Россия и Запад

The following essay is a study of attitudes towards Germany among members of Russia’s foreign office in the years before 1914. According to historians, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just as Russian politics more generally during that time, was effectively divided into a pro- and an anti-German group[1351]. How much these predispositions influenced actual foreign policy is hard to ascertain. But they did sometimes affect personnel decisions and thus had at least indirectly an effect on the practical diplomatic discourse between Russia and Germany. Most of what will be discussed is based on memoirs of politicians and diplomats, i.e. sources, which many serious historians have been reluctant to use, because of their inherently tendentious nature. And they are indeed not particularly helpful if one wants to investigate actual foreign policy issues, international relations and diplomatic crises. Yet for studying perceptions and stereotypes, such ego-documents are of immense value[1352]. They still provide the most authentic voice for the convictions of their authors, even if they were written years after the events which they relate.

Russian foreign policy before World War I has been studied in great detail, including the nationalist views of some of its actors. Dominic Lieven, for one, has discussed pro-German attitudes, focusing mainly on three high-ranking officials[1353]. However, he did not consider lower-ranking personnel and has little to say about anti-Germans, many of whom held leading positions. Several of these people have left memoirs and correspondences which allow additional insights into the кулуарная политика at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Pro-German writers, as may be expected, tended to draw a rather benign image of Germany and things German. In the writings of anti-German officials, pan-Slavist ideas about a final showdown between Germans and Slavs were often shining through as was the so-called German Drang nach Osten. This relatively new and thoroughly a-historical catchword was commonly mobilized to create a scenario of threat reaching back deep into the past. It allowed for conflating such different phenomena as German rearmament, economic power and 18^th c. Volga-German colonists with anti-Russian diatribes by Baltic German activists and the contemporary political crises in the Balkans. Its appeal was such that it even appeared in official Russian diplomatic correspondence, while pan-Slavist ideas were part of the foreign policy programmes of almost all parties represented in the State Duma At least in this respect, politics and public opinion went hand in hand. In most of the Russian press after 1900, Germany was seen as a bastion of reaction and military expansionism. Only some conservative papers like «Grazhdanin» or «Rossiia» were more lenient with German positions, stressing the importance of a strong monarchy and of good relations with Germany in the fight against «anarchism, nihilism and social democracy»[1354].

The most prominent members of the anti-German group were, unsurprisingly, those politicians and officials who favoured close ties with France and Britain. Among them were the two foreign ministers, Aleksandr Izvol’skii (1906–1910) and Sergei Sazonov (1910–1916), as well as Aleksandr Savinskii, chief of the cabinet of the Minister for Foreign Affairs (1901–1910). In his memoirs, he identifies the Drang nach Osten as the most important reason for the outbreak of World War I. Already since Frederick the Great, the Germans «inaugurated their systematic method of the colonization of Russia» and used «the Slavonic nations for extending [their] greatness»[1355]. While one might have expected a more subtle and historically informed analysis of the reasons for the war from such a high-ranking official, the true source of his prejudices comes out when he writes about his Baltic German colleagues. A: cording to him, these people «for the greater number remained German in soul and sentiment and faithful servants of the German cause». While the large number of «Baltic barons» in Russia’s Foreign Service was an undisputed fact, most of them had been in Russian service for generations and had only little connection with the Baltic lands, let alone Germany proper[1356]. But still, their patriotic loyalty was repeatedly put into question, and they were sometimes even deliberately kept away from office.