After four hectic days of receptions, military reviews, speeches, dinners and toasts, Maurice Paléologue needed some rest. Having seen Poincaré off on the France on the evening of 23 July, he told his servant to let him sleep in on the following morning. But it was not to be: at seven o’clock came an urgent telephone call announcing the Austrian ultimatum. As the ambassador lay in bed still half-asleep, the news entered his mind like a waking dream:
The occurrence seemed to me unreal and yet definite, imaginary but authentic. I seemed to be continuing my conversation of yesterday with the Tsar, putting my theories and conjectures. At the same time I had a sensation, a potent, positive and compelling sensation, that I was in the presence of a fait accompli.1
Paléologue cancelled his lunchtime date and agreed instead to a meeting at the French embassy with Foreign Minister Sazonov and the British ambassador Sir George Buchanan.2 According to his own memoirs, Paléologue reminded his two guests of the toasts exchanged between the president and the Tsar on the previous night and repeated that the three Entente powers must adopt a policy of ‘firmness’. Sazonov was taken aback: ‘But suppose that policy is bound to lead to war?’ Firmness would lead to war, Paléologue replied, only if the ‘Germanic powers’ had already ‘made up their minds to resort to force to secure their hegemony over the East’ (here the French ambassador mirrored exactly the argument Bethmann had made to Riezler during the second week of July).
Whether Sazonov was really as passive as Paléologue’s account suggests may be doubted: in the despatch George Buchanan filed on the same conversation, it was Sazonov who raised the stakes, declaring that ‘Russia would at any rate have to mobilise’.3 Whoever said what, the three men clearly took a drastic view of the situation created by Austria’s presentation of the note to Belgrade. Sazonov and Paléologue joined forces in urging Buchanan to dissuade his government from a policy of neutrality that would be ‘tantamount to suicide’. Buchanan agreed and undertook to make ‘strong representations’ to Grey in favour of a policy of ‘resistance to German arrogance’.4 Count de Robien, who spoke with the ambassador that afternoon, was aghast. ‘At this noxious lunch,’ he recalled, ‘they all goaded each other on. Paléologue was apparently particularly vehement, boasting of his conversations with Poincaré . . .’5
In fact, Sazonov needed no persuading from Paléologue or anyone else. Even before his lunch at the French embassy, he had dressed down the Austrian ambassador in terms that left no doubt about how he read the situation and how he intended to respond to it. After Fritz Szapáry, following the customary practice in such cases, had read aloud the text of the Austrian note, Sazonov barked several times over: ‘I know what it is. You want to make war on Serbia! The German newspapers have been egging you on. You are setting fire to Europe. It’s a great responsibility you are taking on, you will see what effect this has in London and Paris and maybe elsewhere too.’ Szapáry proposed to send him a dossier of evidence supporting Vienna’s claims, but Sazonov waved the offer aside, saying he was not interested: ‘You want war and you’ve burned your bridges.’ When Szapáry replied that Austria had a right to defend its vital interests and was ‘the most peace-loving power in the world’, Sazonov responded with a sarcastic retort: ‘One can see how peaceful you are, now that you are setting fire to Europe.’6 Szapáry left the meeting in an excited state and rushed straight to the Austrian embassy to encode and dispatch his report.
No sooner had the Austrian ambassador left than Sazonov summoned the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Yanushkevich, to the ministry of foreign affairs. The government, he declared, would soon be issuing an official press announcement to the effect that Russia did not intend to ‘remain inactive’ if the ‘dignity and integrity of the Serb people, brothers in blood, were under threat’ (a corresponding note was released to the press on the following day). Then he discussed with Yanushkevich plans for a ‘partial mobilisation against Austria-Hungary alone’.7 During the days that followed the presentation of the note, the Russian foreign minister stuck to his policy of firmness, striking postures and making decisions that escalated the crisis.
At 3 p.m. that afternoon, there was a two-hour meeting of the Council of Ministers. Sazonov, fresh from his lunch with Paléologue and Buchanan, was the first to speak. He began by sketching out what he saw as the broader background to the current crisis. Germany, he declared had long been engaged in ‘systematic preparations’ aimed not just at increasing its power in Central Europe but at securing its objectives ‘in all international questions, without taking into consideration the opinion and influence of the powers not included in the Triple Alliance’. Over the last decade, Russia had met these challenges with unfailing moderation and forbearance, but these concessions had merely ‘encouraged’ the Germans to use ‘aggressive methods’. The time had come to take a stand. The Austrian ultimatum had been drawn up ‘with German connivance’; its acceptance by Belgrade would transform Serbia into a de facto protectorate of the central powers. Were Russia to abandon its ‘historic mission’ to secure the independence of the Slav peoples, she would be ‘considered a decadent state’, would forfeit ‘all her authority’ and her ‘prestige in the Balkans’ and ‘would henceforth have to take second place among the powers’. A firm stand, he warned, would bring the risk of war with Austria and Germany, a prospect all the more dangerous for the fact that it was as yet still uncertain what position Great Britain would take.8
The next to speak was the minister of agriculture, A. V. Krivoshein, one of the ministers who had opposed and intrigued against Vladimir Kokovtsov. He enjoyed the special favour of the Tsar and was closely associated with the nationalist lobby in the Duma. As minister of agriculture, he was also closely affiliated with the zemstvos, noble-dominated elected organs of local government that spanned most of the Russian Empire. He had been linked for years to the Novoye Vremya, known for its nationalist campaigns on Balkan questions and the Turkish Straits.9 He had supported Sukhomlinov’s policy of partial mobilization against Austria in November 1912 on the grounds that it was ‘high time Russia stopped cringeing before the Germans’.10 He also appears to have been on quite close terms with the garrulous Militza of Montenegro, who viewed him as an ally in Montenegro’s struggle to redeem South Slavdom.11 After Kokovtsov’s departure, Krivoshein was the most powerful man on the Council of Ministers. His views on foreign policy were hawkish and increasingly Germanophobic.
In his words to the Council of Ministers on 24 July, Krivoshein invoked a complex array of arguments for and against a military response, but ultimately opted for a firm reaction to the Austrian démarche. Russia, he noted, was without question in an incomparably better political, financial and military position than after the catastrophe of 1904–1905. But the rearmament programme was not yet complete and it was doubtful whether Russia’s armed forces would ever be able to compete with those of Germany and Austria-Hungary in terms of ‘modern technical efficiency’. On the other hand, ‘general conditions’ had improved in recent years (perhaps he was referring to the strengthening of the Franco-Russian Alliance), and it would be difficult for the imperial government to explain to the public and the Duma why it was ‘reluctant to act boldly’. Then came the nub of the argument. In the past, Russia’s ‘exaggeratedly prudent attitudes’ had failed to ‘placate’ the Central European powers. To be sure, the risks to Russia in the event of hostilities were great, the Russo-Japanese War had made that clear. But while Russia desired peace, further ‘conciliation’ was not the way to achieve it. ‘War could break out in spite of our efforts at conciliation.’ The best policy under the present circumstances was therefore ‘a firmer and more energetic attitude towards the unreasonable claims of the Central Powers’.12
Krivoshein’s statement made a profound impression on the meeting and none of the speakers who followed said anything to modify his conclusions. War Minister Sukhomlinov and Naval Minister Grigorovich admitted that the rearmament programme was still unfinished, but both ‘stated nevertheless that hesitation was no longer appropriate’ and saw ‘no objection to a display of greater firmness’. Peter Bark, speaking for the finance ministry, expressed some concerns about the capacity of Russia to sustain the financial and economic strains of a continental war, but even he acknowledged that further concessions were in themselves no guarantee of peace, and ‘since the honour, dignity and authority of Russia were at stake’, he saw no reason to dissent from the opinion of the majority. Summing up that opinion, premier Goremykin concluded that ‘it was the Imperial Government’s duty to decide immediately in favour of Serbia’. Firmness was more likely to secure peace than conciliation and, failing that, ‘Russia should be ready to make the sacrifices required of her’.13 Finally, the meeting agreed the following five resolutions: (i) Austria would be requested to extend the time-limit of the ultimatum; (ii) Serbia would be advised not to offer battle on the frontier, but to withdraw its armed forces to the centre of the country; (iii) the Tsar would be requested to approve ‘in principle’ the mobilization of the military districts of Kiev, Odessa, Kazan and Moscow; (iv) the minister of war would be instructed to accelerate the stockpiling of military equipment and (v) Russian funds currently invested in Germany and Austria were to be withdrawn.14
On the next day (25 July), there was a further, more solemn meeting of the Council of Ministers, presided over by the Tsar and attended both by Chief of Staff Yanushkevich and by Grand Duke Nikolai, commander of the St Petersburg District and the husband of Anastasia of Montenegro, who had spoken so forthrightly with President Poincaré during the state visit. This meeting confirmed the Council’s decisions of the previous day and agreed on further, more elaborate military measures. Most importantly of all, the Council decided to authorize a complex batch of regulations known as the ‘Period Preparatory to War’. These measures, which involved numerous dispositions intended to prepare for mobilization, were not to be confined to the districts bordering on Austria, but would apply right across European Russia.15
It would be difficult to overstate the historical importance of the meetings of 24 and 25 July. In one sense, they represented a kind of last-minute renaissance of the Council of Ministers, whose influence over foreign policy had been in decline since the death of Stolypin. It was rather unusual for foreign policy to be debated in this way by the Council.16 In focusing the minds of his colleagues on Germany as the alleged instigator of the current crisis, Sazonov revealed the extent to which he had internalized the logic of the Franco-Russian Alliance, according to which Germany, not Austria, was the ‘principal adversary’. That this was an Austrian rather than a German crisis made no difference, since Austria was deemed to be the stalking horse for a malevolent German policy whose ultimate objectives – beyond the acquisition of ‘hegemony in the Near East’ remained unclear. As for the problem of Russia’s relative unreadiness for war (by comparison with its prospective condition in three years), the ministers addressed this issue by referring in vague terms to a war which would come ‘anyway’, even if Russia chose to ‘conciliate’ the Germans by not attacking their Austrian allies. This line of argument superficially resembled the train of thought that preoccupied Bethmann during the first weeks of July: that one could view the Sarajevo crisis as a means of testing Russia’s intentions – if the Russians opted, despite everything, for a European war, that would mean they had wanted war anyway. But there was a crucial difference: in Bethmann’s case, this argument was deployed to justify accepting a war, should Russia choose to start one; at no point (until after Russian general mobilization) was this argument used to justify pre-emptive military measures by Germany. In St Petersburg, by contrast, the measures being considered were proactive in nature, did not arise from a direct theat to Russia, and were highly likely (if not certain) to further escalate the crisis.
The practical military measures adopted at the two meetings are especially baffling. First, there was the fact that the partial mobilization agreed by Sazonov and Yanushkevich and subsequently adopted in principle at the meeting of 24 July, was a grossly impractical and potentially dangerous procedure. Even a partial mobilization, if it posed a direct threat to Austria-Hungary, would inevitably, by the logic of the Austro-German alliance, call forth counter-measures by Berlin, just as a German partial mobilization against Russia would inevitably have triggered counter-measures by France, whether or not Germany chose to mobilize on its western front. And should these counter-measures occur, the frontier areas in which mobilization had not occurred would be doubly exposed, as would be the right flank of the southern army group that had mobilized against Austria. The room for manoeuvre created by the partial nature of the mobilization was thus largely illusory. Even more worrying was the fact that Russian plans simply did not provide for a partial mobilization. There existed no separate schedule for a mobilization against Austria alone. The current planning regime, known as Mobilization Schedule no. 19, was a ‘seamless whole, an all-or-nothing proposition’ that made no distinction between the two adversaries.17 Variations in population density across the different districts meant that most of the army corps drew on reservists from other mobilization zones. Moreover, some army corps in the areas adjoining Austria were earmarked, in the event of full mobilization, for deployment into parts of the Polish salient adjoining Germany. As if all this were not bad enough, a mobilization restricted to some sectors would wreak havoc on the immensely complex arrangements for rail transit into and across the concentration zones. Improvising an Austria-only mobilization would therefore not only be risky in its own right, it would jeopardize Russia’s ability to make the transition to a full mobilization, should this subsequently become necessary.18
In view of these difficulties, it is astonishing that the partial mobilization policy was ever given serious consideration. Why did Sazonov press for it? One can understand the superficial appeal of a measure that seemed to offer something short of the full mobilization that must by necessity trigger a continental war. Sazonov doubtless remembered the winter crisis of 1912–13, when the army had improvised a stop-gap mobilization plan against Austria-Hungary. And as a civilian in an environment where military expertise was jealously guarded and civil– military communications were poor, Sazonov, whose ignorance of military matters was notorious, may have known no better. He clearly received extremely poor advice from the chief of the General Staff, Yanushkevich, a man of very modest abilities who was still somewhat out of his depth after only five months in office. Yanushkevich, a courtier rather than a soldier, had seen no service in the field and his promotion, which was said to have excited general surprise, was probably due more to the Tsar’s affection for him than to his professional qualifications.19 Yet even after Yanushkevich’s subordinates and Yanushkevich himself had pointed up the absurdity of the partial mobilization plan, Sazonov refused to discard it. Perhaps he felt he needed to be able to offer the Tsar an alternative to full mobilization; perhaps he hoped that partial mobilization would suffice to persuade the Austrians and the Germans to back down. Perhaps, on the other hand, he hoped with the offer of partial mobilization to coax the Tsar into a situation from which he would be forced to progress to the real thing. At the very least, these uncertainties suggest a certain disjointedness at the apex of the Russian executive, an impression reinforced by the fact that the Tsar was allowed to add the Baltic Fleet to Sazonov’s partial mobilization plan, although this made a nonsense of the foreign minister’s intention to avoid antagonizing Germany.20
In any case, for the moment, the policy of partial mobilization remained a red herring – at least until 28 July, when the government chose actually to announce it. In the meanwhile, the Council of Ministers had resolved an even more important decision, namely the activation of the ‘Regulation on the Period Preparatory to War of 2 March 1913’. This pre-mobilization law provided for heightened security and readiness at magazines and supply depots, the accelerated completion of railway repairs, readiness checks in all departments, the deployment of covering troops to positions on threatened fronts and the recall of reservists to training camps. And there were other measures: troops in training at locations remote from their bases were to be recalled immediately; around 3,000 officer cadets were to be promoted to officer rank to bring the officer corps up to wartime strength; harbours were to be mined, horses and wagons assembled, and the state of war was to be declared in all fortresses in the Warsaw, Vilnius and St Petersburg districts, so that the military authorities would possess the fullness of powers required to ensure speedy general mobilization when the order came. And these measures were put in force not only in the Austrian border zones, but across the entirety of European Russia.21
Needless to say, these measures were fraught with risk. How would the Germans and the Austrians be able to tell the difference between Russia’s far-reaching pre-mobilization measures and the opening phase of a mobilization proper? The text of the Regulation of 2 March conveys an impression of the scale of the measures underway. According to its stipulations, reserves were to be recalled to frontier divisions and ‘instructed as to the uniforms and probable dispositions of the enemy.
Horses are to be reshod. No more furloughs are to be granted and officers and men on furlough or detailed elsewhere are to return at once to their troop divisions. Espionage suspects are to be arrested. Measures to prevent the export of horses, cattle and grain are to be worked out. Money and valuable securities are to be removed from banks near the frontier to the interior. Naval vessels are to return to their harbours and receive provisions and full war equipment.22
Yanushkevich raised the likelihood of misunderstandings by expressly advising the commanders in each district not to feel bound by the letter of the Regulation of 2 March and to overstep the prescribed measures if they judged it appropriate.
And sure enough, many obervers mistook the pre-mobilization for a partial mobilization. The Belgian military attaché in St Petersburg reported on 26 July that the Tsar had ordered the mobilization of ‘ten army corps in military circumscriptions of Kiev and Odessa’, adding that the news had been ‘received with the greatest enthusiasm in military circles’ and pointing out in a dispatch of the following day that the press had been informed that any public discussion of the ‘mobilization of the army’ was strictly forbidden.23 German and Austrian consuls, diplomats and attachés began firing off alarmed reports. From Copenhagen, the Austrian minister Count Széchényi reported on 26 July that the Danish foreign minister Eric Scavenius had received news from St Petersburg suggesting that Russia had already begun to mobilize – though in view of these precipitate offensive measures, Széchényi thought it unlikely that France or England would feel obliged to intervene.24 On the following day, the Austrian Consul Hein in Kiev reported the recall of officers to garrisons and long lines of artillery units marching westwards out of the Kiev encampment, their destination unknown. Later on the same day (27 July), he reported sixteen trains loaded with artillery and Cossacks leaving Kiev and twenty-six military trains carrying artillery and sappers en route from Odessa, all bound for the Austrian border. The vast Kiev military camp was now empty – the troops had either moved to their winter quarters or were assembling at the station for embarkation.25 From Szczakowa in the Polish salient came a coded dispatch reporting that manoeuvres taking place in the area had been broken off and all troops concentrated in the city; a ‘large contingent’ of artillery had been loaded into wagons at the city’s Vienna station. During the previous night, seven trains full of sappers had passed out of the station.26 From Moscow came reports that the Imperial Russian Airforce, second only to the French in size, had pushed westwards, while a cavalry regiment had arrived in the city from far-off Ekaterinoslav (today: Dniepropetrovsk) nearly 600 miles to the south.27 From the Austrian authorities in Galicia, there were reports of ‘decidedly large’ masses of troops, including artillery and Cossacks, moving into positions just across the border.28 From Batum on the east coast of the Black Sea came news of regiments of infantry, Cossacks and dragoons on their way to Warsaw.29 Consular dispatches sent from across Russia to the German embassy in St Petersburg reported the mining of rivers, the seizure of rolling stock, an entire Russian artillery division seen marching westwards out of Kiev, the interdiction of German encrypted telegraphy through the Moscow telegraph office, troops on their way back from manoeuvres, infantry and cavalry units approaching Lublin and Kovel, the assembly of masses of horses at their points of concentration, large convoys of military vehicles on the move and other signs of a mass army preparing to make war.30 As early as the evening of 25 July, when Maurice Paléologue went to the Warsaw station in St Petersburg to say goodbye to Izvolsky, who was travelling back to Paris ‘in hot haste’, the two men were struck by the commotion around them:
There was great bustle on the platforms. The trains were packed with officers and men. This looked like mobilization. We rapidly exchanged impressions and came to the same conclusion: ‘It’s war this time.’31
In taking these steps, Sazonov and his colleagues escalated the crisis and greatly increased the likelihood of a general European war. For one thing, Russian pre-mobilization altered the political chemistry in Serbia, making it unthinkable that the Belgrade government, which had originally given serious consideration to accepting the ultimatum, would back down in the face of Austrian pressure. It also heightened the domestic pressure on the Russian administration, for the sight of uniformed men and the news that Russia would not ‘remain indifferent’ to the fate of Serbia stirred euphoria in the nationalist press. It sounded alarm bells in Austria-Hungary. Most importantly of all, these measures drastically raised the pressure on Germany, which had so far abstained from military preparations and was still counting on the localization of the Austro-Serbian conflict.
Why did Sazonov do it? He was not a candid man and never produced a reliable account of his actions or motivations during these days, but the most plausible and obvious answer lies in his very first reaction to the news of the ultimatum: ‘C’est la guerre européenne!’ Sazonov believed from the outset that an Austrian military action against Serbia must trigger a Russian counter-attack. His response to the ultimatum was entirely consistent with his earlier commitments. Sazonov had never acknowledged that Austria-Hungary had a right to counter-measures in the face of Serbian irredentism. On the contrary, he had endorsed the politics of Balkan irredentism and had explicitly aligned himself with the view that Serbia was the rightful successor to the lands of unredeemed South Slavdom within the dual monarchy, an obsolete multi-ethnic structure whose days, in his view, were in any case numbered. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the days of the autocratic, multi-ethnic Russian Empire, whose minority relations were in worse condition than Austria-Hungary’s, might also be numbered.
Sazonov had denied from the start Austria’s right to take action of any kind against Belgrade after the assassinations. He had repeatedly indicated in a range of contexts that he would respond militarily to any action against the client state. Already on 18 July, shortly after it became known that an Austrian note of some sort was in preparation, Sazonov had told Sir George Buchanan that ‘anything resembling an Austrian ultimatum in Belgrade could not leave Russia indifferent, and she might be forced to take some precautionary military measures’.32 Sazonov must have been aware of the immense risks involved, for he had joined Kokovtsov in opposing such a partial mobilization against Austria in November 1912 at the height of the Balkan crisis, on the grounds – as Kokovtsov put it – that ‘whatever we chose to call the projected measures, a mobilisation remained a mobilisation, to be countered by our adversaries with actual war’.33
The situation in 1914 was different, of course. The risks were greater and, with Kokovtsov out of the way, the mood was less inhibited. But there was another important difference: even in November 1912, Sazonov had added a rider to his support for a stand-down, saying that ‘even if we were ready for war [. . .] we had no right to undertake such steps without first coming to an understanding with our allies’.34 About this understanding – at least with France – there could no longer be any doubt in the summer of 1914. It was not just that Poincaré and Paléologue had pressed so hard for Russian firmness on the Serbian question, it was that a crisis of this kind conformed exactly to the Balkan inception scenario that the alliance, over many discussions and summit meetings, had come to define in recent years as the optimal casus belli. In a fascinating dispatch filed on 30 July, the Russian military attaché in Paris, Count Ignatiev, who had numerous contacts among the most senior French military commanders, reported that he saw in all around him ‘unconcealed joy at the prospect of having the chance to use, as the French see it, beneficial strategic circumstances’.35 The Belgian minister in Paris registered the same upbeat mood: ‘The French general staff is favourable to war,’ he wrote on 30 July. ‘The general staff desires war, because in its view the moment is favourable and the time has come to make an end of it.’36
It is simply not the case, as has sometimes been claimed, that Paléologue misrepresented French intentions and made undertakings to St Petersburg for which he had no authorization from Paris. Nor is it true that he misinformed Paris about Russian mobilization in order to allow the crisis to mature to the point where Paris would be unable to restrain her ally. On the contrary, he alerted the French foreign ministry throughout to the measures adopted by the Russian government. A telegram composed at 6.30 on the evening of 24 July endorsed the principle of alliance solidarity in the interests of ‘preserving peace by the use of force’; a further telegram of eleven o’clock that night referred to the measures that Russia ‘would without doubt be obliged to take if Serbia were to be threatened in her independence or her territorial integrity’. And a further telegram composed at 4.45 p.m. on the following day and marked ‘urgent’ and ‘secret’ reported that the Council of Ministers had that day agreed ‘in principle’ the mobilization ‘of the 13 army corps that are destined to operate against Austria’. There followed the crucial sentence:
The mobilisation will be made public and effective only when the Austro-Hungarian government attempts to constrain Serbia by force of arms. However, secret preparations [preparatifs clandestins] will begin from today.37
Viviani would later explode with indignation at the news that things had been allowed to go so far so quickly and would demand from Paléologue a full account of his doings during the crucial days of the crisis, accusing him of having withheld vital information on Russian measures (this is where the myth of Paléologue’s unauthorized manipulations began). But athough Viviani was out of the loop (as Poincaré no doubt intended him to be), Poincaré and Paris were not. In case the notes from Paléologue did not suffice, there were parallel dispatches streaming in from the French military attaché General Laguiche, who reported on 26 July, for example, that ‘secret military dispositions’ were already underway in Warsaw, Vilna and St Petersburg, all districts abutting the German frontier.38 Yet there was no call for restraint from the Quai d’Orsay. Nor did Poincaré, though he later falsified key details of his own involvement in the crisis, ever disavow Paléologue or the policy he had so enthusiastically represented in St Petersburg.
To be sure, there were moments when Sazonov’s belief in a peaceful outcome seemed to revive. We have seen that the Austrians paused after receiving the ultimatum on 25 July, in the hope that the actuality of Austrian military preparations might prompt last-minute concessions from Belgrade. Sazonov mistakenly read this as a sign that Vienna might be looking for a climbdown and began to talk of a negotiated settlement. ‘Until the very last moment,’ he told the French ambassador on 26 July, ‘I will show myself ready to negotiate.’ What he meant by this became clear when he summoned Szapáry for a ‘frank and loyal explanation’ of his views. Working through the Austrian note point by point, Sazonov insisted on the ‘unacceptable, absurd and insulting’ character of every clause and closed with an offer: ‘Take back your ultimatum, modify its form and I guarantee you we will have a result.’39 This ‘negotiation’ was hardly the basis for fruitful further discussions. In any case, the brief Austrian lull after the submission of the ultimatum was grounded not in Austrian doubts about the rectitude of their own course, but in the hope that Belgrade might back down at the last minute. The news of the Russian pre-mobilization naturally rendered these hopes groundless. No one was more excited by the spectacle of Cossacks boarding trains than Miroslav Spalajković, who saw in them the portents of a final struggle for Serbian unity and freedom. With the Tsar urging the Serbs to fight ‘like lions’, it was unlikely that Belgrade would entertain second thoughts about the terms of the ultimatum. And, in the meantime, Sazonov had explicitly advised Belgrade not to accept a British offer of mediation.
Even as they allowed the crisis to escalate, the Russians had to observe a certain caution. The French were committed to support Russia in a Balkan intervention, regardless of the precise circumstances in which that intervention was deemed to be necessary. But it was still important to placate French and British public opinion and to keep the Germans quiescent for as long as possible. Since November 1912, it had been an established assumption of Russian mobilization practice that the concentration of troops and matériel should be completed, if possible, ‘without beginning hostilities, in order not to deprive the enemy irrevocably of the hope that war can still be avoided’. During this period of latent mobilization, ‘clever diplomatic negotiations’ would be used to ‘lull to sleep as much as possible the enemy’s fears’.40 When mobilization is ordered in Russia, Paléologue reported to Paris on 25 July after a conversation with Sazonov, it will take place against Austria only and will avoid taking the offensive, ‘in order to leave Germany with a pretext for not invoking straight away the casus foederis’.41 It was also essential, for the sake of Russian, French and British public opinion, that Austria, not Russia, be seen as the aggressor. ‘We must let Austria place herself entirely in the wrong,’ Sazonov told Paléologue on 24 July.42 This thought, that the opponent must be allowed to appear the aggressor, would crop up in all the key decision-centres on both sides during the last days of the crisis.
Was all this done on Serbia’s behalf alone? Was Russia really willing to risk war in order to protect the integrity of its distant client? We have seen that Serbia’s importance in Russian eyes grew during the last years before the war, partly because of the deepening alienation from Sofia and partly because Serbia was a better instrument than Bulgaria for applying pressure to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Sympathy with the Serbian cause was strong in Russian pan-Slavist and nationalist circles – this was an issue with which the government could build useful bridges to its middle-class public. On the other hand, St Petersburg had been willing to leave Belgrade to its own devices in October 1913, when the Austrians had issued an ultimatum demanding their withdrawal from northern Albania. And unlike Russia’s neighbour Bulgaria, which possessed a piece of Black Sea coast, Serbia could hardly be seen as geopolitically crucial to Russian security.
The robustness of the Russian response fully makes sense only if we read it against the background of the Russian leadership’s deepening anxiety about the future of the Turkish Straits. The Russians (or, more precisely, the Russian naval command) had been wishfully planning Bosphorus-seizing expeditions since the 1890s.43 And we have seen how the Bulgarian march on Constantinople, the disruption of grain exports during the Balkan Wars and the Liman von Sanders crisis pushed this issue to the head of the agenda in 1912–1914.44 By the summer of 1914, further factors were conspiring to heighten Russian apprehensions about the Turkish Straits. Most importantly, a regional arms and naval race had broken out between the Ottoman Empire and Greece, driven by a dispute over the future of the northern Aegean islands. In order to retain their edge over the Greeks, the Ottoman naval authorities had ordered two dreadnought-class battleships from the British firms Armstrong and Vickers, the first of which was due to arrive in late July 1914.45
This local power struggle was extremely alarming to the Russians. First, there was the danger, in the event of hostilities, of a further closure of the Straits to Russian commercial shipping, with all the costs and economic disruption that entailed. Then there was the possibility that some lesser state (Greece or Bulgaria) might suddenly grab a piece of Ottoman territory that the Russians themselves had their eyes on. A further worry was that a Graeco-Turkish war might bring the British navy on to the scene, just when the Russians were pressing London to scale down the British naval mission. But most important by a long margin was the prospect of a Turkish dreadnought presence in the Black Sea, where the Russians possessed no battleships of this class. The arrival of the new Turkish dreadnoughts, the Russian naval minister warned in January 1914, would create a naval power with ‘crushing, nearly sixfold superiority’ over the Russian Black Sea Fleet.46 ‘It is clear what calamitous results the loss of our superior position on the Black Sea would have for us,’ Sazonov told the Russian ambassador in London in May 1914. ‘And therefore we cannot stand idly by and watch the continued and also very rapid expansion of the Ottoman naval forces.’47 At the end of July 1914, Sazonov was still entreating the British to retain the dreadnoughts destined for Constantinople.48
Exactly how much weight these concerns carried in Russian thinking during the July Crisis is difficult to ascertain.49 Since the official documents tended to focus on the Austro-Serbian epicentre of the crisis, there was a tendency to rationalize Russian decisions exclusively in terms of solidarity with the Slavic ‘little brothers’ and the need to maintain Russian prestige on the Balkan peninsula. Sazonov had learned his lesson and knew that an open bid for control of the Straits was unlikely to play well with his allies. The picture is complicated somewhat, however, by the fact that the Bosphorus was a specifically naval obsession, not shared by the army General Staff.
On the other hand, the Straits issue doubtless carried considerable weight for Krivoshein, whose responsibility for agricultural exports made him especially aware of the vulnerability of Russian commercial shipping. Recent instability in the Balkans had tended to fuse the Balkan theatre with the Straits question, so that the pensinsula came increasingly to be seen as the crucial strategic hinterland to the Straits.50 Russian control of the Balkans would place St Petersburg in a far better position to prevent unwanted intrusions on the Bosphorus. Designs on the Straits were thus an important reinforcing factor in the decision to stand firm over the threat to Serbia.
Whatever the precise order of geopolitical priorities, the Russians were already on the road to war. At this point, the horizons of possibility began to narrow. It becomes in retrospect harder (though not impossible) to imagine alternatives to the war that actually did break out in the first days of August 1914. This is doubtless what General Dobrorolsky, head of the Russian army’s mobilization department, meant when he remarked in 1921 that after the St Petersburg meetings of 24 and 25 July ‘the war was already a decided thing, and all the flood of telegrams between the governments of Russia and Germany were nothing but the staging for an historical drama’.51 And yet throughout the crucial days of the fourth week of July, the Russians and their French partners continued to speak of a policy of peace. The policy of ‘firmness’, as expounded by Poincaré, Sazonov, Paléologue, Izvolsky, Krivoshein and their colleagues was a policy that aimed, in the words of the Tsar, ‘to safeguard peace by the demonstration of force’.
It is tempting to dismiss this language as a smokescreen of euphemisms intended to disguise the aggressiveness of Russian and French policy and perhaps also to avoid putting off the policy-makers in London. But we find the same formulations in internal correspondance and private utterances. There is an interesting contrast here with the analogous German documents, which speak more directly of war as an external threat, a necessity and an instrument of policy. Yet a closer look at what Russian and French statesmen were actually doing when they spoke of the need to safeguard peace suggests that the difference was discursive, rather than substantial. Why this difference should have existed is not immediately clear, but we should be wary of seeing in it the symptom of Germanic militarism or war-lust. It may well reflect the deep impact of Clausewitz on German political language. The war of 1914–18 was the absolute negation of everything that Clausewitz had stood and argued for, but his subtle writings on conflict had depicted war as an eminently political tool, whose deployment – as a measure of last resort – should always serve political ends. By contrast, the language of the Russian and French decision-makers reflected the assumption that war and peace were stark existential alternatives. However, neither Clausewitz’s sage injunctions on the primacy of politics nor heartfelt invocations of peace as the highest human good did anything to inhibit the decision-makers who took Europe into war in July 1914.