German Problems and Personalities Part 14

The history of Russia proves only too conclusively that again and again the national interests of Russia have been sacrificed to the German dynastic influences. At the end of the Seven Years' War, Frederick the Great was at his last gasp. Prussia was on the verge of ruin. _The Russian Army had entered Berlin_; the power of the new military monarchy had been totally broken at Kunersdorf. The death of Elizabeth and the accession of her mad nephew, Peter III., retrieved a desperate situation. For the mad nephew was a German Prince, a Duke of Holstein, and a pa.s.sionate admirer of Frederick the Great. Peter III.

was murdered in 1762. He only reigned a few months, but he reigned sufficiently long to save Prussia from destruction and to surrender all the advantages secured by Russian triumphs and dearly paid for by Russian blood.

V.

There is no more fantastic fairy-tale and there is no more fascinating drama than the life-story of Catherine the Great, which recently has been so brilliantly told by Mr. Francis Gribble. A Cinderella amongst German royalties, a pauper Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine became the mightiest potentate of her age. Although the nominee of Frederick the Great, she pursued consistently a national Russian policy. And she had good reasons for doing so. For no throne was less secure than the throne of the Romanovs. She had had to remove her husband by murder for fear of being removed herself. She continued to be surrounded by a rabble of unscrupulous adventurers and intriguers. Her only safety lay in becoming a patriotic Russian, and in seeking the support of Russian sentiment and Russian opinion. Whilst Frederick the Great surrounded himself with French advisers, and contemptuously refused even to speak the German language; whilst he declared to the German scholar who presented him with a copy of the "Nibelungen Lied" that this national German epic was not worth a pipe of tobacco, Catherine the Great systematically encouraged Russian literature. Whilst Frederick the Great remained the consistent Atheist on the throne, Catherine the Great professed the utmost zeal for Russian Orthodoxy. All through her reign she avoided as far as possible a conflict with Frederick and his successor. She divided with them the spoils of Poland, or, as Frederick the Great put it in his edifying theological language, she partook of the Eucharistic body of the Polish kingdom in unholy communion with Prussia and Austria. But Catherine saw to it that Russia secured the greater part of the spoils.

VI.

There is a curious and uncanny similarity between the character and the reign of Peter III. and the character and reign of his son, Paul I. Both reigns were brief, yet both reigns had an incalculable influence on European affairs. Both rulers sacrificed national interests to dynastic interests. Both rulers were insane, and both rulers engaged in insane enterprises. Both father and son were murdered with the complicity or connivance of their own family. The Russian armies, on the advent of Peter III., had secured and achieved a dramatic victory over Prussia, but the admiration of Peter III. for Frederick the Great prevented the Russians from reaping the fruits of victory. Suvoroff crossed the Alps and achieved an equally sensational victory over France, but Paul I. was prevented from taking advantage of his victories by his admiration for Napoleon.

VII.

The reign of Alexander I. once more strikingly ill.u.s.trates the enormous part which subterranean German influences have played in the foreign policy of Russia. After the costly victories of Eylau and Friedland, Napoleon I. had concluded with Alexander I. the Peace of Tilsit. The treaty was fatal to Europe, for it divided the Continent practically between the Russian and French Empires. But it was highly advantageous to Russia, and enormously added to Russian power and Russian prestige.

It was certainly in Russia's interest to maintain the Alliance. It was broken largely through one of those small dynastic incidents which are of such vast importance under an absolute despotism. One of Napoleon's main objects was to establish a Napoleonic Dynasty and to be adopted by marriage into one of the ruling families of Europe. The Corsican parvenu pa.s.sionately desired a matrimonial alliance with the House of Romanov, and repeatedly applied for the hand of one of Alexander's sisters; the dowager Tsarina, Alexander's mother, a daughter of the King of Wurtemberg, as persistently refused. She had all the pride of birth of a German Princess, and all the hatred of a reactionary against the armed soldier of the Revolution. Foiled at the Court of Petersburg, Napoleon was more successful at the Court of Vienna. A few months after Napoleon's last overtures had been rejected by Russia, the Habsburgs, who, after the Bourbons, were the most august, the most ancient dynasty of Europe, eagerly accepted what the Romanovs had refused. The war of 1812 with Russia was the result of that pro-German policy of the Russian Court.

VIII.

During the reigns of Nicholas I. and Alexander II. the German-Austrian influence reached its zenith at the Court of Petersburg. Nicholas I.

was the brother-in-law of the Prussian Hohenzollern. An able and an honest man in his private relations, he was in his political capacity a Prussian martinet, as even Treitschke is compelled to admit, and he organized his Empire on the strictest Frederician principles. The Court, the Army, and the bureaucracy were Prussianized as they had never been before. A German bureaucrat, Nesselrode, who could not even speak the Russian language, for forty years controlled as Foreign Minister the policy of the Russian Empire. Even as his grandfather, Peter III., even as his brother, Alexander I., had saved Prussia from destruction, so Nicholas I. saved Austria from a similar fate. Francis Joseph had ascended a throne shaken to its foundations. Hungary was in open rebellion. The young Austrian Emperor appealed to Russia for help. Nicholas I. sent an army to quell the revolution, and established his cousin on the Hungarian throne. It is unnecessary to add that Francis Joseph was as loyal and as grateful to Russia as Frederick the Great had been!

Alexander I. had refused to accept Napoleon I. as a brother-in-law.

Even so did Nicholas I. refuse to recognize Napoleon III. as Emperor of the French. It was a gratuitous insult inspired by Prussia; it was opposed to Russian interests, and it was one of the main causes of the Crimean War.

IX.

Under Alexander II. the alliance of the three reactionary empires of Central Europe was welded even more firmly than under his predecessor.

Bismarck, during his tenure of the Prussian Emba.s.sy at Petersburg, was the chosen favourite of the Russian Court, and if he had chosen could have become a Minister of the Tsar. An understanding with Russia became the chief dogma of his political creed, and it remained so until the end. It was Bismarck's adherence to the Russian-Prussian Alliance which was one of the causes of his dismissal.

Alexander II. did nothing to guard against the German peril. He might have been the umpire of Central Europe, as Alexander I. had been fifty years before. He demanded no compensation for the enormous accession of power and territory which Germany had received through the victorious wars of 1863, 1866, and 1870. He insisted on no guarantees.

When, after Sedan, Thiers came to St. Petersburg to obtain the intervention of the Russian Empire, he was dismissed with empty words.

One year after Thiers's fruitless journey, Emperor William paid an official visit to his nephew Alexander II., and the Tsar once more proclaimed the indissoluble solidarity of Russia with Germany. Until the end of his reign the German-Austrian-Russian Alliance, the famous dynastic Alliance of the Three Emperors, remained the keystone of European policy and the mainstay of Russian reaction.

X.

The influence of Germany at the Russian Court was strengthened by the influence of Germany on the Russian bureaucracy. An agricultural community without a middle cla.s.s, Russia has had to recruit her Civil Services almost entirely from the outside and mainly from Germany, and more especially from the German Baltic provinces of Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland. Teutonic barons from those Baltic provinces have filled the higher ranks of the Diplomatic Service and of the Civil Service for a hundred and fifty years. The Russian Tsars found the German barons far more serviceable tools than the Russian boiars. In a previous age one Emperor after another had been removed by a rebellious aristocracy. The highest n.o.bles in the land had been implicated in the Decabrist conspiracy at the end of Alexander I.'s reign. Even under Alexander II. there were always a few members of the n.o.bility to be found as accomplices in the revolutionary plots. But there never was one single German from the Baltic provinces implicated in a conspiracy against reaction. It is easy to understand, therefore, why a Russian autocrat should have preferred the services of the German Baltic barons. The Russian n.o.bleman is casual, lavish, a bad economist, easygoing, generous, and he is corrupt because easygoing and generous. He is also much more independent. The Junker is punctual, precise, disciplined, generally poor, always ambitious. He is also tolerably honest. He is the ideal bureaucrat.

XI.

German influence has been no less dominant in the Russian academies and in scientific inst.i.tutions. The Academy of Sciences of St.

Petersburg was organized on the pattern of the Academy of Berlin. It was an official inst.i.tution with high privileges, and it remained consistently German. Until recently its proceedings were published in the German language, and German scientists were invariably preferred rather than Russian scientists. Mendelieff, one of the most creative scientific minds of his generation, was a member of every European academy except the Academy of Petersburg.

The Germans have been an even greater power in the Russian Universities. They took full advantage of the prestige which German science had acquired in Europe, and they largely filled the ranks of the liberal professions. German doctors, German veterinary surgeons, German _Feldschers_, German foresters, German engineers, were to be found in every part of the Empire. A casual reading of the Post Office directories of Moscow, or Petersburg, or Kiev, provides a most instructive commentary on the extent of the German domination.

XII.

Securely entrenched in the Russian Court, in the Army, in the bureaucracy, in the Universities, in the Diplomatic Service, the Germans secured a no less commanding influence in trade and industry.

As we have already pointed out, Russia, until recent years, had remained an agricultural country without a middle cla.s.s. The trade remained almost entirely in foreign hands. Already in the Middle Ages Russian cities, like Novgorod, were affiliated to the German Hanseatic League. In the sixteenth century adventurous English explorers and traders, whose exploits are amongst the most thrilling of Hakluyt's voyages, tried to oust their German compet.i.tors, but they utterly failed. The Russians themselves are excellent traders, and the merchant guilds of Moscow have been for centuries a powerful commercial organization. Even to-day you will meet in Moscow una.s.suming Russian merchants leading the simplest of lives and possessed of enormous wealth. But the Russian merchant is generally conservative, un-enterprising, a bad linguist, and servilely attached to ancient usages. He is scarcely a match for the foreigner. In recent years British and Belgian traders as well as Jews and Armenians have shared in the enormous trade of the Russian Empire, _but the Germans have secured the lion's share_.

And what is true of Russian trade is equally true of Russian industry.

The liberal economic policy of Witte has created in one generation powerful industrial centres in Central Russia, and especially in Poland. Here, again, the Germans have benefited more than all their compet.i.tors together. Lodz, the "Manchester of Russian Poland," has ceased to be either Polish or Russian, and has become a German manufacturing town. Caprivi, Bismarck's successor, negotiated with the Russian Government a treaty of commerce which gave enormous advantages to German industry, and if the German Government had continued to show the wisdom of Bismarck and Caprivi, Germany would certainly have profited more than any other country by the commercial expansion of the Russian Empire.

XIII.

It might have been expected that a German influence so absolutely supreme in every sphere of society, in every walk of life, should have extended to the lower cla.s.ses. But the common people were never affected by German methods and remained untainted by the German spirit. To the Russian moujik, the German remained the _Niemets_, the mute, the alien enemy. The Russian peasant, with his simple ways and his child-like faith, a mystic and an idealist, has an instinctive antipathy to the modern Prussian, who is an implacable realist, selfish, calculating, and aggressive. The persistence with which the Russian people have resisted and escaped Prussian influence is not the least convincing proof of the soundness of the Slav character.

XIV.

We have seen German influence supreme in the province of the practical, the tangible, the useful. It is all the more remarkable that it should be insignificant in the sphere of the ideal and of the beautiful. In Art and Literature the influence of Germany has been purely superficial, although the beautiful Russian language has often been spoiled by the influence of a c.u.mbrous German syntax. With the exception of Nietzsche, no German writer has left his mark on Russian literature. The literary influence of Great Britain has been much more extensive, and has grown enormously during the last generation. But it is the literature of France which has been the dominant factor in the literary life of modern Russia. The fascination of French culture has been as old as Russian culture. Catherine II. was the friend of Diderot and Voltaire, and herself translated French masterpieces into Russian. The French language has been the language of diplomacy and society. Readers of "War and Peace" will remember how the n.o.blemen of the Petersburg salons denounced the French usurper in the language of Voltaire.

XV.

We have sufficiently proved that Germany has been a formidable factor in the whole past history of the Russian Empire. We may hope that after the war German influence will be a thing of the past. After the war it is not German political ideas and German inst.i.tutions, but French and British ideas and inst.i.tutions which will mould the destinies of the Russian Empire. The elective affinities between the Russian democracy and the French and British democracies will a.s.sert themselves and will eliminate the mischievous and reactionary influence of Germany.

We have seen how entirely German power has been artificial and imposed from above, how it has been the outcome of the dynastic connection.

_But in the meantime the German influence supreme before the war still subsists and still const.i.tutes a danger which it would be extremely unwise and unstatesmanlike to ignore or to under-rate._ We must therefore guard ourselves, so that when the day of settlement comes the subtle and subterranean German forces shall not make themselves felt, and that the Teutonic Monarchies shall be frustrated in their supreme effort to retain a power which has been so fatal to the liberties of Europe and to the free development of the Russian people.

CHAPTER XV

THE PEACEMAKER OF GERMANY: PRINCE BERNHARD VON BuLOW

I.

In the year of grace 1878, after the great Turkish-Russian war, a young and unknown Prussian diplomat of twenty-nine years of age called Bernhard von Bulow found himself, as a.s.sistant to his father, the Foreign Secretary of the German Empire, suddenly summoned to co-operate in the making of a new Europe. In the same year, on the same arena, an equally unknown young Scotch politician called Arthur James Balfour, born in the same year, 1849, also found himself, as a.s.sistant to his uncle, Lord Salisbury, Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, unexpectedly chosen to play the identical part of an international peacemaker. And now, after a lapse of thirty-eight years, the two erstwhile Secretaries of the Congress of Berlin, to-day the only surviving statesmen of that momentous crisis, Prince von Bulow and Mr. Arthur James Balfour, are about to meet in another European Congress, and be called upon once more to recast the map of the world. But this time the Scotsman and the German will meet no more as Allies working out a common policy. They will meet as the leading champions of hostile and irreconcilable world policies, united only in a joint endeavour to undo the evil work of Bismarck and Beaconsfield which claimed to bring to Europe "peace with honour," and which ultimately brought Europe nothing but war with dishonour.

II.

Prince von Bulow's whole career has been one steady and rapid ascent to high office and exalted honour. Before his fall he had earned the well-deserved nickname of "Bernhard the Lucky." He seemed to have found in his cradle all the gifts of the fairies. His most striking characteristic is an amazing and totally un-German versatility and resourcefulness. As a soldier he volunteered in the Franco-German War, and retired from service as a Prussian Lieutenant. As a diplomat he has occupied responsible positions in every capital of Europe except London, and the exception, by the way, is probably the reason why he has always been less familiar with the English mind than with the Continental mind. An unrivalled Parliamentary tactician as well as a persuasive Parliamentary orator, he managed with even more than the skill of Mr. Asquith or Mr. Balfour the most unmanageable representative a.s.sembly of the Continent, and for twelve years he played off one against the other the ten or more parties of the Reichstag. As Fourth Chancellor of the New German Empire he has been a.s.sociated with all the leading measures of the "new course," and he succeeded for ten years in retaining the confidence and affectionate regard of the most fickle and most despotic of masters. A man of the world and a patron of learning and art, he has enlisted all the graces and amenities of social life in the service of his ambition.

III.