The Sleepwalkers (48 page)

Krivoshein was one of the most dynamic and interesting figures on the Russian political scene. He was the consummate political networker: intelligent, sophisticated, shrewd and possessed of an uncanny gift for making the right friends.
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As a young man, he was notorious for his skill in befriending the sons of powerful ministers who subsequently helped him find attractive posts. In 1905, he infiltrated the circle associated with the Tsar's secretary D. Trepov (the autumn of 1905 was the only time the Tsar used the services of a private secretary). By 1906, though he still lacked any permanent official post, Krivoshein was already being received by the sovereign.
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He was also immensely rich, having married into the Morozov family, heirs to a vast textiles empire, an alliance that also assured him close relations with Moscow's industrial elite.

Krivoshein's politics were forged by his early experience of Russian Poland – he was born and grew up in Warsaw. The region was a breeding ground for nationalist Russian officials. Russian bureaucrats in the Polish western
gubernias
felt, in the words of one senior functionary, ‘like a besieged camp, their thoughts always drifting towards national authority'.
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The western salient became one of the footholds of the Duma nationalists after 1905. Foreign policy was not initially among Krivoshein's specialities. He was an agrarian and administrative modernizer in the style of Stolypin. He found communication with foreigners difficult, because, unlike most members of his class in Russia, he spoke neither German nor French fluently. Nevertheless: as his political star ascended, he acquired the appetite to wield influence in this, the most prestigious domain of government activity. Moreover, his appointment as minister of land-tenure regulation and agriculture in May 1908 involved a stronger geopolitical dimension than its title suggested. Krivoshein's ministry was involved in promoting Russian settlement in the Far East and he thus took an active interest in security questions relating to the frontier between the Russian Far East and Chinese inner Manchuria.
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Like many eastern-oriented politicians, Krivoshein favoured the maintenance of good relations with Germany. He did not share Izvolsky's apocalyptic view of the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and resisted the foreign minister's calls for ‘revenge' against the powers of the Triple Alliance.
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Alexander V. Krivoshein

During the last few years before the summer of 1914, however, Krivoshein underwent a transition. Stolypin, who had been a powerful mentor, was dead. United government was in disarray. Krivoshein began more intensively to cultivate nationalist circles in the Duma and the public sphere. During the Balkan winter crisis of 1912–13, he supported Sukhomlinov's forward policy in the Balkans, on the grounds that it was time to ‘stop cringing before the Germans' and place one's trust instead in the Russian people and their age-old love for their homeland.
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In the spring of 1913, he led a high-volume campaign to revise the terms of Russia's current tariff treaty with Germany. The treaty had been negotiated with the Germans by Sergei Witte and Kokovtsov in 1904; by 1913, the view was widespread in the Russian political classes that the treaty allowed ‘the cunning, cold German industrialist' to collect ‘tribute' from the ‘simple-minded Russian worker of the soil'.
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The campaign, a clear disavowal of Kokovtsov's agrarian policy, stirred feuding between the German and Russian press. Krivoshein's son later recalled that as the controversy heated up and relations with Germany cooled, Krivoshein became a favourite at the French embassy, where he was often seen with his new circle of French friends.
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Krivoshein's deepening enthusiasm for a firm foreign policy also reflected the aspiration (important for Izvolsky and Sazonov, too) to find issues that would forge bonds between society and government. Krivoshein and his ministry stood out among government and official circles for their close collaboration with the
zemstvos
(elected organs of local government) and a range of civil-society-based organizations. In July 1913, he opened an agricultural exhibition in Kiev with a short address that became famous as the ‘we and they' speech. In it he declared that Russia would attain well-being only when there was no longer a harmful division between ‘us', the government, and ‘them', society. In short: Krivoshein represented a formidable compound of technocratic modernism, populism, agrarian sectoralism, parliamentary authority and increasingly hawkish views in external affairs. By 1913, he was undoubtedly the best-connected and most powerful civilian minister. No wonder Kokovtsov spoke despairingly of his own ‘isolation' and ‘complete helplessness' in the face of a ministerial party that was clearly determined to drive him from office.
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There was one strategic choice that Sazonov and his colleagues would eventually be forced to confront. Should Russia support Bulgaria or Serbia? Of the two countries, Bulgaria was clearly the more strategically important. Its location on the Black Sea and Bosphorus coasts made it an important partner. The defeat of Ottoman forces in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8 had created the conditions for the emergence, under Russian custodianship, of a self-governing Bulgarian state under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman Porte. Bulgaria was thus historically a client state of St Petersburg. But Sofia never became the obedient satellite that the Russians had wished for. Russophile and ‘western' political factions competed for control of foreign policy (as indeed they still do today) and the leadership exploited the country's strategically sensitive location by transferring their allegiances from one power to another.

After the accession to the throne of Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Koháry, who ruled Bulgaria, first as prince regnant (
knjaz
) and later as king (tsar) from 1885 until 1918, these oscillations became more frequent. Ferdinand manoeuvred between Russophile and Germanophile ministerial factions.
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The Bulgarian monarch ‘always made it a rule not to commit himself to any definite line of action', Sir George Buchanan later recalled. ‘An opportunist inspired solely by regard for his own personal interests, he preferred to [. . .] coquet first with one and then with another of the powers . . .'.
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The Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908–9 brought a cooling of relations with St Petersburg, because Ferdinand temporarily aligned himself with Vienna, exploiting the moment to throw aside the Treaty of Berlin (which had defined Bulgaria as an autonomous principality of the Ottoman Empire), declare Bulgarian unity and independence, and proclaim himself Tsar of the Bulgars at a lavish ceremony at Turnovo, the country's ancient capital. Izvolsky was appalled at this disloyalty and warned that the Bulgarians would soon pay a price for betraying their friends. It was a passing irritation: when negotiations between Sofia and Constantinople over recognition of the kingdom's independence broke down and the Ottomans began concentrating troops on the Bulgarian border, Sofia appealed to St Petersburg for help and all was forgiven. The Russians brokered an independence agreement with Constantinople and Bulgaria became for a time a loyal regional partner of the Entente.
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Yet even the most Bulgarophile policy-makers in St Petersburg recognized that relations with Sofia had to take Serbian interests into account, especially after the Bosnian annexation crisis, which had created a wave of pro-Serbian feeling in Russian public opinion. In December 1909, anxious to rebuild a forward position on the Balkan peninsula, the Russian ministry of war drafted a secret convention that envisaged joint Russo-Bulgarian operations against the Habsburg Empire, Romania or Turkey and promised the entirety of Macedonia and the Dobrudja (a disputed zone along the border with Romania) to Bulgaria. But the convention was shelved on Izvolsky's instructions because it was deemed too injurious to Serbian interests. With Hartwig in Belgrade goading the Serbs against Austria-Hungary and agitating on their behalf in St Petersburg, the irreconcilability of the Serbian and Bulgarian options became increasingly obvious.

In March 1910, delegations from Sofia
and
Belgrade visited St Petersburg within two weeks of each other for high-level talks. The Bulgarians pressed their Russian interlocutors to abandon Serbia and commit clearly to Sofia – only on this basis would a stable coalition of Balkan states emerge. It was impossible, the Bulgarian premier Malinov told Izvolsky, for the Russians to create a Great Bulgaria and a Great Serbia at the same time:

Once you decide to go with us for the sake of your own interests, we will easily settle the Macedonian question with the Serbs. As soon as this is understood in Belgrade – and you must make it clear in order to be understood – the Serbs will become much more conciliatory.
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No sooner had the Bulgarians left than King Petar, who was much more popular at the Tsar's court than the wily Ferdinand, arrived to press the Serbian case. He received crucial assurances: Russia no longer intended to grant Bulgaria the status of a privileged client. The long-standing Russian commitment to support the Bulgarian claim to Macedonia would remain officially in place, but behind the scenes Izvolsky promised that he would find ways of ‘satisfying the interests and rights of Serbia'. Above all – this was news that electrified the foreign ministry in Belgrade – Russia now accepted that a part of Macedonia must fall to Serbia.
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One of the attractions of the Balkan League policy in Russian eyes was precisely that it enabled the inconsistency between the options to be bridged, at least for the moment. Once the Serbo-Bulgarian alliance of March 1912 found what appeared to be a mutually acceptable solution to the problem of Macedonia, it was possible to imagine that the League might prove a durable instrument of Russian policy on the peninsula. The provision for Russian arbitration in the disputed zone seemed to protect Russia's special role on the peninsula while creating a mechanism by which the Slavic patron could contain and channel the conflict between its clients.

The unexpectedly rapid advance of the Bulgarian armies on Constantinople caused panic in St Petersburg. Sazonov had urged Sofia to be ‘wise' and prudent enough to ‘stop at the right moment'; his alarm was deepened by the bizarre suspicion that the French were urging the Bulgarians to seize the Ottoman capital.
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But the mood calmed after the collapse of the Bulgarian advance and in the aftermath of the war, St Petersburg focused on mediating a settlement between the two victor states under the terms set out in the treaty of March 1912. But Serbia refused to vacate the territories it had seized and Bulgaria refused to relinquish its claim to those areas. Mediation was virtually impossible: the Bulgarians claimed that any mediation must take place on the basis of the treaty of March 1912, whereas the Serbian government took the view that events on the ground had rendered the treaty null and void. The Balkan states were, as Tsar Nicholas put it, like ‘well-behaved youngsters' who had ‘grown up to become stubborn hooligans'.
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Sazonov gravitated at first towards Bulgaria and blamed Serbia, reasonably enough, for refusing to vacate the conquered areas. But by the end of March 1913, the Russian foreign minister had swung back to Belgrade and was urging Sofia to make concessions. When he learned that the Bulgarians were about to recall their ambassador in Belgrade, Andrey Toshev, Sazonov flew into a rage and accused the Bulgarians of acting under the instructions of Vienna; thanks to their ‘impertinence towards Russia and Slavdom', the Bulgarians were throwing themselves ‘into ruin'.
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The Bulgarians agreed not to recall Ambassador Toshev and the quarrel was patched up, but there was a lasting Russian reorientation away from Sofia. It helped that the Bulgarians were the ones to commence hostilities on 29 June, since Sazonov had repeatedly warned that whoever started the next war was going to pay a heavy price. (Yet the Russians had a hand in this, too, since Hartwig had instructed Nikola Pašić under no circumstances to take the initiative, but to wait for a Bulgarian attack.)

At the same time, there was a shift in Russian policy vis-à-vis Romania. During the First Balkan War, Sazonov had interceded with Bucharest to ensure that there was no opportunist Romanian assault on Bulgarian territory – he was referring to the Dobrudja, the border region claimed by both states. In the early summer of 1913, by contrast, when the Serbo-Bulgarian agreement on Macedonia broke down, Sazonov let it be known in Bucharest that Russia would
not
take action if Romania intervened against the aggressor in a Serbo-Bulgarian war.
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This was the firmest step against Bulgaria hitherto; it made the Russian position unprecedentedly clear.