Россия и Запад

Diplomats with pro-German leanings unsurprisingly shared Sazonov’s positive views about German culture, but not his wider anti-German resentments. Petr Botkin, for example, who served at the Embassies in the USA and Portugal, remembered that he had to think of no one less than Goethe’s last words — «mehr Licht!» — when he first entered the dark corridors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg. He also was a great admirer of the music of Bach, Beethoven and, in particular, Richard Wagner, whom he mentions several times in his memoirs[1363]. Iurii Solov’ev, who later was one of the first tsarist diplomats to join the Bolsheviks, apparently had a late start in his Foreign Service career because of his pro-German attitudes. He had become a victim of Izvol’skii’s personnel policies (at least so he thought). When he finally received a diplomatic post and arrived in Stuttgart in 1909 «in order to find out in reality the German attitude towards Russia which was always shown in a hostile light in St. Petersburg», he was utterly surprised. Like Botkin, he liked Wagner’s music and frequently visited the Bayreuth Festival. But he was also deeply impressed by the cleanliness of W"urttemberg villages and the excellent conditions of German roads. As a proud member of the German automobile association, ADAC, he clearly knew what he was writing about[1364]. Others based their image of Germany on less concrete facts. Dmitrii Abrikosov, for example, who was mostly stationed at posts in Asia and had little experience with Russo-German relations proper, still thought highly of German virtues. In his case, this attitude was determined by the admiration for a former superior. He started his career as attache at the Embassy in London under Count Alexander Benckendorff and later reminisced that «the Russian character was much more difficult to deal with than that of the disciplined Germans». He then concluded that this is «the main reason perhaps why our diplomatic service is full of barons from the Baltic provinces»[1365].

It should be noted that some of these Baltic barons themselves held rather critical views of Germany and can thus not automatically be counted as pro-Germans simply because of their names and ancestries. Benckendorff, for example, was a passionate anglophile and an ardent supporter of Russia’s rapprochement with Britain, who believed that the German Empire posed the biggest danger to Russia It seems ironic then that the Anglo-Russian Entente (1907) had to be negotiated in St. Petersburg instead of London, allegedly because there was so little confidence in the personnel of the Russian Embassy there which, according to the popular newspaper «Novoe Vremia», was filled with «foreigners»[1366]. Roman Rosen, the ambassador in Washington (1905–1911) and later member of the State Council, was critical of irrational attitudes on both sides. In his memoirs, he attacks pan-Germanism, the disease of the «swelled head» and German «inability to understand other people’s mentality». For Russia, in turn, he bemoans the absence of a «feeling of personal responsibility for the condition of public affairs», attributes a «fatalistic strain» to the Russian national character and, after warning of the dangers of pan-Slavism to Russian foreign relations, demands a policy of «reason and competent statesmanship»[1367].