autonomy. According to Paléologue this argument made an impression on Sazonof, who admitted that the idea was worth considering. If Paléologue’s account is accurate, it would follow that, in the first period of the war, Sazonof had no general Slav policy; otherwise he must have put forward his own counter-arguments. It is noteworthy, too, that Sazonof spoke only of Bohemia and Croatia but said nothing of the provinces appertaining to them.
Similarly, the conquest of Slovakia or, at any rate, of Central and Eastern Slovakia, had been contemplated in many unofficial Slavophil Russian circles, the Bohemian Lands being left out of account. These, and particularly Bohemia, were to be given up to the West, though, according to some of these Slavophils, Moravia was graciously to be received into the Russian bosom. Some of our Slovaks remembered this idea during the Russian advance in the winter of 1914 and the offensive of Brusiloff in the summer of 1916. The fact is that Tsarist Russia had not thought out any Czechoslovak policy. On the contrary, official Russia was in so far anti-Slav as it desired to round off the Russian Empire on strategic principles and to reach Constantinople without troubling about individual Slav peoples. Its readiness to sacrifice considerable portions of those peoples was not due to ill-will but rather to weakness and ineptitude.
As the war went on, bringing defeat after defeat, Russian declarations in regard to the Slavs became more and more reserved. The high-sounding proclamations at the beginning of the war I have already mentioned. On May 29, 1916, Sazonof still spoke in the Duma of Russia’s “Slav Brethren,” though he referred only to their “future organization” and promised far-reaching autonomy to the Poles. But, in Trepoff’s speech on War Aims, in December 1916, nothing more was said of the Slavs; and, in an Order to the Army and Navy, the Tsar repeated what Trepoff and, before him, Stürmer had said that the aims of Russia were Constantinople, and a free Poland inseparably joined to Russia.
The real war aims of Russia were revealed in the secret agreements which she concluded. Of these the weightiest was the Secret Treaty made with France and England on March 18, 1915, of which the chief feature was the conquest of Constantinople. This Treaty is certainly important, particularly as regards England. The second (provisional) Treaty was Doumergue’s convention with Pokrovsky on February 12, 1917, by which France claimed a frontier on the Rhine and
