The Sleepwalkers (61 page)

Ivan Goremykin

It was difficult, in other words, to imagine a scenario in which the Russians would be able to secure the necessary international backing for a policy aimed directly and openly at securing control of the Straits. This was the problem Charykov had faced in November 1911, when he had explored the possibility of a bilateral deal with the Porte. At that time, Sazonov had opted to disavow his ambassador in Constantinople, because he believed a direct bid for the Straits was still premature. He had gravitated instead towards Hartwig, whose militant pan-Slavist policy was focused on the Balkan peninsula, and on Serbia in particular. The logic of that choice suggested that the failure or frustration of a Straits policy was likely to shift the emphasis back again to the Balkan salient. This was in some ways a default or residual option. But a forward policy in the Balkans did not by any means entail the abandonment of Russia's ultimate interest in the Straits. On the contrary, it represented a longer and more winding road to the same destination. Russian strategic thinking tended increasingly in 1912–14 to view the Balkans as the hinterland to the Straits, as the key to securing ultimate control of the Ottoman choke-point on the Bosphorus.
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Underlying this conviction was the belief, increasingly central to Sazonov's thinking during the last years before the outbreak of war, that Russia's claim to the Straits would only ever be realized in the context of a general European war, a war that Russia would fight with the ultimate aim of securing control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
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These concerns were reflected in the protocols of the state Special Conference of 8 February 1914. Convened and chaired by Sazonov and marked by a distinctly post-Kokovtsovian disinhibition in tone and outlook, the conference reaffirmed the importance of Russian control of the Straits. And yet, as Sazonov acknowledged, it was hard to imagine how the Straits could be taken without triggering a ‘general European war'. The discussion thus turned on how Russia should prioritize two quite different tasks: the seizure of the Dardanelles and the winning of a European war that would itself require the commitment of all available forces. Responding to Sazonov's remarks, Chief of Staff Zhilinsky noted that in the event of a European war, Russia would not be able to spare the troops required for a seizure of the Straits – these would be needed on Russia's western front. But – and this was the important conceptual step – if Russia prevailed in the war on the western front, the question of the Dardanelles would also solve itself, along with various other regional issues, as part of the larger conflict. Quartermaster-General Danilov agreed. He was against any military operation directed exclusively at securing the Straits:

The war on the western front would demand the ultimate exertion of all forces of the state; we would not be able to dispense with even one Army Corps in order to keep it aside for other tasks. We must focus on securing success in the most important theatre of war. Victory in this theatre would entail advantageous decisions in all lesser questions.
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But this was not the only view taken at the conference. Captain Nemitz, head of the operations section of the Russian Admiralty, warned that the scenario envisaged by Sazonov, Zhilinsky and Danilov made sense only if the enemy threatening Constantinople happened to be the same as the one opposing Russia on the western front (i.e. Germany and/or Austria-Hungary). Then Russia could indeed focus exclusively on the primary conflict, in the assumption that the Straits would fall to her in due course. But in its striving for the Straits, Nemitz noted, Russia had other opponents than Germany and Austria. It was thus plausible, he observed in a veiled reference to Britain, that ‘foreign fleets and armies' might occupy the Straits while Russia fought and bled on the German and Austrian fronts.
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Nemitz had a point: the experience of recent years suggested that any Russian attempt to change unilaterally the regime in the Straits was likely to encounter the resistance of friends and foes alike.
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These reflections help in turn to explain why the Liman von Sanders crisis was such a crucial juncture in Russia's policy towards Britain.
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Sazonov immediately began pressing for measures that would transform the Entente into a fully-fledged alliance, and he was the main protagonist behind the naval conversations with London that began on 7 June 1914. In his memoirs, Sazonov later recalled that the German military mission on the Bosphorus had ‘forced' Russia to seek a ‘concrete agreement' with Britain ‘in consciousness of the shared danger' posed by Berlin – and this of course fits with our retrospective view, which is oriented towards the outbreak of war in 1914. But while there is no doubt that Sazonov dreamt of confronting and containing Germany with the ‘greatest alliance known in human history',
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it is also clear (though this was not a matter on which the foreign minister could afford to be forthcoming) that a naval agreement with England held the promise of
tethering
the world's greatest naval power and holding it back from unwelcome initiatives on the Straits. This inference is reinforced by the Russian protest formally submitted to London in May 1914 at the role British officers were playing in the development of the Turkish navy.
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For Russia, as for Britain, this was still a world in which there was more than one potential enemy. Beneath the scaffolding of the alliances lurked older imperial rivalries.

In a letter of May 1913 to Hartwig whose contents were passed to Pašić, Sazonov sketched an overview of recent Balkan events and their significance for the kingdom. ‘Serbia', he remarked, had completed only ‘the first stage of its historical path':

In order to reach its destination it must still undergo a terrible struggle, in which its entire existence is placed in question. [. . .] Serbia's promised land lies in the territory of today's Austria-Hungary and not in the direction in which it currently strives, where the Bulgarians block its path. Under these circumstances it is in the vital interest of Serbia [. . .] to place itself through determined and patient work in a condition of readiness for the inescapable future struggle. Time is working for Serbia and for the downfall of her enemies, who already show clear signs of decomposition.
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What is interesting about this letter is not just the candour with which Sazonov deflected Serbian aggression away from Bulgaria in the direction of Austria-Hungary, but also his claim that in doing so he was merely acquiescing in the verdict of History, which had already decided that the days of the Habsburg polity were numbered. We often encounter such narratives of inevitable Austrian decline in the rhetoric of Entente statesmen, and it is worth noting how useful they were. They served to legitimate the armed struggle of the Serbs, who appeared in them as the heralds of a pre-ordained modernity destined to sweep away the obsolete structures of the dual monarchy. At the same time, they occluded the superabundant evidence that, whereas the Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of the centres of European cultural, administrative and industrial modernity, the Balkan states – and especially Serbia – were still locked in a spiral of economic backwardness and declining productivity. But the most important function of such master narratives was surely that they enabled decision-makers to hide, even from themselves, their responsibility for the outcomes of their actions. If the future was already mapped out, then politics no longer meant choosing among options, each of which implied a different future. The task was rather to align oneself with the impersonal, forward momentum of History.

By the spring of 1914, the Franco-Russian Alliance had constructed a geopolitical trigger along the Austro-Serbian frontier. They had tied the defence policy of three of the world's greatest powers to the uncertain fortunes of Europe's most violent and unstable region. For France, the commitment to the Serbian salient was a logical consequence of the commitment to the Franco-Russian Alliance, which was in itself the consequence of what French policy-makers saw as immovable policy constraints. The first of these was demographic. Even with the immense expansion made possible by the Three Year Law, the French army did not possess the numbers its commanders believed were necessary to counter the German threat alone. Success against the Germans would thus depend upon two things: the presence of a British expeditionary force on the Allied western front, and a rapid offensive through Belgium that would enable the French forces to circumvent the heavily fortified terrain of Alsace and Lorraine. Unfortunately, these two options were mutually exclusive, because breaching Belgian neutrality would mean forfeiting British support. Yet even forgoing the strategic advantages of an invasion of Belgium did not necessarily guarantee a British intervention in the first, decisive phase of the coming war, because the ambiguity of British policy had created a substantial margin of doubt.

France was thus obliged to seek a means of compensating in the east for its security deficits in the west. As the Belgian minister had put it in the spring of 1913, the less ‘solid and effective' British friendship seemed, the more French strategists felt the need to ‘tighten' the bonds of their alliance with Russia.
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The French government focused from 1911 onwards on strengthening Russian offensive capacity and, in 1912–13 on ensuring that Russian deployment plans were directed against Germany rather than Austria, the ostensible opponent in the Balkans. Increasingly, intimate military relations were reinforced by the application of powerful financial incentives. This policy was purchased at a certain strategic cost, because betting so heavily on enabling Russia to seize the initiative against Germany inevitably involved a certain reduction in French autonomy. That French policy-makers were willing to accept the resulting constraints is demonstrated by their willingness to extend the terms of the Franco-Russian Alliance specifically in order to cover the Balkan inception scenario, a concession that in effect placed the initiative in Russian hands. The French were willing to accept this risk, because their primary concern was not that Russia would act precipitately, but rather that she would not act at all, would grow so preponderant as to lose interest in the security value of the alliance, or would focus her energies on defeating Austria rather than the ‘principal adversary', Germany.

The Balkan inception scenario was attractive precisely because it seemed the most likely way of securing full Russian support for joint operations, not only because the Balkan region was an area of traditionally strong Russian interest, but because the conflict of the Serbs with Austria-Hungary was an issue that could be depended upon to stir Russian national feeling in a way that would leave the leaders with little option but to commit. Hence the importance of the vast French loans (at the time, among the largest in financial history), being tied to the programme of strategic railway construction that would throw the brunt of Russia's forces against Germany, thereby forcing Germany (so it was hoped) to divide its armies, reduce the weight of the assault on the west and provide France with the margin required to secure victory.

The Russian commitment to the Serbian salient was built of different stuff. The Russians had long pursued policies designed to secure a partnership of some kind with a league of Balkan states capable of forming a bulwark against Austria-Hungary. They revived this policy during the Italian war on Libya, brokering the creation of the Serbo-Bulgarian alliance that defined Russia as the arbitrating power on the peninsula. When the Second Balkan War broke out over the territorial spoils of the first, the Russians recognized that the League policy was now obsolete and chose, after some prevarication, to adopt Serbia as the principal client, to the detriment of Bulgaria, which quickly drifted into the financial and (later) political orbit of the central powers. The deepening commitment to Serbia tied Russia into a posture of direct confrontation with Austria-Hungary, as the events of December 1912–January 1913 had shown.

Yet the Russians were slow to embrace the strategic vision so insistently offered by the French General Staff. Sukhomlinov's Redeployment Plan of 1910 annoyed the French, because it had pulled the areas of concentration far back from Russia's western borders with Germany. Over the following years, the French worked hard and with success to overcome Russian resistance to a strategy focused on delivering the maximum strike power against the western frontier in the shortest possible time, by means of quadruple railway arteries designed to deliver massive forces against the enemy's heartland.

If Russian and French strategic thinking eventually fell to some extent into step, this was for several reasons. The promise of massive French loans offered a powerful incentive for collaboration. Since it was impossible to imagine that a Russian attack on Austria would not draw in Germany, it was increasingly clear that the breaking of Austrian power on the Balkan peninsula would be possible only if Russia were in a position to defeat Germany. Finally, and most importantly, the arrival of the Liman von Sanders mission in Constantinople prompted not just an escalation of Russian war-readiness and suspicion of German objectives, but also a clarification of how Balkan policy related to Russia's more fundamental interest in the Turkish Straits. As the Special Conference of 8 February made clear, Sazonov, Sukhomlinov and Zhilinsky had come to accept that the objective of securing access to or control of the Straits, though agreed to be of profound importance to Russia's economic and strategic future, would have to be subordinated to the task of prevailing in the European conflict against the central powers, not just or even primarily because of the fear that Germany might acquire a controlling interest in the Straits, but because the Entente powers were themselves as yet unready to support a direct Russian bid for this crucial strategic asset. Indeed, so diverse were the perspectives of the three Entente powers on the Straits that the Russian ministry of foreign affairs came to see a general war – which in effect meant a war begun in the Balkans – as the only context in which Russia could be sure of acting with the support of its western partners.
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