Россия и Запад

When, for example, Izvol’skii was looking for an assistant in 1908, he chose Nikolai Charikov, not only as a former classmate, but also because he saw in him a man from «the traditional circle of Russian [as opposed to Baltic!] landed nobility», which he hoped would continue to dominate Russia’s political institutions[1357]. His opinion of officials with German background was in general utterly prejudiced. In his memoirs, he describes one of them in almost cartoon-like fashion as a person «qui repr'esentait le type le plus accompli de ces fonctionnaires d’origine allemande […] souvent tr`es laborieux, mais r'eussissant surtout `a atteindre les degr'es sup'erieurs de la hi'erarchie russe `a force d’intrigues et de bassesses»[1358]. Clearly, he did not want to have any such people around him. When he was selecting his staff at the Embassy in Paris and a Baron Uexkoll was suggested to him as attache, he responded acidly in a letter to Sazonov: «Is it really impossible to find a young man with university education and a plain Russian family name?»[1359] Despite such ethnic prejudices, Izvol’skii frequently enjoyed his summer holidays at Tegernsee in Bavaria, where he had served as the ambassador to Munich in the late 1890s.

While Izvol’skii’s attitudes towards Germany were quite obvious, the case of his successor, Sazonov, is more complicated. He was not a straightforward anti-German, as has been suggested[1360]. At some point, he was even rumoured to «cater to the whims and caprices of the Kaiser» and, in a letter by Izvol’skii from 1912, to be «a friend of Germany»[1361]. His attitudes apparently changed as a result of the Liman von Sanders crisis in 1913, when a German military mission to Constantinople seemed to pose a vital threat to Russia’s interests and to challenge his personal reputation as Foreign Minister. Although this crisis was peacefully resolved, by the time he was writing his memoirs, after World War I, Sazonov had become a convinced nationalist, who employed all the familiar anti-German cliches, including Drang nach Osten and the final showdown between Slavs and Germans. Yet his image of Germany was still much more complex than one might expect. He attaches it to a specific historic development which bothered him not just as a politician, but also as an individual human being. Like many other educated Russians, Sazonov had always admired German music and literature, and he even welcomed the positive influence that German culture exerted within Europe. But with the foundation of the German Empire, all of this allegedly changed. Under the influence of «blood and iron» ideology, German culture degenerated into «Prussian civilization», and German arts and sciences took on a «barracks-like character». In sarcastic language, Sazonov elaborates on the results of these changes, in particular the psychology of Germans and their politicians. He attributes their self-righteous attitudes to a «Prussian official education» which made them «physically incapable to face with impartiality a Frenchman and even more a Slav» and he identifies a certain «nationalist frenzy» as a main characteristic of German national psychology[1362]. Although one could argue that this perception of Germany actually reflected historical reality (nationalism and militarism did indeed run high there), it is still quite reductionist with its notion of a physically predetermined national psychology and its absurd historical claims. If anything, Sazonov’s memoirs reflect a deep feeling of disappointment and bitterness about a country that he had once admired.