The Sleepwalkers (60 page)

Russia had lost millions of roubles in trade during the recent disruption of the Straits, Sazonov pointed out to Nicholas II on 23 November 1912: ‘Imagine what would happen if, instead of Turkey, the Straits were to go to a state which would be able to resist Russian demands'.
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Anxieties on this score ensured that, throughout the summer and autumn of 1913 the Russian Black Sea naval command remained focused on the possibility of an imminent seizure of the Dardanelles. Russia, Captain A. V. Nemitz of the Naval General Staff declared, ‘must be prepared to accomplish [the capture of the Straits] in the immediate future'.
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Concerns about the growing strength of the Turkish fleet heightened the urgency of these proposals. The Turks had already ordered one dreadnought battleship, which was currently under construction in Britain, and two more were ordered in 1912–14, though none had arrived by the time war broke out. Nevertheless, the prospect of local Turkish superiority over Russian naval strength filled the navalists in St Petersburg with a foreboding that was in part no more than the inversion of their own imperial designs.
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The Russians – and Sazonov in particular, who was closely involved in all the relevant strategy discussions – were thus already highly sensitized to the question of control over the Straits when the Liman von Sanders mission arrived in Constantinople. What the foreign minister found particularly objectionable was the German command role. The Germans were at first reluctant to back down on this question, because the failure to assign real authority to previous generations of military advisers was seen (by both the Germans and the Ottomans) as the core reason for their failure to produce genuine reform. Experience suggested that the right to issue instructions was insufficient without the power to see that these were implemented. Sazonov was unimpressed and sought to step up pressure on Berlin. He proposed to London and Paris a joint note from the Entente powers objecting in the strongest terms to the mission and closing with the implicit threat that ‘if Germany were to secure such a primacy in Constantinople, then the other powers would see themselves obliged to act in accordance with their own interests in Turkey'.
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This initiative was not a success, mainly because the Russians were alone in viewing the Liman von Sanders mission as a threat to their vital interests. Neither the French nor the British military attaché in Constantinople was especially alarmed at Liman's arrival. It made sense, they reported, for the Germans to insist on tighter controls after the failure of previous missions to achieve anything of lasting value. Grey pleaded that the urgency of the Irish Question and ‘the difficult internal condition of the country' ruled out any direct British involvement in the issue.
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In any case, the British were less concerned about German advances in Turkey than about the growing dominance of
French
capital. ‘Turkey's independence is a vanishing quantity before the advances of the French financiers,' Sir Louis Mallet told Edward Grey in March 1914. In a furious speech to the House of Commons on 18 March, the Conservative MP Sir Mark Sykes, expert on Ottoman and Middle Eastern affairs, warned that the stranglehold of French finance in Ottoman Syria would ultimately ‘pave the way to annexation'.
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Then there was the fact that there was already a British naval mission operating on the Bosphorus, the scope of which had been extended by the arrival in 1912 of Admiral Arthur Limpus, whose contract of employment stated that he was
‘commandant de la flotte'
.
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In addition to overseeing improvements to the training and supply of the Ottoman navy, Limpus coordinated the deployment of torpedo boats and the laying of mines in the Turkish Straits, one of the most important means by which access was denied to foreign warships.
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Limpus understood his mission in a broad political sense – his correspondence with the Ottoman Admiralty covered not just questions of technical modernization, procurements and training, but also broader issues of strategic importance, such as the degree of naval strength required ‘to make it hazardous for the Russians to move troops across the Black Sea'.
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In other words, his presence in Constantinople served aims closely analogous to Liman's. Limpus viewed with sage equanimity the Anglo-German condominium over Ottoman sea- and land-based defence. ‘England has the widest experience in naval matters and as regards shore establishments,' he told the Ottoman Admiralty in June 1912:

Germany has the most powerful army and it is also believed to be the most efficient. I feel sure it has been most wise to get German advisers for everything connected with the army. I feel sure it will be most wise to obtain all advisers on naval matters from England.
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Sazonov therefore found it difficult to stir in his Entente partners the outrage felt in Russia at the arrival of the German mission. Grey rejected the threatening joint note proposed by Sazonov and suggested instead a much more innocuous
enquiry
to Constantinople as to the scope of the German mission. Notwithstanding Delcassé's vigorous nodding in St Petersburg,
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the Quai d'Orsay was even less enthusiastic than the British Foreign Office, because it discerned in the language of Sazonov's menacing joint note the prospect of a comprehensive ‘dissolution of Asiatic Turkey' with potentially disastrous consequences for French financial interests. Paris thus preferred to support Grey's more irenic proposal.
¹¹⁶
In other words: too many different forms of imperial ambition and paranoia were focused on the faltering Ottoman Empire to permit the Entente powers to rally together against one supposed threat.

Nevertheless: the Liman episode triggered a dangerous escalation of the mood among the key Russian policy-makers. Sazonov was furious at the lukewarmness of the British and French reactions to Russia's protests. In a telegram of 12 December 1913 to the Russian ambassador in London, he spoke bitterly of his declining trust in the effectiveness of British support, adding that the ‘lack of solidarity between the powers of the Entente arouses our serious concern'.
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In a report to the Tsar of 23 December, he adopted an openly militant position. He urged that ‘joint military measures' should be prepared immediately and coordinated with France and Britain. The Entente powers should ‘seize and occupy certain points in Asia Minor and declare that they would stay there until their aims were met'. Of course such a dramatic initiative risked triggering ‘European complications', but it was more likely that a posture of ‘firm resolve' would have the desired effect of forcing a German climbdown. Giving in, on the other hand, ‘could have the most fatal consequences'. A summit conference should be convened to discuss the issues arising from the Liman affair.
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The conference, which opened on 13 January 1913, was chaired by Premier Vladimir Kokovtsov. Also present were Sazonov, Minister of War Sukhomlinov, Chief of Staff General Zhilinsky and Naval Minister Grigorovich. The meeting began with a discussion of the ‘coercive measures' required to pressure Constantinople into withdrawing its request for the German military mission. The notion that economic sanctions could be used to apply pressure to the Ottoman government was dismissed – these would also hurt the very extensive French financial interests in the Ottoman Empire and strain the bonds of the Entente. An alternative was the armed seizure by Entente forces of key Ottoman strongpoints. The crucial precondition, Sazonov pointed out, was French support. Kokovtsov argued, as usual, against all this fighting talk, pointing out that war was simply too great a risk. Throughout the meeting he strove to impose a moderate and reasonable tone on the proceedings. Rather than acting in a spirit of pique with
ad hoc
reprisals, it was important, he suggested, to establish exactly the limits of what Russia would tolerate and what it would not. The Germans, Kokovtsov observed, were looking for a way of escaping ‘from the situation created by the Russian demands' and had already expressed their readiness to make concessions. It was thus crucial to avoid ‘categorical declarations of an ultimative character' that would force them to harden their own position.
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But this time, the prime minister was challenged in chorus by Sukhomlinov, Sazonov, Grigorovich and Zhilinsky, who argued that the likelihood of a German armed intervention was minimal, and that, if the worst should come to the worst, war, though undesirable, was nonetheless acceptable. Minister of War Sukhomlinov and Chief of Staff Zhilinsky both categorically declared ‘the full readiness of Russia for a one-to-one war with Germany, not to mention a one-to-one war with Austria'.
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These drastic scenarios became irrelevant, because the Germans quickly backed down and the crisis passed. Alarmed by the intensity of the Russian reaction and urged to conciliate by London and Paris, the Berlin government agreed to assign Liman to the Sultan's army: he remained inspector general, but his promotion to ‘Field Marshal of the Ottoman Empire' meant that he could relinquish his command of the 1st Army Corps without loss of face.
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The Liman von Sanders affair never flared into a continental war, but it was, in retrospect, a revelatory moment. It showed, firstly, how belligerent the thinking of some of the Russian policy-makers had become. Sazonov in particular had moved from the vacillations of his early period in office towards a firmer and more Germanophobic stance – he had begun to construct a narrative of German-Russian relations that left no room for an understanding with Berlin: Russia had always been the docile, peace-loving neighbour and Germany the duplicitous predator, bullying and humiliating the Russians at every opportunity. Now the time had come to stand firm! The power of such narratives to shrink policy horizons should not be underestimated. And the repeated assurances from Paris had clearly left their mark: at the conference of 13 January Sazonov observed that, although it was unclear how the British would react to a war between Russia and Germany, it was certain that in the event of a war with Germany, the French would offer ‘active assistance, even to the ultimate'. The French ambassador M. Delcassé, Sazonov reported, had recently assured him that ‘France would go as far as Russia wished'. As for Britain, while there might be some hesitation in London at first, it was ‘beyond doubt' that she would intervene as soon as the resulting conflict developed to the disadvantage of France and Russia.
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The Tsar too began to take a firmer view: in a conversation with Ambassador Buchanan at the beginning of April 1914, he observed that ‘it was commonly supposed that there was nothing to keep Germany and Russia apart'. This, however, ‘was not the case: there was the question of the Dardanelles', where the Tsar feared that the Germans were working to shut Russia into the Black Sea. Should Germany attempt such a thing, it was essential that the three powers of the Entente unite together more closely to make it clear to Berlin that ‘all three would fight together against German aggression'.
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For the Germans, on the other hand, the ferocity of the Russian reaction to the Liman mission coupled with bitterness over the German capitulation to Russian demands created the sense that an unbridgeable gulf now separated Berlin and St Petersburg. ‘Russian–Prussian relations are dead for all time!' lamented the Kaiser. ‘We have become enemies!'
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For the dovish Kokovtsov, the Liman von Sanders affair brought the final unravelling of his already enfeebled position. He had been in France negotiating the new railways loan when the crisis had broken. Sazonov asked him to go to Berlin to negotiate with the Germans. Kokovtsov's reports of those conversations reveal that he felt acutely the extent to which he had been sidelined. He had found it difficult, he commented in a thinly veiled complaint to Sazonov, to make his German interlocutors understand the ‘peculiarities' of a Russian system that assigned such limited ‘powers and prerogatives' to the chairman of the Council of Ministers.
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Kokovtsov's chairmanship at the conference of 13 January was the last occasion on which he would play such a role. At the end of January 1914, he was dismissed by the Tsar both as chairman of the Council of Ministers and as minister of finance.

Kokovtsov's dismissal was a defeat not just for the man but for the policy and more generally for the cautious and conservative tendency in Russian politics that he represented. The new chairman of the Council of Ministers was Goremykin, who was widely viewed as a mere figurehead, ‘an old man' as Sazonov later recalled, ‘who had long ago lost not only his capacity for interesting himself in anything but his personal tranquillity and well-being, but also the power of being able to take into account the activities in progress around him'.
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The real power-house on the new council was the exceptionally well-connected Krivoshein, who had been coordinating the campaign against Kokovtsov since 1913. Kokovtsov's replacement in finance, P. A. Bark, was a competent but undistinguished figure and a protégé of Krivoshein. Krivoshein was an enthusiastic supporter of the hard line pursued with increasing energy by Sukhomlinov and Sazonov. Without Kokovtsov as the exponent of caution, the balance of influence on the Council of Ministers shifted towards more militant solutions.

Finally, the Liman von Sanders crisis revealed how urgent the Russian preoccupation with the Straits had become.
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At the same time, it raised troubling questions about how far the Entente partners still were from supporting a Russian bid for untrammelled access to the Straits. Sazonov's doubts on this score were reflected in the rather inconsequential conclusion to the conference of 13 January, in which it was agreed, on the one hand, that the Russians should launch, with Entente support, a sequence of increasingly coercive actions against Constantinople, and on the other, that if the Entente continued to
withhold
its support, the Russians should confine themselves to non-military measures of coercion. The Russians were right to be sceptical about Entente backing. Even after the crisis had passed, the British remained apprehensive at the prospect that Russia would ‘raise the question [of the Turkish Straits] again in the not distant future'.
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