RUSSIA AND GERMANY
I.
The complicated and contradictory relations between Russia and Germany
can be summed up very briefly. On the one hand, there existed before
the war the closest intercourse between the Russian and the German
Courts, and that close intercourse extended to the army, to the
bureaucracy, to the Universities, to the industrial and commercial
classes. On the other hand, the Russian and the German people are
mutually repelled. There is a temperamental antagonism between the two
nations, between the dour disciplined Prussian and the easygoing
disciplined Russian. In the province of ideas, of art and literature,
French influence is dominant amongst the intellectual and in the upper
classes, but as literature counts for very little, and as trade and
industry, as the bureaucracy and the Court, count for a very great
deal, and as all these social and political forces hitherto were
almost entirely controlled by the Germans, it may be said that before
the war German influence was supreme in the Russian Empire.
II.
Until Peter the Great, the Romanov Family was a national dynasty. It
had remained national from sheer necessity, as no European Court would
have cared to intermarry with Tatar and Barbarian Princes. Even at the
end of Peter the Great's reign the prestige of Russia had scarcely
asserted itself in the politics of the West. Peter the Great expressed
a keen desire to pay a visit to the Court of Louis XIV. He was
politely given to understand that his visit would not be acceptable,
even as a poor relation will be told that his visit is not welcome to
a kinsman in exalted position. After the death of Louis, the Tsar
again asked to be received at Versailles. This time his overtures were
accepted, but even at the Court of the Regent his visit caused the
greatest embarrassment to the masters of ceremonies. The situation was
a tragi-comic one. French etiquette could not decide whether the Tatar
Prince was to receive the honours which belong of right only to the
ruler of a civilized people.
For the first time in modern Russian history, Peter the Great's
daughter, Anne, married a German Prince in 1725. With that year begins
that close dynastic alliance with the German Courts which has lasted
until our own day. Germany has been carrying on a most thriving export
trade of Princes and Princesses with almost every European
monarchy--an export trade of which she is reaping the enormous
political advantages in the present crisis. But in Russia alone she
has obtained a monopoly of this royal export trade. _All the Russian
Tsars have married German Princesses._ For one hundred and fifty years
the rule suffered no exception until Alexander II. married a daughter
of the Danish Dynasty, which itself is in reality the German Dynasty
of Oldenburg.
I need not emphasize the supreme importance of those close family
relations between the Courts of Russia and Germany, _and especially
between the Courts of Russia and Prussia_. It is the peculiarity of an
autocratic government that the smallest causes are productive of the
greatest consequences, and amongst those smaller causes none are
likely to produce more far-reaching results than the personal likes
and dislikes of the ruler and his family. In the Empire of the Tsars
the sympathies of the ruler and of the Imperial family for a hundred
and fifty years have generally been German. Women have no less
influence in Russia than in other countries, and as every Russian
Princess has, for a hundred and fifty years, been German in origin,
German by training, German by pride of birth, German by prejudice, the
Teutonic influences have necessarily been supreme in the Russian
Court. Nor must we forget that every German Princess coming to
Petrograd would bring with her a numerous suite of ladies-in-waiting
and Court officials, so that the German Court colony was automatically
increasing. Indeed, it is no mere chance that the capital, the
military harbour, and the chief Imperial residences should all have
German names--Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Schluessenburg, Petersburg, and
Peterhof. Peterhof has been the Russian Potsdam. Petersburg has been
the outpost of Germany in the Russian Empire, the _feste Burg_ of
Prussia until the eve of the war.
III.
From what has been said, it is obvious that the national Romanov
Dynasty, founded in 1613 by Michael Romanov, Patriarch of all the
Russias, ceased to be a Romanov Dynasty at the death of Empress
Elizabeth in 1761. With Peter III. it is a German Dynasty which
ascends the throne. Peter III., son of a Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, is
a Romanov in the proportion of one-half; Paul, son of a Princess of
Anhalt-Zerbst, in the proportion of one-fourth; Alexander I. and
Nicholas I., sons of a Princess of Würtemberg, in the proportion of
one-eighth; Alexander II., son of a Princess of Hohenzollern, to the
extent of one-sixteenth; Alexander III., son of a Grand Duchess of
Hesse-Darmstadt, to the extent of one thirty-second; and the late
ruler, Nicholas II., who married a Princess of the House of Oldenburg,
to the extent of one sixty-fourth. One sixty-fourth of the blood of
the late Tsar is Russian Romanov blood. In the proportion of
sixty-three sixty-fourths it is the blood of Holstein, of Anhalt, of
Oldenburg, of Hesse, of Würtemberg, of Hohenzollern, which flows
through the veins of the late Emperor of all the Russias.
IV.
The history of Russia proves only too conclusively that again and
again the national interests of Russia have been sacrificed to the
German dynastic influences. At the end of the Seven Years' War,
Frederick the Great was at his last gasp. Prussia was on the verge of
ruin. _The Russian Army had entered Berlin_; the power of the new
military monarchy had been totally broken at Kunersdorf. The death of
Elizabeth and the accession of her mad nephew, Peter III., retrieved a
desperate situation. For the mad nephew was a German Prince, a Duke of
Holstein, and a passionate admirer of Frederick the Great. Peter III.
was murdered in 1762. He only reigned a few months, but he reigned
sufficiently long to save Prussia from destruction and to surrender
all the advantages secured by Russian triumphs and dearly paid for by
Russian blood.
V.
There is no more fantastic fairy-tale and there is no more fascinating
drama than the life-story of Catherine the Great, which recently has
been so brilliantly told by Mr. Francis Gribble. A Cinderella amongst
German royalties, a pauper Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine became
the mightiest potentate of her age. Although the nominee of Frederick
the Great, she pursued consistently a national Russian policy. And she
had good reasons for doing so. For no throne was less secure than the
throne of the Romanovs. She had had to remove her husband by murder
for fear of being removed herself. She continued to be surrounded by a
rabble of unscrupulous adventurers and intriguers. Her only safety lay
in becoming a patriotic Russian, and in seeking the support of Russian
sentiment and Russian opinion. Whilst Frederick the Great surrounded
himself with French advisers, and contemptuously refused even to speak
the German language; whilst he declared to the German scholar who
presented him with a copy of the "Nibelungen Lied" that this national
German epic was not worth a pipe of tobacco, Catherine the Great
systematically encouraged Russian literature. Whilst Frederick the
Great remained the consistent Atheist on the throne, Catherine the
Great professed the utmost zeal for Russian Orthodoxy. All through her
reign she avoided as far as possible a conflict with Frederick and his
successor. She divided with them the spoils of Poland, or, as
Frederick the Great put it in his edifying theological language, she
partook of the Eucharistic body of the Polish kingdom in unholy
communion with Prussia and Austria. But Catherine saw to it that
Russia secured the greater part of the spoils.
VI.
There is a curious and uncanny similarity between the character and
the reign of Peter III. and the character and reign of his son, Paul
I. Both reigns were brief, yet both reigns had an incalculable
influence on European affairs. Both rulers sacrificed national
interests to dynastic interests. Both rulers were insane, and both
rulers engaged in insane enterprises. Both father and son were
murdered with the complicity or connivance of their own family. The
Russian armies, on the advent of Peter III., had secured and achieved
a dramatic victory over Prussia, but the admiration of Peter III. for
Frederick the Great prevented the Russians from reaping the fruits of
victory. Suvoroff crossed the Alps and achieved an equally sensational
victory over France, but Paul I. was prevented from taking advantage
of his victories by his admiration for Napoleon.
VII.
The reign of Alexander I. once more strikingly illustrates the
enormous part which subterranean German influences have played in the
foreign policy of Russia. After the costly victories of Eylau and
Friedland, Napoleon I. had concluded with Alexander I. the Peace of
Tilsit. The treaty was fatal to Europe, for it divided the Continent
practically between the Russian and French Empires. But it was highly
advantageous to Russia, and enormously added to Russian power and
Russian prestige.
It was certainly in Russia's interest to maintain the Alliance. It was
broken largely through one of those small dynastic incidents which are
of such vast importance under an absolute despotism. One of Napoleon's
main objects was to establish a Napoleonic Dynasty and to be adopted
by marriage into one of the ruling families of Europe. The Corsican
parvenu passionately desired a matrimonial alliance with the House of
Romanov, and repeatedly applied for the hand of one of Alexander's
sisters; the dowager Tsarina, Alexander's mother, a daughter of the
King of Würtemberg, as persistently refused. She had all the pride of
birth of a German Princess, and all the hatred of a reactionary
against the armed soldier of the Revolution. Foiled at the Court of
Petersburg, Napoleon was more successful at the Court of Vienna. A few
months after Napoleon's last overtures had been rejected by Russia,
the Habsburgs, who, after the Bourbons, were the most august, the most
ancient dynasty of Europe, eagerly accepted what the Romanovs had
refused. The war of 1812 with Russia was the result of that pro-German
policy of the Russian Court.
VIII.
During the reigns of Nicholas I. and Alexander II. the German-Austrian
influence reached its zenith at the Court of Petersburg. Nicholas I.
was the brother-in-law of the Prussian Hohenzollern. An able and an
honest man in his private relations, he was in his political capacity
a Prussian martinet, as even Treitschke is compelled to admit, and he
organized his Empire on the strictest Frederician principles. The
Court, the Army, and the bureaucracy were Prussianized as they had
never been before. A German bureaucrat, Nesselrode, who could not even
speak the Russian language, for forty years controlled as Foreign
Minister the policy of the Russian Empire. Even as his grandfather,
Peter III., even as his brother, Alexander I., had saved Prussia from
destruction, so Nicholas I. saved Austria from a similar fate. Francis
Joseph had ascended a throne shaken to its foundations. Hungary was in
open rebellion. The young Austrian Emperor appealed to Russia for
help. Nicholas I. sent an army to quell the revolution, and
established his cousin on the Hungarian throne. It is unnecessary to
add that Francis Joseph was as loyal and as grateful to Russia as
Frederick the Great had been!
Alexander I. had refused to accept Napoleon I. as a brother-in-law.
Even so did Nicholas I. refuse to recognize Napoleon III. as Emperor
of the French. It was a gratuitous insult inspired by Prussia; it was
opposed to Russian interests, and it was one of the main causes of the
Crimean War.
IX.
Under Alexander II. the alliance of the three reactionary empires of
Central Europe was welded even more firmly than under his predecessor.
Bismarck, during his tenure of the Prussian Embassy at Petersburg, was
the chosen favourite of the Russian Court, and if he had chosen could
have become a Minister of the Tsar. An understanding with Russia
became the chief dogma of his political creed, and it remained so
until the end. It was Bismarck's adherence to the Russian-Prussian
Alliance which was one of the causes of his dismissal.
Alexander II. did nothing to guard against the German peril. He might
have been the umpire of Central Europe, as Alexander I. had been fifty
years before. He demanded no compensation for the enormous accession
of power and territory which Germany had received through the
victorious wars of 1863, 1866, and 1870. He insisted on no guarantees.
When, after Sedan, Thiers came to St. Petersburg to obtain the
intervention of the Russian Empire, he was dismissed with empty words.
One year after Thiers's fruitless journey, Emperor William paid an
official visit to his nephew Alexander II., and the Tsar once more
proclaimed the indissoluble solidarity of Russia with Germany. Until
the end of his reign the German-Austrian-Russian Alliance, the famous
dynastic Alliance of the Three Emperors, remained the keystone of
European policy and the mainstay of Russian reaction.
X.
The influence of Germany at the Russian Court was strengthened by the
influence of Germany on the Russian bureaucracy. An agricultural
community without a middle class, Russia has had to recruit her Civil
Services almost entirely from the outside and mainly from Germany, and
more especially from the German Baltic provinces of Esthonia, Livonia,
and Courland. Teutonic barons from those Baltic provinces have filled
the higher ranks of the Diplomatic Service and of the Civil Service
for a hundred and fifty years. The Russian Tsars found the German
barons far more serviceable tools than the Russian boiars. In a
previous age one Emperor after another had been removed by a
rebellious aristocracy. The highest nobles in the land had been
implicated in the Decabrist conspiracy at the end of Alexander I.'s
reign. Even under Alexander II. there were always a few members of the
nobility to be found as accomplices in the revolutionary plots. But
there never was one single German from the Baltic provinces implicated
in a conspiracy against reaction. It is easy to understand, therefore,
why a Russian autocrat should have preferred the services of the
German Baltic barons. The Russian nobleman is casual, lavish, a bad
economist, easygoing, generous, and he is corrupt because easygoing
and generous. He is also much more independent. The Junker is
punctual, precise, disciplined, generally poor, always ambitious. He
is also tolerably honest. He is the ideal bureaucrat.
XI.
German influence has been no less dominant in the Russian academies
and in scientific institutions. The Academy of Sciences of St.
Petersburg was organized on the pattern of the Academy of Berlin. It
was an official institution with high privileges, and it remained
consistently German. Until recently its proceedings were published in
the German language, and German scientists were invariably preferred
rather than Russian scientists. Mendelieff, one of the most creative
scientific minds of his generation, was a member of every European
academy except the Academy of Petersburg.
The Germans have been an even greater power in the Russian
Universities. They took full advantage of the prestige which German
science had acquired in Europe, and they largely filled the ranks of
the liberal professions. German doctors, German veterinary surgeons,
German _Feldschers_, German foresters, German engineers, were to be
found in every part of the Empire. A casual reading of the Post Office
directories of Moscow, or Petersburg, or Kiev, provides a most
instructive commentary on the extent of the German domination.
XII.
Securely entrenched in the Russian Court, in the Army, in the
bureaucracy, in the Universities, in the Diplomatic Service, the
Germans secured a no less commanding influence in trade and industry.
As we have already pointed out, Russia, until recent years, had
remained an agricultural country without a middle class. The trade
remained almost entirely in foreign hands. Already in the Middle Ages
Russian cities, like Novgorod, were affiliated to the German Hanseatic
League. In the sixteenth century adventurous English explorers and
traders, whose exploits are amongst the most thrilling of Hakluyt's
voyages, tried to oust their German competitors, but they utterly
failed. The Russians themselves are excellent traders, and the
merchant guilds of Moscow have been for centuries a powerful
commercial organization. Even to-day you will meet in Moscow
unassuming Russian merchants leading the simplest of lives and
possessed of enormous wealth. But the Russian merchant is generally
conservative, un-enterprising, a bad linguist, and servilely attached
to ancient usages. He is scarcely a match for the foreigner. In recent
years British and Belgian traders as well as Jews and Armenians have
shared in the enormous trade of the Russian Empire, _but the Germans
have secured the lion's share_.
And what is true of Russian trade is equally true of Russian industry.
The liberal economic policy of Witte has created in one generation
powerful industrial centres in Central Russia, and especially in
Poland. Here, again, the Germans have benefited more than all their
competitors together. Lodz, the "Manchester of Russian Poland," has
ceased to be either Polish or Russian, and has become a German
manufacturing town. Caprivi, Bismarck's successor, negotiated with the
Russian Government a treaty of commerce which gave enormous advantages
to German industry, and if the German Government had continued to show
the wisdom of Bismarck and Caprivi, Germany would certainly have
profited more than any other country by the commercial expansion of
the Russian Empire.
XIII.
It might have been expected that a German influence so absolutely
supreme in every sphere of society, in every walk of life, should have
extended to the lower classes. But the common people were never
affected by German methods and remained untainted by the German
spirit. To the Russian moujik, the German remained the _Niemets_, the
mute, the alien enemy. The Russian peasant, with his simple ways and
his child-like faith, a mystic and an idealist, has an instinctive
antipathy to the modern Prussian, who is an implacable realist,
selfish, calculating, and aggressive. The persistence with which the
Russian people have resisted and escaped Prussian influence is not the
least convincing proof of the soundness of the Slav character.
XIV.
We have seen German influence supreme in the province of the
practical, the tangible, the useful. It is all the more remarkable
that it should be insignificant in the sphere of the ideal and of the
beautiful. In Art and Literature the influence of Germany has been
purely superficial, although the beautiful Russian language has often
been spoiled by the influence of a cumbrous German syntax. With the
exception of Nietzsche, no German writer has left his mark on Russian
literature. The literary influence of Great Britain has been much more
extensive, and has grown enormously during the last generation. But it
is the literature of France which has been the dominant factor in the
literary life of modern Russia. The fascination of French culture has
been as old as Russian culture. Catherine II. was the friend of
Diderot and Voltaire, and herself translated French masterpieces into
Russian. The French language has been the language of diplomacy and
society. Readers of "War and Peace" will remember how the noblemen of
the Petersburg salons denounced the French usurper in the language of
Voltaire.
XV.
We have sufficiently proved that Germany has been a formidable factor
in the whole past history of the Russian Empire. We may hope that
after the war German influence will be a thing of the past. After the
war it is not German political ideas and German institutions, but
French and British ideas and institutions which will mould the
destinies of the Russian Empire. The elective affinities between the
Russian democracy and the French and British democracies will assert
themselves and will eliminate the mischievous and reactionary
influence of Germany.
We have seen how entirely German power has been artificial and imposed
from above, how it has been the outcome of the dynastic connection.
_But in the meantime the German influence supreme before the war still
subsists and still constitutes a danger which it would be extremely
unwise and unstatesmanlike to ignore or to under-rate._ We must
therefore guard ourselves, so that when the day of settlement comes
the subtle and subterranean German forces shall not make themselves
felt, and that the Teutonic Monarchies shall be frustrated in their
supreme effort to retain a power which has been so fatal to the
liberties of Europe and to the free development of the Russian
people.