Count [Mikhail Nikolayevich] Muraviev, Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, has addressed the following Circular to Representatives of Foreign Powers in Petersburg, December 30 [January 11]:†
When my Noble Lord instructed me last August to disseminate the proposal to those governments who have representatives in Petersburg for a conference aimed at finding effective means with which to secure the blessings of a true and lasting peace for all peoples in the world—and primarily to limit the continuing increase in present-day armaments—it seemed that next to nothing could block these plans from soon being realized, given their thoroughly humane character. The accommodating responses with which the foreign powers greeted this step of the Imperial Government have strengthened this initial assumption. The Imperial Cabinet highly appreciates the sympathetic manner in which the majority of governments has responded and finds great satisfaction in the validations of friendship that have been made, and are still making their way, to the Cabinet from all circles of society around the globe.
Despite public opinion flowing strongly and unanimously toward the idea of general peace, various parties have visibly tarred the political horizon with quite a different brush. Several powers have recently made new steps in rearmament, putting increasing efforts into their armed forces. Given this uncertain situation, one is tempted to pose the question as to whether the foreign powers wish to judge the current moment as an apt one for commencing international discussions about the ideas raised in the August 12 circular. Hoping, nonetheless, that the disquieting elements currently influencing political circles will soon make way for more peaceful circumstances better suited to aiding the success of the proposed conference, the Imperial Government considers that it is possible to now move toward a provisional exchange of ideas between the national powers, with the aim of finding without delay the means with which the palpable increase in naval and in land armaments can be limited. The answer to this question is manifestly becoming more and more urgent, considering the extent to which rearmament is advancing. Most of all, we should chart a path toward preempting conflicts fought out with arms by using the peaceful means that international diplomacy has at its disposal.
Should the powers consider the hour at hand favorable for gathering a conference on this basis, it would certainly be useful if the various participating cabinets could agree on its working program. We may summarize the questions that international talks would deal with in the context of this conference in the following broad outline: 1) A treaty for a specific time period agreeing not to increase the current strength of both land and sea forces or the budget for war and connected categories; furthermore, a provisional inquiry into ways in which it would even be possible to achieve a decrease in the effective strengths of such forces and their budget in the future. 2) A ban on the use of any new firearms and explosives or stronger gunpowder types than are currently used in armies and navies; this agreement would also cover rifles and canons. 3) Limits on the use of currently available explosives that have devastating effects during land wars; and a ban on firing ammunition or any explosives from aerial balloons and using any comparable vehicle to launch such weapons. 4) A ban on naval wars using submarines or other diving torpedo boats or any other comparable destructive technology, and a commitment not to build any more warships with naval rams in the future. 5) Applying the resolutions of the 1864 Geneva Convention to naval wars, based on the supplementary article of 1868.* 6) The granting of neutral status to lifeboats charged with saving persons ship-wrecked during or after a naval battle, on the same basis as the preceding point. 7) The revision of the position developed during the Brussels Conference in 1874, which remains unratified to this day, concerning spoils of war.* 8) The fundamental acceptance of the beneficial service of negotiations and the use of non-obligatory arbitration committees in appropriate cases with the goal of avoiding armed confrontations between different peoples. 9) An agreement on how the above methods should be applied, and the construction of a uniform process for their application.
Of course all questions concerning political relationships between states and regarding the order of things as regulated through these contracts will definitely be excluded as a subject of conference discussion; as shall general questions that do not directly pertain to the program as adopted by the participating cabinets.
The press has already communicated the circular’s principle proposals. It suffices to conclude that in Mr. Muraviev’s second circular, the character of a carefully calculated espousal to benefit tsarist interests asserts itself much more gaudily and blatantly than in the first act of this international peace comedy.
This newest circular goes to great efforts to explicitly explain that in case this picnic of the diplomats really does take place, it will amount to no more than an academic discussion—or to use a fine colonial German expression for it, nothing but a “palaver.” It is clear from the start that the only result will be sweet-sounding phrases and Platonic pronouncements, while in the empires of the military powers steel will clash on steel just as it always has—i.e., eternally increasing armaments are here to stay.
At best, the nine “practical proposals” of the tsarist “program” are nothing more than palliatives that do nothing to touch the essence and continuance of anti-cultural militarism. And even that is based on the fantastical and unfounded supposition that these academic proposals will be turned into reality.
The wish is to “humanize” war rather than to make it impossible, to turn the mass murder factory companies of the large states into an industrial cartel with specific rules and limits on production, in order to limit unbridled competition.
Hence, the whole thing amounts to no more than a fantastical performance. The Petersburg Government Herald has published the following official pronouncement: it is clear from the December 30 [January 11] circular that the government does not have the least intention of creating a finalized program for the conference to work on. Instead, the government is operating on the premise that conference members will be responsible for clarifying all aspects of the problem. It is leading them to believe that they only need to propose generalized and provisional questions for the parties to consider when the time has come to contemplate the collective development of a detailed conference program. As regards technical questions, these must of course be worked out with the assistance of specialists—which means that the most thorough inquiries only would be admissible, in order to keep pace with the disproportionate increase in armaments. By easing the way to a solution to these entangled questions, they will have contributed to producing an agreement between the powers, and, as a result, to the realization of the tsar’s benevolent aims.
It is with unmistakable irony that [German] War Minister [Heinrich] Von Goßler justifies the restructuring of the German armed forces by referring unashamedly to the tsarist peace pronouncement.* When you see how one military state after the other, large or small, from Washington to Stockholm, from the Golden Horn to London, zealously works to increase its army and naval capacity—when you see how tsarism, posing for a moment with its olive branch, draws together all its violent forces to arm itself for the decisive battle for hegemony in Asia against proud Albion—then this second Russian circular appears as a flippant mockery of the whole of politics of peace.
Even just the glimmer of an apparition that the planned conference’s current agenda could resolve anything at all—albeit Platonically, and with ambiguous diplomatic reservations—serves as a welcome opportunity for the war ministers of participating states to take the stage with new demands that burden the world’s peoples. Did we not just hear Herr [Carl Ferdinand Freiherr von] von Stumm[-Halberg] argue during the latest debates about military restructuring that Germany must move to increase the greatest possible size of its armed forces as rapidly as possible, so as to cover its back before negotiating a maximum level of arms as part of some fictive treaty? Such a development would enable the aforesaid gentleman to safeguard his political gains.
We are in no doubt that Nicholas II’s solemn pronouncement is first of all a Russian diplomatic ruse, not lacking in skill, designed to protect Russia from an all-too-premature first strike. And it is intended to secure for Russia the elbow room needed to prepare its own far-reaching political plans for world domination in the financial, transport and military spheres without being bothered by war and cries for war in Europe. In this light, the new circular almost leaves us with the impression that the whole of international diplomacy commissioned this document from Little Father Tsar. It seems like an actor’s trick aimed at pulling the wool over the eyes of the over-the-top faction, which, with its peppy promises and pompous rulers’ statements, leaves itself in a readily bribable position. It is a trick so that the actor can continue to fish sedately in troubled waters.
Today, in our age of political costume dramas, where a swanky performance trumps everything, you’ll understand what’s really going on in such glossy announcements. Bonaparte’s phrase—“If you scratch the surface of a Russian you’ll find a Tatar underneath”*—is valid for the totally Pharisaical two-faced character of this “affirmation” of international peace. The hegemons, wrapped in their philosopher’s cloak of love-thy-neighbor and the-brotherhood-of-man, are wearing steel armor under their deceptive costumes. Behind the peace conference’s rose lurks a glittering sword.
At this peak of historical development, in which big-money capitalism and militarism depend on each other like siblings, bourgeois republics, whether constitutional or absolute monarchies, are nothing more than meaningless company signs for the organization of the sectors of industry, trade, and agribusiness that make up capital. Moreover, capital is forced not only to restrain the unleashed production forces of the bourgeois economic sphere, but also to hold back the irresistible, aspiring and class-conscious proletariat. This is what makes this peace comedy appear as a necessary result of our advanced political technology.
Down with this terrible and ever-increasing burden of the armed forces that inflict pain right down to the bones on working people through military service and tax obligations! Down with hollow declamations of disarmament! Down with accumulating and accelerating international conflicts and entanglements that are born out of imperialism and its expansionist Weltpolitik,† which threaten the cultured world with horrible, head-on collisions. Down with those sleeping pills manufactured from the resolutions of debating clubs that commit to nothing!
That is how the rulers think they are able to lull that “big fool,” the people, to sleep and deceive them about the brute facts of their misery and oppression. They think they can blind the working class with rhetorical fireworks, so that they can go on tyrannizing and exploiting them in the future. The possessors of power who calibrate their means of control miscalculate when it comes to assessing their acting abilities. The class-conscious proletariat will not swim into their net any longer; they will recognize this new pronouncement for what it is in essence. It is a bad comedy, deserving of one only critique—a boo from the stage!