opinion. It had not been educated in practical foreign policy, which, for us, really began with the war. I read all the Russian pronouncements attentively. The Russian war manifesto of August 2 spoke of Slavs related by blood and faith-in the eyes of official Russia the Orthodox Slavs of the Balkans had long been “Slavs and brothers.” On August 9 the Tsar, speaking to the Members of the Duma, referred again to co-religionist brethren.” For this reason his further phrase, “the complete and inseparable union of the Slavs with Russia,” did not strike me as particularly precise, since he was silent on the question whether Poles, Bulgars and Serbs, as well as Croats, Slovenes and Czechoslovaks, could be so closely united with Russia. At the Moscow war celebration on August 18, the representative of the nobility declared the war to be a defence of Slavdom against pan-Germanism, and the Tsar replied that it was a question of defending Russia and Slavdom. He said nothing about the Orthodox faith because, for him, that was a matter of course.
In the Duma, Sazonof as Foreign Minister announced that it was the historical task of Russia to protect the Balkan peoples—not the Slav peoples-and that the will of Austria and of Germany must not be the law of Europe. Sazonof, as I heard later, also wrote the manifesto to the Poles on August 15. It was a fine declaration which the Poles accepted with grateful emotion; but I felt misgivings because it was signed by the Grand Duke Nicholas, not by the Tsar, just as the Austrian Emperor had not spoken to the Poles directly but through his Commander-in-Chief. Before long the old enmity between Poles and Russians blazed up again, by no means through the fault of the Poles alone. In fact, Tsarist Russia showed, little by little, that it had no thought of real independence for Poland but only of some sort of autonomy; and Trepoff presently blurted it out and the Tsar repeated it.
Besides, the bombastic vagueness of the Grand Duke Nicholas’s war manifestos displeased me, especially the one addressed to the Austro-Hungarian peoples. Many copies of it were circulated in nine languages. The Slovak text, however, differed from the Czech and other texts in that the Slovaks were expressly appealed to. A special manifesto to the Czech people was also put into circulation, but it struck me as having been forged either by some of our own fellows or by the Austrian police. I could not find it in the Russian files of documents or in the Russian newspapers.
