  Until the year 1890 Russia and Germany had been in close touch. Dynastic connexions united the two imperial houses; and the common policy of repression of Polish nationality—the fatal legacy of the days of Frederic the Great and Catharine II—united the two empires. National sentiment in Russia was, however, always anti-German; and as early as 1885 Balkan affairs began to draw the Russian Government away from Germany. In 1890 Bismarck fell; and under William II German policy left the Russian connexion, and in close touch with Austria embarked on Balkan adventures which ran counter to Russian aims, while Russia on her side turned to new allies. The new direction of Russian policy, which has brought the aims of the Russian Government into close accord with the desires of national Slav sentiment, was determined by Balkan conditions. Bismarck had cherished no Balkan ambitions: he had been content to play the part of an 'honest broker' at the Congress of Berlin, and he had spoken of the Bulgarian affair of 1885 as 'not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier.' William II apparently thought otherwise. At any rate Germany seems to have conducted, for many years past, a policy of establishing her influence, along with that of Austria, through South-Eastern Europe. And it is this policy which is the fons et origo of the present struggle; for it is a policy which is not and cannot be tolerated by Russia, so long as Russia is true to her own Slav blood and to the traditions of centuries. After Austria had finally lost Italy, as she did in 1866, she turned for compensation to the Balkans. If Venetia was lost, it seemed some recompense when in 1878 Austria occupied Bosnia and the Herzegovina. Hence she could expand southwards—ultimately perhaps to Salonica. Servia, which might have objected, was a vassal kingdom, the protÉgÉ of Austria, under the dynasty of the Obrenovitch. As Austria might hope to follow the line to Salonica,[22] so Germany, before the end of the nineteenth century, seems to have conceived of a parallel line of penetration, which would carry her influence through Constantinople, through Konieh, to Bagdad. She has extended her political and economic influence among the small Slav states and in Turkey. In 1898 the King of Roumania (a Hohenzollern by descent) conceded direct communication through his territories between Berlin and Constantinople: in 1899 a German company obtained a concession for the Bagdad railway from Konieh to the head of the Persian Gulf. In a word, Germany began to stand in the way of the Russian traditions of ousting the Turk and ruling in Constantinople: she began to buttress the Turk, to train his army, to exploit his country, and to seek to oust Russia generally from South-Eastern Europe. In 1903 the progress of Austria and Germany received a check. A blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. Servia, which had hoped to gain these territories, once a part of the old Servian kingdom, was mortally offended, and would have gone to war with Austria, if Russia, her champion under the new dynasty, could only have given her support. But Russia, still weak after the Japanese war, could not do so; Russia, on the contrary, had to suffer the humiliation of giving a pledge to the Austrian Ambassador at St. Petersburg that she would not support Servia. That humiliation Russia has not forgotten. She has saved money, she has reorganized her army, she has done everything in her power to gain security for the future. And now that Austria has sought utterly to humiliate Servia on the unproved charge (unproved, in the sense that no legal proof was offered)[23] of complicity in the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Russia has risked war rather than surrender her protection of a Slav kingdom. Slav sentiment imperatively demanded action in favour of Servia: no government could refuse to listen to the demand. The stake for Russia is not merely the integrity of Servia: it is her prestige among the Slav peoples, of which she is head; and behind all lies the question whether South-Eastern Europe shall be under Teutonic control, and lost to Russian influence. Germany has not only threatened Slav life in South-Eastern Europe: she has irritated Slav feeling on her own Eastern frontier. The vitality and the increase of the Slavs in Eastern Germany has excited deep German alarm. The German Government has therefore of late years pursued a policy of repression towards its own Slav subjects, the Poles, forbidding the use of the Polish language, and expropriating Polish landowners in order to plant a German garrison in the East. Teutonism is really alarmed at the superior birth-rate and physical vigour of the Slavs; but Russia has not loved Teutonic policy, and there has been an extensive boycott of German goods in Russian Poland. The promise made by the Tsar, since the beginning of the war, that he would re-create the old Poland, and give it autonomy, shows how far Russia has travelled from the days, not so far distant in point of time, when it was her policy to repress the Poles in conjunction with Germany; and it has made the breach between Germany and Russia final and irreparable. It is thus obvious that Germany is vitally opposed to the great Slav Empire in South-Eastern Europe and on her own eastern borders. But why, it may be asked, should Russian policy be linked with English? Is there any bond of union except the negative bond of common opposition to Germany? There is. For one thing England and Russia have sought to pursue a common cause—that of international arbitration and of disarmament. If neither has succeeded, it has been something of a bond between the two that both have attempted to succeed. But there are other and more vital factors. England, which in 1854-6 opposed and fought Russia for the sake of the integrity of Turkey, has no wish to fight Russia for the sake of a Germanized Turkey. On the contrary, the interest of England in maintaining independence in the South-East of Europe now coincides with that of Russia. Above all, the new constitutional Russia of the Duma is Anglophil. 'The political ideals both of Cadets and Octobrists were learnt chiefly from England, the study of whose constitutional history had aroused in Russia an enthusiasm hardly intelligible to a present-day Englishman. All three Dumas ... were remarkably friendly to England, and England supplied the staple of the precedents and parallels for quotation.'[24] In a word, the beginnings of Russian constitutionalism not only coincided in time with the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, but owed much to the inspiration of England. Notes: |
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