Россия и Запад

Russian Diplomats and their Image of Germany before World War I

The relations between Russia and Germany have a long and colourful history, which has been studied thoroughly in most of its aspects[1348]. Religion, politics, philosophy, economy, wars, the arts and culture — these are just some of the areas in which Germans and Russians have been in contact over many centuries. Literary relations have frequently provided some of the most prominent and fruitful links, which Konstantin Azadovskii has for many years explored and actively promoted. The correspondences of writers, their mutual visits, their love for the culture of the other country and their translating activities have all been subjects of distinguished studies by Konstantin Markovich, not to forget his own translations from German literature into Russian.

Mutual perceptions and images of the other have always played an essential role in the relations between Germans and Russians and have been explored accordingly[1349]. They are particularly well known in popular culture and in literature — just think of the archetypical Petersburg Germans in the works of Gogol or of Rilke’s fascination with the Russian spirit, or recall the many cartoons, jokes and popular broadsheets making fun of stereotypical Ivans and Russian bears on the one hand or немцы шмерцы and колбасники on the other[1350]. But mutual perceptions have also affected (and continue to affect) other areas of Russo-German relations, beyond the spheres of high and low cultures. Foreign policy, for example, is one such area While its decisions are ideally based on cold reason and national interest, they are, in the end, still taken by human beings and thus prone to personal influences.

The following essay is a study of attitudes towards Germany among members of Russia’s foreign office in the years before 1914. According to historians, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just as Russian politics more generally during that time, was effectively divided into a pro- and an anti-German group[1351]. How much these predispositions influenced actual foreign policy is hard to ascertain. But they did sometimes affect personnel decisions and thus had at least indirectly an effect on the practical diplomatic discourse between Russia and Germany. Most of what will be discussed is based on memoirs of politicians and diplomats, i.e. sources, which many serious historians have been reluctant to use, because of their inherently tendentious nature. And they are indeed not particularly helpful if one wants to investigate actual foreign policy issues, international relations and diplomatic crises. Yet for studying perceptions and stereotypes, such ego-documents are of immense value[1352]. They still provide the most authentic voice for the convictions of their authors, even if they were written years after the events which they relate.

Russian foreign policy before World War I has been studied in great detail, including the nationalist views of some of its actors. Dominic Lieven, for one, has discussed pro-German attitudes, focusing mainly on three high-ranking officials[1353]. However, he did not consider lower-ranking personnel and has little to say about anti-Germans, many of whom held leading positions. Several of these people have left memoirs and correspondences which allow additional insights into the кулуарная политика at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Pro-German writers, as may be expected, tended to draw a rather benign image of Germany and things German. In the writings of anti-German officials, pan-Slavist ideas about a final showdown between Germans and Slavs were often shining through as was the so-called German Drang nach Osten. This relatively new and thoroughly a-historical catchword was commonly mobilized to create a scenario of threat reaching back deep into the past. It allowed for conflating such different phenomena as German rearmament, economic power and 18^th c. Volga-German colonists with anti-Russian diatribes by Baltic German activists and the contemporary political crises in the Balkans. Its appeal was such that it even appeared in official Russian diplomatic correspondence, while pan-Slavist ideas were part of the foreign policy programmes of almost all parties represented in the State Duma At least in this respect, politics and public opinion went hand in hand. In most of the Russian press after 1900, Germany was seen as a bastion of reaction and military expansionism. Only some conservative papers like «Grazhdanin» or «Rossiia» were more lenient with German positions, stressing the importance of a strong monarchy and of good relations with Germany in the fight against «anarchism, nihilism and social democracy»[1354].

The most prominent members of the anti-German group were, unsurprisingly, those politicians and officials who favoured close ties with France and Britain. Among them were the two foreign ministers, Aleksandr Izvol’skii (1906–1910) and Sergei Sazonov (1910–1916), as well as Aleksandr Savinskii, chief of the cabinet of the Minister for Foreign Affairs (1901–1910). In his memoirs, he identifies the Drang nach Osten as the most important reason for the outbreak of World War I. Already since Frederick the Great, the Germans «inaugurated their systematic method of the colonization of Russia» and used «the Slavonic nations for extending [their] greatness»[1355]. While one might have expected a more subtle and historically informed analysis of the reasons for the war from such a high-ranking official, the true source of his prejudices comes out when he writes about his Baltic German colleagues. A: cording to him, these people «for the greater number remained German in soul and sentiment and faithful servants of the German cause». While the large number of «Baltic barons» in Russia’s Foreign Service was an undisputed fact, most of them had been in Russian service for generations and had only little connection with the Baltic lands, let alone Germany proper[1356]. But still, their patriotic loyalty was repeatedly put into question, and they were sometimes even deliberately kept away from office.

When, for example, Izvol’skii was looking for an assistant in 1908, he chose Nikolai Charikov, not only as a former classmate, but also because he saw in him a man from «the traditional circle of Russian [as opposed to Baltic!] landed nobility», which he hoped would continue to dominate Russia’s political institutions[1357]. His opinion of officials with German background was in general utterly prejudiced. In his memoirs, he describes one of them in almost cartoon-like fashion as a person «qui représentait le type le plus accompli de ces fonctionnaires d’origine allemande […] souvent très laborieux, mais réussissant surtout à atteindre les degrés supérieurs de la hiérarchie russe à force d’intrigues et de bassesses»[1358]. Clearly, he did not want to have any such people around him. When he was selecting his staff at the Embassy in Paris and a Baron Uexkoll was suggested to him as attache, he responded acidly in a letter to Sazonov: «Is it really impossible to find a young man with university education and a plain Russian family name?»[1359] Despite such ethnic prejudices, Izvol’skii frequently enjoyed his summer holidays at Tegernsee in Bavaria, where he had served as the ambassador to Munich in the late 1890s.

While Izvol’skii’s attitudes towards Germany were quite obvious, the case of his successor, Sazonov, is more complicated. He was not a straightforward anti-German, as has been suggested[1360]. At some point, he was even rumoured to «cater to the whims and caprices of the Kaiser» and, in a letter by Izvol’skii from 1912, to be «a friend of Germany»[1361]. His attitudes apparently changed as a result of the Liman von Sanders crisis in 1913, when a German military mission to Constantinople seemed to pose a vital threat to Russia’s interests and to challenge his personal reputation as Foreign Minister. Although this crisis was peacefully resolved, by the time he was writing his memoirs, after World War I, Sazonov had become a convinced nationalist, who employed all the familiar anti-German cliches, including Drang nach Osten and the final showdown between Slavs and Germans. Yet his image of Germany was still much more complex than one might expect. He attaches it to a specific historic development which bothered him not just as a politician, but also as an individual human being. Like many other educated Russians, Sazonov had always admired German music and literature, and he even welcomed the positive influence that German culture exerted within Europe. But with the foundation of the German Empire, all of this allegedly changed. Under the influence of «blood and iron» ideology, German culture degenerated into «Prussian civilization», and German arts and sciences took on a «barracks-like character». In sarcastic language, Sazonov elaborates on the results of these changes, in particular the psychology of Germans and their politicians. He attributes their self-righteous attitudes to a «Prussian official education» which made them «physically incapable to face with impartiality a Frenchman and even more a Slav» and he identifies a certain «nationalist frenzy» as a main characteristic of German national psychology[1362]. Although one could argue that this perception of Germany actually reflected historical reality (nationalism and militarism did indeed run high there), it is still quite reductionist with its notion of a physically predetermined national psychology and its absurd historical claims. If anything, Sazonov’s memoirs reflect a deep feeling of disappointment and bitterness about a country that he had once admired.

Diplomats with pro-German leanings unsurprisingly shared Sazonov’s positive views about German culture, but not his wider anti-German resentments. Petr Botkin, for example, who served at the Embassies in the USA and Portugal, remembered that he had to think of no one less than Goethe’s last words — «mehr Licht!» — when he first entered the dark corridors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg. He also was a great admirer of the music of Bach, Beethoven and, in particular, Richard Wagner, whom he mentions several times in his memoirs[1363]. Iurii Solov’ev, who later was one of the first tsarist diplomats to join the Bolsheviks, apparently had a late start in his Foreign Service career because of his pro-German attitudes. He had become a victim of Izvol’skii’s personnel policies (at least so he thought). When he finally received a diplomatic post and arrived in Stuttgart in 1909 «in order to find out in reality the German attitude towards Russia which was always shown in a hostile light in St. Petersburg», he was utterly surprised. Like Botkin, he liked Wagner’s music and frequently visited the Bayreuth Festival. But he was also deeply impressed by the cleanliness of Württemberg villages and the excellent conditions of German roads. As a proud member of the German automobile association, ADAC, he clearly knew what he was writing about[1364]. Others based their image of Germany on less concrete facts. Dmitrii Abrikosov, for example, who was mostly stationed at posts in Asia and had little experience with Russo-German relations proper, still thought highly of German virtues. In his case, this attitude was determined by the admiration for a former superior. He started his career as attache at the Embassy in London under Count Alexander Benckendorff and later reminisced that «the Russian character was much more difficult to deal with than that of the disciplined Germans». He then concluded that this is «the main reason perhaps why our diplomatic service is full of barons from the Baltic provinces»[1365].

It should be noted that some of these Baltic barons themselves held rather critical views of Germany and can thus not automatically be counted as pro-Germans simply because of their names and ancestries. Benckendorff, for example, was a passionate anglophile and an ardent supporter of Russia’s rapprochement with Britain, who believed that the German Empire posed the biggest danger to Russia It seems ironic then that the Anglo-Russian Entente (1907) had to be negotiated in St. Petersburg instead of London, allegedly because there was so little confidence in the personnel of the Russian Embassy there which, according to the popular newspaper «Novoe Vremia», was filled with «foreigners»[1366]. Roman Rosen, the ambassador in Washington (1905–1911) and later member of the State Council, was critical of irrational attitudes on both sides. In his memoirs, he attacks pan-Germanism, the disease of the «swelled head» and German «inability to understand other people’s mentality». For Russia, in turn, he bemoans the absence of a «feeling of personal responsibility for the condition of public affairs», attributes a «fatalistic strain» to the Russian national character and, after warning of the dangers of pan-Slavism to Russian foreign relations, demands a policy of «reason and competent statesmanship»[1367].

It is interesting that none of the pro-Germans quoted here stood out as particularly conservative. They were thus not quite fitting the customary pattern that pro-Germans in Russian politics tended to belong to conservative circles and to be close to the monarchy, the Ministry of the Interior or the radical Right[1368]. But perhaps these crude divisions into pro— and anti-Germans are themselves not particularly helpful and such categorizations of people just too simplistic in explaining a complex web of relations, politics and personal attitudes. It may well be that Izvol’skii and Savinskii were more the exception than the norm when it came to frankly expressing national stereotypes and taking sides. Most memoirists, it appears, avoided too offensive value judgements when it came to revealing their image of Germany or generally positioning themselves in relation to another country. As true diplomats, they would have failed their career, if they had done so. Consequently, most of them continued to present their public persona rather than their innermost personal thoughts in their memoirs. Once a diplomat, always a diplomat, one might say. But as the examples have shown, Foreign Service officials also were just ordinary human beings who developed their ideas about Germany from a plethora of very different experiences and impressions. These were not always associated with high politics, diplomatic rancour or nationalist ideologies. Most of the time, they had their roots in culture and the arts. As we have seen with Sazonov, these ideas could also change over time. They reached from love and admiration to rejection and deep hatred. It was characteristic for the venomous atmosphere of the time, that anything in between hardly registered in the official discourse. By 1914, the «love-hate relationship»[1369] between Russia and Germany had firmly swung in the direction of the latter, with according results for the mutual perceptions of the two countries. Yet World War and Revolution eventually also led to new beginnings, with cultural links spearheading new political relations in the 1920s. But that is an altogether different story.