Did the tsarist government consider public opinion in formulating foreign policy?

Viewpoint: Yes. Public opinion heavily influenced government decisions on commercial and strategic issues in the late imperial era.

Viewpoint: No. Imperial Russian diplomacy operated according to principles of realpolitik and was in the main divorced from public opinion.

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Much ink has been spilled in assessing the importance of public opinion in foreign policy. In the context of Imperial Russia, public opinion long appeared to be irrelevant. An elitist state run by remote and unaccountable (to all but the tsar) officials paid little attention to public opinion with regard to foreign policy and almost any other subject. Policy was made on the basis of interests and their evaluation, often flawed, by high-ranking servitors of the state.
Some recent research, however, suggests that the interaction of public opinion and government policy was more closely linked than has previously been thought. As in many other areas, public opinion--expressed in speeches, addresses, newspaper columns, meetings, journals, and professional associations--was taken seriously by the government. It measured popular moods and attitudes, presented the government with options and choices, and even threatened it with consequences. In the case of crafting foreign policy, Russia was trapped in an attempt to balance its interests with the views of its population, which, in a modern context, was becoming more dynamic and diverse.



Viewpoint: Yes. Public opinion heavily influenced government decisions on commercial and strategic issues in the late imperial era.

Public opinion often played a vital role in crafting tsarist foreign policy. Although Imperial Russia's major diplomatic goals--furthering the Empire's power and influence along its Eurasian periphery and pursuing commercial and strategic positions in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Asia--remained relatively consistent over time, public opinion shaped many of the decisions taken to further these ambitions in the late-imperial era. Consideration of public opinion often caused the tsarist government to make critical tactical and strategic errors, mistakes that its leaders often identified as such. That they nevertheless acted against their better judgment in these cases only testifies to the power of public opinion in the late-imperial era.

The most significant origins of independent commentary on foreign affairs arose with the Slavophile and Pan-Slavist movements in the mid nineteenth century. Slavophiles sought to explain the nature of Russian state and society by idealizing what they saw as their distinctive features and contrasting them with characteristics of other cultures, particularly those of the West. To these thinkers, Russia's overwhelmingly rural population and reliance on communal institutions defined its national identity. Many of this philosophy's proponents were suspicious of actions and ideas that had altered Russia's uniqueness in the past. Existing institutions of the Russian state--including its autocratic monarchy, stratified society, powerful bureaucracy, and other products of Peter the Great's Westernizing reforms--figured among their targets. Yet, it was the specter of newer foreign influences, ones that had not yet reached Russia, that drove their opinions on international relations. Fears of statist and hierarchical forms of Western Christianity (especially Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism), European philosophical trends toward "scientific" determinism (especially Marxism), economic philosophies favoring competitive individualism and urban values (especially capitalism), and systems of government defined by impersonal and, in their view, socially divisive institutions (especially parliamentary democracy) all colored their opinions of who should be Russia's friends and enemies.

As this environment of distrust and vulnerability evolved in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Slavophiles' major bugbear became Germany. Especially after national unification in 1871, the new German Empire embodied virtually all of the Western influences that they found so objectionable. Its rulers either controlled or sought to subdue its religious establishments. Two of its most important living philosophers were Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels. Its economy was moving rapidly toward commercial capitalism and its attendant urbanization and industrialization. Its government included important roles for parliaments and constitutions at both the national and member-state levels. Neither earlier German expansion to the east at the expense of Slavic peoples nor the prominent role of Germans in Russia's recent Westernization and bureaucratization escaped their notice.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the prevalence of these views among those who forged Russian public opinion. A significant portion of the intelligentsia, including the country's two most outstanding and influential men of letters, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, subscribed to at least some of them. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who infamously called parliamentary democracy "the great lie of our time," tutored both Alexander III (ruled 1881-1894) and his son and successor Nicholas II (ruled 1894-1917) and served as the chief state official in charge of religious matters from 1880 to 1905. By the turn of the twentieth century, many rising figures in Russia's relatively new publishing, journalism, and opinion-making industries, many of whom had social origins in the peasantry so idealized by the original Slavophiles, had little difficulty subscribing to their ideals. As Russia developed a commercial, mass-circulation daily press and saw its population's literacy rates and educational achievements rise dramatically, views of foreign affairs formed by Slavophile ideology became more common and articulate.

Although not all informed Russians attached an aggressive or nationalistic dimension to their political philosophy, an important number did. These "Pan-Slavists" not only shared the Slavophiles' belief in the uniqueness of Russia's social and cultural conditions, but also endowed its national characteristics with a powerful sense of moral and philosophical superiority. In addition to everything else they found loathsome about the West, its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century slide toward social crisis, ethical abstraction, and cultural decadence exacerbated their prejudices. Along with its strong nationalist ideals, Pan-Slavism held that all Slavic peoples shared cultural and political interests and depended on the protection and leadership that Russia could provide as the most powerful Slavic nation. Assigning this role to their country led them to urge state and society toward supporting Slavic causes in Europe, whether or not it was in Russia's pragmatic strategic interests. Their insistence on this priority led to catastrophes that the Russian Empire would have done well to avoid.

The Balkans, where Russia had intervened to protect Orthodox Christian populations in the past and had long pursued major strategic and economic goals, proved to be the cauldron that boiled Pan-Slavist passions. For proponents of the Pan-Slavist perspective, any failure on Russia's part to come to the aid of its fellow Slavs would compromise its important role in world affairs. They vociferously argued that the Empire would, in such a case, lose influence among the Slavic peoples, suffer diminished prestige among the great powers of Europe, and even find itself confronted with domestic challenges to its legitimacy. Since the Pan-Slavists themselves controlled many organs of public discourse, the last of those consequences presented a thinly veiled threat. If the government failed to conduct its foreign policy in a manner that suited their ideological dictates, it stood to lose authority in its interaction with Russia's rapidly growing civil society. Although the government was becoming more ambivalent to involvement in European conflicts, which were almost always costly and unsuccessful adventures for Russia in the nineteenth century, many of its responsible officials felt that they had to gesture toward society's demands or face domestic crisis. At a time when the state was battling revolutionary movements, attempting to reform itself without major upheaval, and struggling to survive as a major power despite its relative underdevelopment, it could hardly admit weakness or willfully ignore the sensibilities of a large segment of its educated population, much of which presented those sensibilities as fervent support for the existing government.

Russia's war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877-1878, begun to protect Serbian and Bulgarian rebels in their struggle against Turkish rule, was largely driven by influential journalists and publishers who reported on atrocities against the Slavic populations and by opinionated Russians who wanted their nation to help Christian Slavs best Muslim overlords. A long-term problem with this construction of Russia's role, however, lay in its sponsorship of national liberation movements fighting an established power, Muslim though it may have been. Often harboring democratic aspirations, Balkan proponents of independence and new nationhood presented a direct challenge to the European status quo, from which the Russian Empire had itself benefited to a great degree. Espousing a community of Slavic peoples was one matter, but encouraging open rebellion by ethnic nationalists both threatened Russia's multiethnic neighbors, Germany and Austria-Hungary, which also ruled over large Slavic populations, and stirred ethnic discontent among the Russian Empire's subject peoples. While St. Petersburg had to confront a whole new generation of minority nationalists at home, including many who ultimately would lead their peoples to independence, it also fired the antagonism of its Germanic neighbors.

German and Austrian reactions to the results of Russia's policy in the Balkans contributed to a growing diplomatic rift. The Congress of Berlin, a diplomatic conference convoked by European statesmen to revise the initial peace treaty ending the 1877-1878 war, dramatically scaled back the territorial ambitions of the Balkan Slavs. This result disappointed them, embarrassed the Russians, and fueled the increasing virulence of anti-German sentiment in both the Balkans and Russia. The consequences of the soured Russo-German relationship led steadily toward the alienation of the two countries in the 1880s, the rupture of their traditional alliance arrangements by 1890, and to Russia's conclusion of a counteralliance with France, Germany's principal enemy, in 1892.

From a geopolitical realist's perspective, these developments created serious problems for St. Petersburg. Russia's support for Balkan nationalism represented an abandonment of one of the critical values that had fostered the Empire's traditionally close relationships with Germany and Austria-Hungary and had assured a general European peace since the early nineteenth century. In the place of that cooperative atmosphere, Russia emerged as the architect of unrest in southeastern Europe and the principal opponent of Austria, which remained in a close alliance with Germany. Russia's estrangement from Berlin led first to the closure of its largest foreign capital market (an absolute necessity for its loan-based modernization program) and then to its alliance with France, a republic that had little affinity for Russia philosophically, shared none of its political or social values, and valued it only as a military counterweight to Germany. Since its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, France had, furthermore, stood in a position of military inferiority relative to Germany. Yet, the power of Pan-Slavism in influencing foreign policy led the Russian government to forfeit its sensible, established alliance with the stronger of the two continental powers in favor of a new and untested relationship with the weaker.

Both German and Russian political elites realized the folly of this outcome. Germany had no desire to fight a war on two fronts, the certain result if it went to war with France and Russia in combination. Nor did the Germans want to go to war to protect Austrian interests in the Balkans. Russia, too, had every strategic reason to restore favorable relations with Germany, its most powerful neighbor, Europe's greatest military power, and, despite the cultural differences that inflamed Russian Slavophiles, a conservative constitutional monarchy ruled by relatives of the Romanovs. In July 1905, as Russia was in the last throes of its unsuccessful war with Japan and in the midst of a domestic revolution, Kaiser Wilhelm II personally offered Nicholas II a renewed alliance relationship. The tsar eagerly accepted. Despite the strategic sense that this proposal made, Russia's foreign minister, Count Vladimir Lamzdorf, was terrified by the probable public reaction, which he expected to be extremely critical of the government's willingness to ally with the hated Germans, and immediately sought to undo the agreement. This turnabout has frequently been presented as a case of professional diplomacy prevailing over monarchical whim, but in fact it had more to do with the foreign minister's fear of the consequences of negative public reaction than sound strategy. Such fears permanently closed the door to any Russo-German rapprochement.

Russia's choice to continue on as a strategic opponent of the Germanic powers only caused its great-power status to drop further. In 1908 Lamzdorf 's inept successor, Count Aleksandr Izvolsky, was duped by his Austrian counterpart into accepting Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina--a province coveted by Russia's Slavic client state Serbia--in exchange for an empty promise to secure Russian access to the Turkish Straits. Bosnia-Herzegovina was duly annexed, but the Austrians then did nothing to promote Russia's interests in the Straits. The failure provoked a public outcry strong enough to cause Izvolsky's dismissal. In effect he had supported Vienna's annexation of a province partly inhabited by Orthodox Christians and greatly desired by Serbia in exchange for nothing. Enraged Russian publicists used the episode to demand heightened commitment to Serbia and other Slavic nations in the future. Russia's ineffectual diplomatic role in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which again saw Serbian territorial ambitions checked by Austro- Hungarian pressure, this time with ominous German backing, provoked further outcries about the failure of the Empire to defend its brother Slavic peoples and respect the sentiments of its own population.

The advent of an elected legislature (Duma) after 1905 did little to soften public criticism in the wake of these crises. Already at odds with the government over constitutional and other domestic issues, foreign-policy failures merely added fuel to the fire. Even politically liberal Duma members--to say nothing of its conservative delegates--despaired of the decline in Russia's international influence and appealed to it to argue that they, as the elected representatives of the people, should share in determining the Empire's foreign policy.

When the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo in June 1914 presented Europe with a pancontinental crisis, Russian public opinion virtually demanded that the government defend Serbia from Austrian aggression. Many argued that if Russia failed yet again to play a meaningful role in supporting its Balkan client, the Empire would slip from the ranks of the great powers and become an irrelevant force in world politics, possibly even a victim of other great powers who sensed its weakness. Unlike more-rational figures in government, including Petr Durnovo, a high official who in February 1914 wrote an influential memorandum reasoning that Russia stood nothing to gain and much to lose from involvement in a future pan-European war, the press showed great enthusiasm for exactly that type of conflict when it broke out a few months later. Almost until World War I finally brought about Russia's revolutionary collapse three disastrous years later, its reporters, editorialists, and opinion makers churned out the view that Russia was fighting for a noble cause alongside admirable allies who had its best interests at heart. Even after the collapse of the monarchy in March 1917, much of Russia's elite public opinion still favored continuing the war as a matter of national honor and advocated the pursuit of tsarist territorial ambitions. These ambitions at least temporarily died out with the decay of the Provisional Government and its final overthrow by Bolshevik coup d'état in October. However, it was the fervor of such opinions that had led the Russian Empire into its fatal crisis to begin with.

-- Paul du Quenoy, American University in Cairo


Viewpoint: No. Imperial Russian diplomacy operated according to principles of realpolitik and was in the main divorced from public opinion.

The outbreak of war in August 1914 was the tragic consequence of the fundamental disconnect between Imperial Russian foreign policy and its people. Not taking into account the lessons of 1904-1905, when Russia's first Far Eastern colonial experiment resulted in defeat abroad and revolution at home, Russia continued to pursue an aggressive and reckless policy of military buildup and imperial expansion in the Balkans. Support for these efforts could be found among military and political elites, and some elements of the emerging middle class. Yet, war hysteria blinded the imperial government to its limited ability to expand vis-à-vis its European rivals. This error in judgment rested on the belief that industrial development and political reform had transformed Russia into a first-rate European power within ten years. In reality, however, industrialization and the establishment of quasi-parliamentary institutions like the Duma and the Council of Ministers failed to bridge the social gap that, after three years of needless war, led to the downfall of the regime.

One of the main arguments that the Russians could wage a successful war in 1914 was that its economy had substantially improved since 1905. Indeed, Russia's industry was growing faster than that of any other European power at that time, as the rapid expansion of its railway system and increases in coal, pig iron, steel, and cotton production indicated. However, these figures were still less than 25 percent of Germany's, Europe's leading industrial producer. In effect, these numbers meant that Russia was at best a second-tier economy that would take decades to tap competitively into its vast human and material resources.

The most immediate consequence of Russia's industrialization prior to 1914 was the rapid expansion of an urban industrial class. This urban proletariat had already demonstrated its strength during the 1905 revolution, when it had formed the mainstay of the radical Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, whose Marxist ideology advocated the abolition of the "feudal" Romanov dynasty. The growth of an urban working class should have easily alerted the Russian state to a renewed danger if a general European war broke out.

The tsar's main attempt to quell broad dissatisfaction with the regime was the establishment of the Duma, where in theory the people's representatives would join him and his officials to formulate policies. In reality, however, this was a parliament in name only. The tsar and his cabinet were completely independent from this body; moreover the tsar could dissolve its sessions at will. While he was restrained to a limited extent in budgetary matters, he retained full authority over all foreign policy and military matters.

Although this new power structure afforded greater participation by those elites who were allowed to participate as a "loyal opposition," which led in turn to Russia's yellow press support of expansionist ventures, it was vulnerable to accusations of being a sham democracy. The tsar and his government should have been well aware of the fact that those hostile to the regime, namely St. Petersburg and Moscow's expanded urban classes, could use another wartime crisis to revolt against the new regime.

Similarly, Russia failed to reexamine its expansionist foreign policy, which continued to be viewed as integral to the country's path to modernity. The Russians sought to carve out their own sphere of influence in the Far East. This mission was viewed as vital, for Russia had faced a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-1856 and no longer could compete with the British, the world's premier naval power. Russia's defeat by the Japanese in 1904-1905 should have alerted Russia's expansionist enthusiasts that this mission had to be abandoned.

Instead, Russian diplomats revived the Russian imperial dream of beating the other European powers to Constantinople, the one great prize that could lead to Russia's becoming the ruler of the eastern Mediterranean. This pursuit was seen as urgent given a growing German presence among the Young Turk government, and, more importantly, the Habsburg Empire's own expansion into the Balkans, traditionally viewed as Russia's sphere of influence.

Central to this renewed drive into the Balkans was Russia's continued bitterness against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Russians harbored a grudge against Vienna since the Habsburgs declared neutrality when the Crimean War broke out. No one could forget that Austria's abandonment of their autocratic alliance came only five years after Nicholas I's armies saved the monarchy in the wake of the 1848-1849 Revolution. Austrian ambitions against the Serbs and wider ambitions in the Balkans did not help. Russia believed this "betrayal" justified the new policy of supporting South Slavic nationalism, a serious threat to the Habsburg regime.

The Austrians' occupation of Bosnia in 1878 and its later annexation of the province in 1908 were major blows to this policy. The Russians saw these measures as an attempt to subjugate Serbia by preventing the "liberation" of Serbs still inside the remaining Ottoman holdings. According to Russian diplomatic circles, it was simply another humiliation.

The Russians' response was to initiate an anti-Habsburg alliance in the Balkans. This alliance was capstoned by the Serbian-Bulgarian treaty of 1911, which they hoped would allow Serbia to expand without fear of interference from Bulgaria, a client state of the Habsburgs and Germans since 1885. This diplomatic initiative resulted in a series of secretive talks among the Balkan States, which quickly led to an alliance against the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. In 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Montenegro declared war on the Turks and successfully seized almost all remaining Ottoman possessions in Europe. That did not resolve the "Eastern Question," as Bulgaria soon began a second war with Serbia, Greece, and the Ottomans over disputed territories in Macedonia and Thrace. These disputes heightened nationalist fervor among the Serbs, who looked once again at Bosnia and Austria-Hungary's Croatian territories to fulfill their Russian-sanctioned dream of a greater Serbia.

The Russians failed once again to grasp the long-term significance of Serbia's complicity in the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. While the Russian press and military and political elites rallied in favor of mobilizing in support of Serbia, which was now threatened with war after the Austrians discovered that the Serbian interior ministry had armed and sent the assassins, the Russian government did not take into account the grave internal threat another war would bring. The Russian strategic planners believed that the Austrians would either back down from their threat of war or be overwhelmed in short order by the combined might of Britain, France, and themselves.

While almost all of the warring parties believed the coming war would be about as short as the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, it was a gamble about which the tsar and leading Russian military and political officials had been forewarned. Petr Durnovo, the Russian interior minister, warned on the basis of hard empirical evidence that Russia's delicate social balance could not withstand another long-drawn-out conflict. The result, he asserted, would be a social revolution that likely would lead to the end of the regime itself.

Instead of heeding this warning, the tsarist regime mobilized its troops and fully participated in triggering World War I. The government had fulfilled its stated obligations encouraged by the delusion that its war against Austria was a popular one at home. In time, however, Russia's inability to fight effectively against Austria and Germany led to years of war, which alienated virtually all of Russia's society and led to the demise of the old regime.

-- York Norman, Georgetown University


IMPERIAL RESCRIPT

From every corner of our native land addresses are reaching me which testify to the great eagerness of the Russian people to devote their energies to providing supplies for the army. From this unanimous expression of the nation, I derive an unshakable confidence in a bright future.

The prolonged war demands ever fresh exertions. But in the increasing difficulties and in the inevitable vicissitudes of war the resolution becomes more firm and more rooted in our hearts to prosecute the war, with God's help, to the complete triumph of the Russian arms. The enemy must be crushed. Till then, there can be no peace.

With a firm belief in the inexhaustible strength of Russia, I expect of the Government and of public institutions, of Russian industry, and of all the loyal sons of our native land, without distinction of opinion and position, harmonious, wholehearted cooperation for the needs of our valiant army. Upon this national task, from now the only task, must be concentrated all the thoughts of a united and, consequently, unconquerable Russia.

Having created, for dealing with the problems of the army supply, a Special Commission made up in part of members of the legislative institutions and representatives of industry, I find it also necessary to hasten the time of the summoning of the legislative institutions themselves, so that we may hear the voice of Russia. I have, therefore, decided that the State Council and State Duma should resume their work not later than August of the present year, and I ask the Council of Ministers to work out, under my direction, the legislative bills called for by the exigencies of war.

The original is signed in His Imperial Majesty's own hand:

NICHOLAS

Headquarters, June 27, 1915

Source: Frank Alfred Golder, ed., Documents of Russian History, 1914-1917, translated by Emanuel Aronsberg (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), pp. 122-123.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000).

Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, N.Y. & London: Cornell University Press, 1995).

Dominic C. B. Lieven, Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983).

David MacLaren McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Robert H. McNeal, ed., Russia in Transition, 1905-1914: Evolution or Revolution? (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).

C. Jay Smith, The Russian Struggle for Power, 1914-1917: A Study of Russian Foreign Policy during the First World War (New York: Philosophical Society, 1956).