A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (14 page)

So Tuesday ended badly. Vienna, with its declaration of war, had convinced Sazonov in St. Petersburg that it was mobilizing not merely to underscore its grievances but to destroy Serbia (which was, in fact, not far from the truth where Berchtold and Conrad were concerned). The Russians had accelerated their preparations for war, Sazonov had been told that it was not even possible to talk with Vienna, and he took this as further evidence that war had become inevitable. Meanwhile he was also being told by France’s Ambassador Paléologue that Paris wanted him to stand firm, by Germany’s Ambassador Friedrich von Pourtalès that if Russia proceeded with its military preparations Germany would have to mobilize as well, by Serbia’s ambassador that the Austrians were bombarding Belgrade, and by Russia’s generals that Germany was preparing for war and they must do the same. In important ways, Sazonov was being deceived. French prime minister René Viviani, from the ship on which he and President Poincaré were returning from St. Petersburg, had sent a telegram urging Paléologue to do everything possible to resolve the crisis without war. Paléologue, so determined to encourage Russian belligerence that he was in effect creating his own foreign policy, instead told Sazonov of the “complete readiness of France to fulfill her obligations as an ally in case of necessity.”

Paléologue’s motivation in all this is clear enough. Notoriously excitable, so inclined to take the darkest possible view of every situation that he was widely distrusted (he owed his appointment to a lifelong friendship with Poincaré), he had been warning even before the July crisis that a European war was inevitable by year-end. Among the terrors that tormented him was the thought that, if France failed to demonstrate a willingness to support Russia almost unreservedly, St. Petersburg would abandon the Entente and seek to ally itself with Berlin. Thus he saw himself as preventing the collapse of France’s entire foreign policy, and therefore of France’s security.

Background

THE ROMANOVS

IN 1914 THE ROMANOV FAMILY HAD JUST COMPLETED THE
celebration of its three hundredth year on the Russian throne. It had been a turbulent, often bizarre three centuries. Geniuses and degenerates had worn the crown by turns, amazingly strong women succeeded by alarmingly weak men. There had been royal murders and assassinations, questions about whether a tsar who was presumably dead and buried had actually died at all, and enough sexual irregularity to make it uncertain whether the Romanovs of the twentieth century were even related to the founders of the dynasty. By fits and starts Russia had changed from a remote and exotic eastern kingdom into one of Europe’s dominating powers—still only half modern, still not entirely European, but an empire of immense wealth reaching from Poland to the Pacific Ocean. By 1914 the Romanovs had been, by the standards of Russian history, stable and respectable for five generations. The reigning tsar, Nicholas II, was a far more virtuous man than many of his predecessors. He was also, unfortunately, far weaker and less capable than the best of them.

The first Romanov tsar was Michael, crowned in 1613 when he was sixteen years old. He was given the crown because Russia’s previous royal family had died out; because after fifteen years of leaderless disorder the country’s most powerful factions were desperate for stability; and because no better choice was available. If Michael’s blood was not quite royal, it was nearly so: his aunt Anastasia, his father’s sister, had been the beloved first wife of Ivan the Terrible and the mother of the last tsar in Ivan’s line. Grief over her death is supposed to have been a factor in Ivan’s transformation into a homicidal maniac of almost inconceivable savagery.

The Romanovs did not burst upon the European scene until almost a century later, when Peter I, Peter the Great, became tsar. He was a gigantic figure in every sense: more than six and a half feet tall, immensely strong, infinitely energetic, violent, a reformer of everything and at the same time a ruthless tyrant. He was so determined to force Russia into the modern Western world that he moved its capital from Moscow to a swampy piece of wilderness on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Here he built a magnificent new city that was laced with canals and became known as the Venice of the North. He named it St. Petersburg because that was more Western than the Russian equivalent, Petrograd. There was nothing that he wasn’t determined to change, and when his ministers weren’t quick enough in doing what he wanted, he would lash even the most exalted of them with his stick. He forced the men of Russia to shave their beards and adopt Western dress; the traditionalists were scandalized. He modernized the government and the military. He conquered and developed seaports not only on the Baltic but on the Black Sea, beginning the long process of pushing the Ottoman Turks southward back toward their capital of Constantinople. By the time of his death in 1725, he had transformed Russia into a major player among the nations of the world.

The Russian royal family: Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters and son

As a young man Peter had married a woman from the Russian nobility, but he soon found her tedious and eventually sent her to a convent. He replaced her with a mistress, a Lutheran girl named Marta who had begun her life as a humbly born orphan in Latvia. She had become a prisoner when an invading Russian army captured her hometown, was given to a man who happened to be close to Peter, and so was taken back to St. Petersburg, where she was discovered by the tsar. Marta and Peter had twelve children together (only two, both of them daughters, survived to adulthood), and she came to be the one person in whom he had complete confidence. She was rechristened in the Orthodox faith and given the baptismal name Catherine, and was married to Peter in 1712, when she was twenty-eight and he fifty. He had her crowned his empress consort in 1724 (Peter was the first tsar to call himself emperor), and upon Peter’s death she was proclaimed Empress Catherine I in her own right. Her career has to be considered among the more remarkable in history.

The story becomes fuzzy in the years following Catherine’s death. The Romanovs became extinct in the male line (Peter had his heir, a son by his first wife, tortured until he died), and in time the crown went to an obscure German princeling whose mother had been Peter’s and Catherine’s daughter. This new tsar, Peter III, was a drunkard, a fool, probably sexually impotent, and an ardent admirer of Russia’s enemy Frederick the Great of Prussia. Not surprisingly, the Russian nobility despised him. He matters in history for one reason only: before becoming tsar, he had married a fifteen-year-old German princess—another Catherine, as it happened—who quickly succeeded him on the throne. (Plotters from the army, in collusion with this second Catherine, murdered him less than a year after his coronation.) She became Catherine the Great, the second monumental figure of the Romanov era.

She was a physically tiny woman whose appetites and ambitions equaled those of Peter the Great. She became more Russian than the Russians, and during her thirty-four-year reign the empire expanded tremendously and again was prodded along the road to modernization. Like Peter the Great, she reached out to the West. She corresponded with such Enlightenment giants as Voltaire and Diderot. She brought John Paul Jones from the New World to take command of her Black Sea Fleet and use it against the Turks. It was with Catherine that the Russians began to aspire seriously to the role of patron of the Christian peoples of the Balkans. And under Catherine they first dreamed of driving the Turks out of Constantinople, the ancient and holy imperial city of the East.

Like Peter the Great before her and like many of her own descendants, Catherine was a perplexing mixture of reformer and tyrant. She was also a woman of great intellect and cultivation, as well as a libertine. She had multiple lovers before her husband’s death, and it is at best questionable whether her son and heir, Paul, was actually the son of Peter III. Her long string of handsome young lovers, most of them playthings whom she was far too shrewd to take seriously except in the boudoir, continued until her death of a stroke at sixty-seven. Unprovable stories about her sexual encounters with a horse have come down to the twenty-first century.

Catherine had no confidence in her son Paul; in fact, she despised him. She took charge of the upbringing of Paul’s sons, especially the eldest, Alexander. She carefully supervised his preparation for the throne. When she died, Paul succeeded. But he was soon murdered, just as his father had been—assuming that Peter III was in fact his father. He was then succeeded, as Catherine had intended, by the tall, handsome, and intelligent young Alexander I.

In what would become something of a Romanov pattern, Tsar Alexander began his reign as a reformer of whom great things were expected, then took alarm at the forces of change all around him, and finally turned into the most iron-handed kind of reactionary. His first fifteen years on the throne were turbulent in the extreme, with Napoleon marching his armies up and down Europe and finally occupying and burning Moscow. It fell to Alexander to save Russia and his dynasty, and he succeeded brilliantly. In the end he outwaited and outwitted the French emperor. At one point he even pretended to consider offering his sister to Napoleon, though in fact giving a Romanov princess to such an upstart was unthinkable. After Napoleon took an Austrian bride instead (even the mighty Hapsburgs turned out to be more submissive than Alexander) and finally was driven into exile, Alexander was more influential than any other monarch in restoring the old order.

Intriguing questions hang over the end of Alexander’s life. In 1825, childless but at the peak of his power, he was suddenly reported to have died in a town where he had been staying far from the capital. When his coffin arrived in St. Petersburg, his brothers refused to have it opened. There were rumors that he had not died at all but had done something that he had long talked yearningly of doing—withdrawn into a monastery in Siberia to spend the rest of his life in contemplation. Nothing of the sort was ever proved. But toward the end of the twentieth century, when his coffin was finally opened in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, it was found to be empty.

Alexander’s heir was his brother Constantine, but because this archduke refused the crown, it was passed to a third and much younger brother who thereby became Nicholas I. This Nicholas, lacking even ephemeral reforming instincts, was a reactionary in all ways from the start. When he died in 1855, he was called the man who had frozen Russia for thirty years.

His son Alexander II was also conservative but more intelligent and therefore able to understand the need for change. He began his career as a reformer and even something of an idealist, abolishing the serfdom that had long been the shame of Russia. Gradually he too turned in the direction of reaction and repression, taking such severe measures against a movement of young reformers that some became bomb-throwing radicals. In the last years of his reign there were repeated attempts on his life, but Alexander never completely abandoned his efforts to move Russia closer to if not quite into the modern world. In 1881, shortly after he had approved the creation of a parliamentlike body that was to be allowed to advise on legislation without actually passing laws, a bomb thrown by a young Pole blew him apart.

Still alive but oozing blood from every part of his body, one leg gone and the other shredded, his torso torn open and his face disfigured, the tsar was carried to his palace. There he died, horribly, in the presence of his family, including his eldest son, who then became Alexander III, and the latter’s eldest son, thirteen-year-old Nicholas. He was the third tsar to be murdered in six generations.

Alexander III was a huge and bearlike man, powerful enough to bend a poker and roll pieces of silverware into balls with his bare hands. On succeeding to the throne he declared his “faith in the power and right of autocracy,” and he was as good as his word. He dedicated himself unreservedly to reversing as many of his father’s reforms as possible (a restoration of serfdom was not among the possibilities), refusing any innovations that might reduce the power of the Romanovs, and clamping down in almost totalitarian fashion on every form of dissent. Newspapers were not even allowed to print the word constitution.

Alexander III’s son Nicholas was improbably unlike his father in almost every respect: physically slight, something of a playboy in his youth though in fairly innocent ways, and utterly lacking in self-confidence. He was, however, given the same tutor who had taught his father, an archconservative named Constantine Pobedonostsev, known as the High Priest of Social Stagnation. “Among the falsest of political principles is the principle of the sovereignty of the people,” Pobedonostsev taught. “It is terrible to think of our condition if destiny had sent us the fatal gift—an all-Russia Parliament. But that will never be.” Young Nicholas listened, and like his father he believed. He learned that it was not only the tsar’s right but his sacred duty to be a strong father to all the Russians, to yield power to no one. But he had a clear sense of his own limits, knew that he could never be like his father, and had absolutely no wish to succeed him.