted to get on with their lives in peace. News of the w
ar reached them more or less as it did the inhabitants of a village in the Aleshka district. “On 17 July, a policeman who had never been to our village before arrived and went door to door calling everyone to a meeting, and so I went,” recalled Ivan Kuchernigo in an unpublished memoir written in 1915 as he convalesced from his wounds in a military hospital. The village elder called for quiet, then explained the war: “Here’s what’s afoot, boys! An enemy has turned up! He has attacked our Mother Russia, and our Father Tsar needs our help; our enemy for now is Germany.” The young men should “show up at 9 o’clock on the 18th in the office of the District Military Commander in Aleshka, and I advise you to bring with you two pairs of underwear.” This largely illiterate public greeted the war with incredulity—Germany?—and grief.
“Russian Prisoner of War with Fur Hat” by Egon Schiele. During the war Schiele (1890–1918) guarded Russian POWs, and in work like this 1915 drawing honored an enemy’s humanity.
“My God, how many tears were spilled when we had to go,” Kuchernigo wrote. “My five-year-old daughter sat in my arms and, pressing against me, said, ‘Daddy, why are you going? Why are you leaving us? Who’s going to earn money and get bread for us?’ ” The revolution began with the asking of such questions about a war fought to show Russia’s stuff as a Great Power that inflicted 10.7 million casualties (including 3 million deaths). As “the army gradually turned into one vast revolutionary mob,” a cycle of anarchy and civil war followed that between 1918 and 1924, by battle, terror, and famine, brought death to 10 million more Russians. Writing to Alexandra, Rasputin foretold “a sea of tears immeasurable, and as to blood?”75
One evening in early July 1914 a young official in the Russian Foreign Office and his friend, the Austro-Hungarian military attaché in St. Petersburg, rode out in an automobile on the Finland road. “It was the time of the marvelous white nights of the northern summer,” recalled Nicolas de Basily, the young Russian. “The sun had scarcely disappeared beneath the horizon only to rise again about an hour later. A faint, pale light illumined the landscape, sad and austere, and increased in us a certain state of anxiety inspired by the recent political news”—the murder of the archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28. As they talked, the impending consequences of that act flickered before them in the firefly light. Gripping Basily by the arm as if to convey the intensity of his conviction, Franz von Hohenlohe, his Austrian companion, echoed Durnovo and Kokovtsov: “Do you understand that you cannot go to war? If you do, you will expose yourself to revolution and to the ruin of your power.” In the voice of official Russia, Basily replied that “public opinion was clamoring for an intervention in support of Serbia … add[ing] forcefully, ‘You commit a serious error of calculation in supposing fear of revolution will prevent Russia from fulfilling its national duty now.’ ”
Russian statesmen had encouraged that error. They had believed it themselves. Then Liman von Sanders arrived in Constantinople and fear of revolution yielded to fear of “encirclement,” of conquest, of a war of Teuton against Slav—a war that Russia would fight alone, unless she stood up to Austria to preserve credibility with her allies. Its rhetoric of weakness since 1905 compelled Russia to act tough in 1914 both to hold its friends and to deter its enemies, or so the tsar’s men believed. Looking back on that white summer night in the black pine forest on the road to Finland, Basily asked himself, “Had Austria and Germany … allowed themselves to be swept into the European crisis in the beginning by the illusion that Russia would yield before their threats of war?” Did this “fatal illusion” set Europe on fire? If so, the price of “peace at almost any cost” was war.76
3
ENGLAND
ULSTER WILL FIGHT
He remarked that it was providential that the one bright spot in this hateful war was the settlement of Irish civil strife … and he added, nearly breaking down, “Jack, God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.”
—Prime Minister H. H. Asquith speaking to J. A. Pease, Liberal Party Whip, August 3, 1914
Asquith was relieved because world war, declared the next day, had saved the United Kingdom from civil war. Better kill the Hun than each other was a widespread sentiment among Britons. Not Germany with its seditious Right boiling to shoot the Reichstag, not Russia with its seething revolutionary underground, but England, long-peaceful England, was the society nearest cracking in 1914. “The damnable question” of Ireland had brought it to what the London Times called “one of the great crises in the history of the British race.” Up to the last days of July, the “Revolt in Ulster” received more coverage in 1914 than any other story in the world. England was the sun of the British Empire, and from India to Canada, from Australia to South Africa, from Malta to Hong Kong, millions followed the stages of its eclipse—the attempt by Asquith’s Liberal government to grant “Home Rule” to Ireland; the forming of a private army in the Protestant north of Ireland to resist “Rome Rule”; the mustering of “Volunteers” in the Catholic south to resist the resisters; the landing of German guns up and down the Irish coast; a Tory party talking rebellion taunted by the young lion of the Liberal Cabinet, Winston Churchill, to bring it on. Millions followed this news sensing, fearing, hoping that, in Ireland, the Empire was on trial.
Unsettling across the English-speaking world, in two foreign capitals the trajectory of events raised a question of grand strategy: Would trouble in Ulster bar England from fighting a continental war? The crisis stirred hope in Berlin and dismay in Paris.1
The French needn’t have worried. England was wired for war. Starting in early 1906 the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, authorized secret “military conversations” with the French that bound the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to the French army and, in a degree, Britain to France, tighter than anything contemplated by the Entente cordiale of 1904 between them—tighter even than the formal military alliances between France and Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Through its spy in the Russian embassy in London, Berlin learned of these and subsequent security initiatives in Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian relations; Parliament and public remained in the dark.2
At the Foreign Office, Grey’s aides competed in ripping the Teuton, certain he meant Grey rejected their more extreme advice, but years of it colored his conduct of foreign policy. A cabinet colleague, Charles Hobhouse, could plausibly name him “the author of our rupture with Germany.” The king warned Grey of the “constitutional gravity” of the French military talks—talks that amounted to planning for a joint Anglo-French defense of France against a German attack, talks that were not approved by the cabinet or Parliament, talks whose import Grey reportedly kept from Asquith for three years. When they came partially to light in 1911 there was a blowup in the cabinet. Liberals in and out of Parliament scored Grey for his “severe economy of truth.” With E. D. Morel in the Nineteenth Century, they wanted to know “where this entente with France is leading us” and whether “the nation has lost all control of its foreign policy.”3
Two years later Britain effectively surrendered control over its foreign policy to France. To close a feared battleship gap with the German navy without asking Parliament to pay for new dreadnaughts, the Royal Navy transferred battle squadrons based in the Mediterranean to home waters. To replace these British warships, the French navy moved its fleet to the Mediterranean, leaving France’s Atlantic coast unguarded. Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, championed the agreement, arguing that it did not obligate Britain in advance of any future war. At the same time he identified the potential dagger in the deal, the implicit quid pro quo: “How tremendous would be the weapon which France would possess to compel our intervention, if she could say, ‘On the advice of and by arrangement with your naval authorities we have left our Northern coasts defenseless. We cannot possibly come back in time [to repel a German naval attack].’ ” And so France would look to England to protect its Atlantic coast from German attack. That argument, Churchill shrewdly surmised, “would probably be decisive
whatever is written down now.” So it proved when in the last days of peace Britons discovered that what the Manchester Guardian termed “a little knot of men working by evasion and equivocation” had signed them up for war. Only dodging the worst in Ulster cushioned the shock.4
In the first half of 1914 civil war over Ulster was in a race with continental war over Serbia. The Austrian chief of staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, urged the foreign minister, Count Berchtold, to postpone Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia until mid-August. If he had got his way, civil war in Ireland likely would have won, and Britain, not Germany, would have confronted the hydra of rebellion and war. In that event, even if the government had declared war on Germany for invading Belgium, it could not have spared troops from Ulster to ship to France in the war’s decisive opening weeks.5
On July 4, 1914, the Military Members of the Army Council warned the British cabinet that there were two hundred thousand armed men in Ireland, and that if civil war broke out the entire Expeditionary Force, the Special Reserve, and the Territorial Army would be required to restore order. “If the whole of our Expeditionary Force were used in Ireland,” the Army Council concluded, “we should be quite incapable of meeting our obligations abroad.” Stipulate that the BEF, committed in Ulster, could not be sent to France. “If the BEF had never been sent, there is no question that the Germans would have won the war,” Niall Ferguson asserts with startling certainty.6
Whether through the BEF’s contribution in the opening weeks, when the “ocular presence” of British soldiers buoyed French morale, or the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany for the duration, or the addition of Britain’s industrial, financial, and technological strength to the Allied cause, Britain’s entry into the world war was the necessary condition of Germany’s defeat.*