THE DEVELOPMENT OF RUSSIAN POLICY
Until the year 1890 Russia and Germany had been in close touch. Dynastic
connexions united the two imperial houses; and the common policy of
repression of Polish nationality--the fatal legacy of the days of
Frederic the Great and Catharine II--united the two empires. National
sentiment in Russia was, however, always anti-German; and as early as
1885 Balkan affairs began to draw the Russian Government away from
Germany. In 1890 Bismarck fell; and under William II German policy left
the Russian connexion, and in close touch with Austria embarked on
Balkan adventures which ran counter to Russian aims, while Russia on her
side turned to new allies.
The new direction of Russian policy, which has brought the aims of the
Russian Government into close accord with the desires of national Slav
sentiment, was determined by Balkan conditions. Bismarck had cherished
no Balkan ambitions: he had been content to play the part of an 'honest
broker' at the Congress of Berlin, and he had spoken of the Bulgarian
affair of 1885 as 'not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier.'
William II apparently thought otherwise. At any rate Germany seems to
have conducted, for many years past, a policy of establishing her
influence, along with that of Austria, through South-Eastern Europe. And
it is this policy which is the _fons et origo_ of the present struggle;
for it is a policy which is not and cannot be tolerated by Russia, so
long as Russia is true to her own Slav blood and to the traditions of
centuries.
After Austria had finally lost Italy, as she did in 1866, she turned for
compensation to the Balkans. If Venetia was lost, it seemed some
recompense when in 1878 Austria occupied Bosnia and the Herzegovina.
Hence she could expand southwards--ultimately perhaps to Salonica.
Servia, which might have objected, was a vassal kingdom, the protégé of
Austria, under the dynasty of the Obrenovitch. As Austria might hope to
follow the line to Salonica,[22] so Germany, before the end of the
nineteenth century, seems to have conceived of a parallel line of
penetration, which would carry her influence through Constantinople,
through Konieh, to Bagdad. She has extended her political and economic
influence among the small Slav states and in Turkey. In 1898 the King of
Roumania (a Hohenzollern by descent) conceded direct communication
through his territories between Berlin and Constantinople: in 1899 a
German company obtained a concession for the Bagdad railway from Konieh
to the head of the Persian Gulf. In a word, Germany began to stand in
the way of the Russian traditions of ousting the Turk and ruling in
Constantinople: she began to buttress the Turk, to train his army, to
exploit his country, and to seek to oust Russia generally from
South-Eastern Europe.
In 1903 the progress of Austria and Germany received a check. A
blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian
Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the
Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian
tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch
with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took
advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex
formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. Servia,
which had hoped to gain these territories, once a part of the old
Servian kingdom, was mortally offended, and would have gone to war with
Austria, if Russia, her champion under the new dynasty, could only have
given her support. But Russia, still weak after the Japanese war, could
not do so; Russia, on the contrary, had to suffer the humiliation of
giving a pledge to the Austrian Ambassador at St. Petersburg that she
would not support Servia. That humiliation Russia has not forgotten. She
has saved money, she has reorganized her army, she has done everything
in her power to gain security for the future. And now that Austria has
sought utterly to humiliate Servia on the unproved charge (unproved, in
the sense that no legal proof was offered)[23] of complicity in the
murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Russia has risked
war rather than surrender her protection of a Slav kingdom. Slav
sentiment imperatively demanded action in favour of Servia: no
government could refuse to listen to the demand. The stake for Russia is
not merely the integrity of Servia: it is her prestige among the Slav
peoples, of which she is head; and behind all lies the question whether
South-Eastern Europe shall be under Teutonic control, and lost to
Russian influence.
Germany has not only threatened Slav life in South-Eastern Europe: she
has irritated Slav feeling on her own Eastern frontier. The vitality and
the increase of the Slavs in Eastern Germany has excited deep German
alarm. The German Government has therefore of late years pursued a
policy of repression towards its own Slav subjects, the Poles,
forbidding the use of the Polish language, and expropriating Polish
landowners in order to plant a German garrison in the East. Teutonism is
really alarmed at the superior birth-rate and physical vigour of the
Slavs; but Russia has not loved Teutonic policy, and there has been an
extensive boycott of German goods in Russian Poland. The promise made by
the Tsar, since the beginning of the war, that he would re-create the
old Poland, and give it autonomy, shows how far Russia has travelled
from the days, not so far distant in point of time, when it was her
policy to repress the Poles in conjunction with Germany; and it has made
the breach between Germany and Russia final and irreparable.
It is thus obvious that Germany is vitally opposed to the great Slav
Empire in South-Eastern Europe and on her own eastern borders. But why,
it may be asked, should Russian policy be linked with English? Is there
any bond of union except the negative bond of common opposition to
Germany? There is. For one thing England and Russia have sought to
pursue a common cause--that of international arbitration and of
disarmament. If neither has succeeded, it has been something of a bond
between the two that both have attempted to succeed. But there are other
and more vital factors. England, which in 1854-6 opposed and fought
Russia for the sake of the integrity of Turkey, has no wish to fight
Russia for the sake of a Germanized Turkey. On the contrary, the
interest of England in maintaining independence in the South-East of
Europe now coincides with that of Russia. Above all, the new
constitutional Russia of the Duma is Anglophil.
'The political ideals both of Cadets and Octobrists were learnt
chiefly from England, the study of whose constitutional history had
aroused in Russia an enthusiasm hardly intelligible to a present-day
Englishman. All three Dumas ... were remarkably friendly to England,
and England supplied the staple of the precedents and parallels for
quotation.'[24]
In a word, the beginnings of Russian constitutionalism not only
coincided in time with the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, but owed
much to the inspiration of England.
Notes:
[Footnote 22: Count Aehrenthal, foreign minister of Austria (1906-1912),
started the scheme of the Novi Bazar railway to connect the railways of
Bosnia with the (then) Turkish line to Salonica. See also
_Correspondence_, No. 19, Sir R. Rodd to Sir E. Grey, July 25: 'There is
reliable information that Austria intends to seize the Salonica
railway.']
[Footnote 23: For a summary of so-called proofs, see Appendix IV,
_infra_.]
[Footnote 24: _Camb. Mod. Hist_. xii. 379.]