Great Russia/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX
RUSSIA AND GERMANY
I
PEACE still seems far off. In the words of the King's message: "The end is not even in sight." We do not know when it will come or how it will come, but we do know that the settlement will largely depend on Russia. Russia is to-day for the Kaiser the most formidable enemy on land as she was the most formidable enemy for Napoleon. Russia can be invaded, but she cannot be conquered. She can be beaten, but no people possess greater recuperative power. The Russian Government have pledged themselves that they shall make no separate peace. There is no reason to believe that, if they can help it, they will break their pledge. But in a world conflagration unexpected catastrophes may always happen and it is the duty of a far-seeing statesman to bring even the unexpected into their calculations. A hundred years ago the members of the European coalition repeatedly entered into a solemn engagement that they would make no separate peace. The engagement broke down under the stress of circumstances. It is at least conceivable that circumstances, say the pressure of a national disaster or an internal revolution, might again prove too strong even for the most resolute Government, and no Russian Government would dare refuse a separate peace if the vital necessities of the people demanded it. A few months ago the resistance of Russia was completely paralyzed for lack of ammunition. It might be paralyzed again. Her most prosperous provinces are ravaged. Grave internal difficulties are ever threatening her. And it is probably in response to popular demand that even so strong a generalissimo as Grand Duke Nicholas was removed from the supreme command. One can therefore imagine a combination of tragic circumstances where the Russian Government might be unable to resist the political, financial and military pressure, and might be reduced to accept an inconclusive peace. For Russia as well as for ourselves the danger of an inconclusive peace is by far the greatest peril which threatens us in the future. The Russian Foreign Secretary recently made a disquieting announcement, that the Russian Government will make no independent peace as long as one single German soldier remains on Russian territory. But what if the last German soldier were to withdraw? Russia will certainly not make a dishonourable peace, but what if financial exhaustion and internal dissension, aided by German intrigue and a short-sighted and faint-hearted policy, compelled her to accept an honourable peace,—such a peace as Bismarck granted to Austria after Sadowa.
Let us be under no delusion; as the war is being protracted, as the economic and military pressure increases, as the decision is being delayed, there exists, at least, a remote danger of a breach in the European Alliance. I admit that the chances are very remote, but Germany may be depended upon to make the most of those chances, and to use all the influence she has got in Russia to compass her ends. It is, therefore, of the greatest practical interest to analyse the nature of the influence which Germany actually does wield in the Empire of the Tsar, the precise nature of the relations between Germany and Russia and the means Germany possesses of controlling the internal and foreign policy of the country, and of eventually deflecting the currents of public opinion.
II
The complicated and contradictory relations between the two countries 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 repellent. There is a temperamental antagonism between the two nations, between the dour disciplined Prussian and the easy-going, undisciplined 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, 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.
III
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 Tartar 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 tragic-comic one. French etiquette could not decide whether the Tartar 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 enormous political advantage 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 really the German dynasty of Oldenburg.
I need not emphasise 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, Schlussenburg, 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.
IV
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-Zerlst, in the proportion of one-fourth; Alexander I and Nicholas I, sons of a Princess of Württemberg, 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 present 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 present Tsar is Russian Romanov blood. In the proportion of sixty-three sixty-fourths (6364) it is the blood of Holstein, of Anhalt, of Oldenburg, of Hesse, of Württemberg, of Hohenzollern which flows through the veins of the Emperor of all the Russias.
V
The history of Russia proves only too conclusively that again and again her national interests 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 reigned only 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.
VI
There is no more fantastic fairy tale and there is no more arresting 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 Kingdom in unholy communion with Prussia and Austria. But Catherine saw to it that Russia secured the greater part of the spoils.
VII
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 engaged in insane enterprises. Both rulers 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 Russia from reaping the fruits of victory. Suvorov 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.
VIII
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 Württemberg, 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 Hapsburgs, 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.
IX
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.
X
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 favorite of the Russian Court. 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 the 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' 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.
XI
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, 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, easy-going, generous, and he is corrupt because he is easy-going 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.
XII
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.
XIII
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 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, unenterprising, 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.
XIV
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.
XV
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.
XVI
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.