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distinct turn for the worse in the late 1880s over a German grain tariff and a boycott of Russian bonds. The rift between the two autocracies became inevitable when in 1890 Germany’s new Kaiser Wilhelm II offended Alexander by refusing to renew a secret promise of neutrality, the Reinsurance Treaty. There were also dynastic considerations. Whereas Alexander II’s fondness for his uncle, Kaiser Wilhelm I, had sustained friendship with Berlin, Alexander III had married a princess of Denmark, which still bore the scars of defeat by Prussia four decades earlier. But the basic reason for the Franco-Russian alliance was geopolitical logic. Russian generals understood that the German Empire, aggressive and militarily powerful, posed the most serious threat to its strategic security. Furthermore, Berlin’s growing intimacy with Vienna seriously complicated St Petersburg’s position in the Balkans. For its part, France also smarted from its more recent humiliation by German arms. To the Third Republic, alliance with Russia seemed the best guarantee of support in a revanchist war.

When Alexander III died in 1894 (of natural causes), contemporaries commemorated him as the ‘Tsar Peacemaker’ (Tsar’ mirotvorets). With the exception of a few short-lived monarchs in the eighteenth century, he was the only Romanov whose reign had been unsullied by war. Alexander was also faithful to a nineteenth-century diplomatic tradition that favoured consistency, caution and stability. Despite setbacks in the Crimea and at Berlin, over the past eighty years St Petersburg had largely steered a steady course in its international relations. During the reign of the last tsar, Nicholas II, the empire entered into distinctly stormier waters.

Decline and fall

Young and relatively unprepared to assume the responsibilities of autocrat, Nicholas was also subject to a much more restless and contradictory temperament than his immediate ancestors. The clearest sign of the unsettled diplomacy that characterised Nicholas’s reign is the simple fact that, whereas three foreign ministers had served since 1815, no less than nine men held the post between 1894 and the dynasty’s collapse in 1917.16 However, to be fair

16 Although Nesselrode had held the post jointly with Capodistrias from 1816 to 1822. Nicholas II’s foreign ministers were: N. K. Giers (until 1895), Prince Aleksei Borisovich Lobanov-Rostovskii (1895–6), Nikolai Pavlovich Shishkin (acting minister 1896–7), Count Mikhail Nikolaevich Murav’ev (1897–1900), Count Vladimir Nikolaevich Lambsdorff (1900–6), Aleksandr Petrovich Izvol’skii (1906–10), Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov (1910– 1916), Boris Nikolaevich Sturmer¨ (1916), Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1916–17). Of the nine, two, Lobanov-Rostovskii and Murav’ev, died in office.

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to this oft-maligned monarch, the turn of the twentieth century was a time of fevered instability throughout much of Europe, ultimately leading to a catastrophic world war that also claimed three other imperial houses.

The first decade of Nicholas II’s rule was dominated by events on the Pacific. Much as the continuing decline of Europe’s ‘sick man’, Ottoman Turkey, continued to attract the involvement of more vigorous powers, China, the sick man of Asia, increasingly also became the object of foreign ambitions at century’s end. The immediate catalyst was the Qing military’s defeat in a war with Japan over Korea during the first year of his reign. After debating the merits of joining Japan in ‘slicing the melon’ of China or supporting the Middle Kingdom’s territorial integrity, Nicholas’s ministers opted for the latter. Together with Germany and France, Russia pressed the Japanese into returning the Liaotung (Liaodong) Peninsula, with its strategically important naval base of Port Arthur (Lushun),¨ near Peking.

The tsarist intervention against Tokyo in 1895 set in motion a chain of events that led to a disastrous war with the Asian empire within a decade. Like the Crimean debacle half a century earlier, confrontation with Japan was neither inevitable nor desired. However, bickering among his councillors, both official and unofficial, severely hampered Nicholas’s ability to pursue a coherent policy in the Far East. At first, the tsar benefited from Peking’s gratitude by concluding a secret defensive alliance with the Qing on 22 May (3 June) 1896. In August of that year he secured a more concrete reward in the form of a 1,500-kilometre railway concession through Manchuria, which considerably shortened the last stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway then nearing completion. Then, toward the end of 1897 the new foreign minister, Count Mikhail Murav’ev, tricked his master into seizing Port Arthur shortly after the German navy had taken another valuable harbour in northern China, on Kiaochow ( Jiaozhou) Bay. While Nicholas’s move did not technically violate the previous year’s agreement, it effectively killed the friendship with the Middle Kingdom. At the same time, by acquiring the very port that its diplomats had forced Japan to hand back to China in 1895, Russia aroused the unyielding enmity of the Meiji government.

The more immediate cause of the Russo-Japanese War was the tsar’s reluctance to evacuate Manchuria, which his troops had occupied in 1900 in concert with an international intervention to suppress the xenophobic ‘Boxer’ rising in north-east China that summer. Although Russia had formally pledged to withdraw its forces from the region in spring 1902, it failed to live up to the final phase of the agreement, scheduled for autumn 1903. Japan had already become alarmed when Nicholas appointed a viceroy for the Far East two

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months earlier, an action that seemed to signal a stronger tsarist presence on the Pacific. On 24 January (6 February) 1904, Tokyo recalled its minister to St Petersburg and two days later Japanese torpedo boats launched a surprise nighttime raid on Russia’s Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur.

The combat itself eventually became a war of attrition involving increasing numbers of troops in Manchuria. As the fighting wore on, Russian public opinion began to oppose the distant war. An attempt to regain the initiative on the waves by sending the powerful Baltic Fleet around the world to the northern Pacific ended catastrophically when much of it was sunk by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Straits of Tsushima in May 1905. Humiliated at sea, unable to halt the adversary’s advance into the Manchurian interior, financially exhausted and beset by revolutionary unrest on the home front, Nicholas readily accepted an American offer that summer to mediate an end to the conflict. Thanks to the brilliant diplomacy of the former finance minister, Sergei Witte, who headed the tsar’s delegation to the peace talks in New Hampshire, Russia’s penalty for defeat was comparatively light. Nevertheless, the Treaty of Portsmouth, which was concluded on 23 August (5 September) 1905, marked an end to Nicholas’s dreams of Oriental glory.

As in 1855, the consequences of Russian military failure abroad had a major impact on politics at home. Facing mounting opposition from nearly all elements of society, in October 1905 the tsar announced the creation of an elected legislature, the Duma, and broader civil rights. While this concession did not convert the empire into a full parliamentary democracy, it did impose important limitations on the autocracy’s prerogatives. More important, Nicholas’s October Manifesto appeased many of his critics, thereby bringing his realm much needed domestic quiet.

Over the coming years, Foreign Minister Aleksandr Izvol’skii resolved most of the outstanding quarrels with other powers in East and Inner Asia. Thus on 21 June (4 July) 1907 he authorised an agreement with Japan, which, along with a treaty in 1910, recognised respective spheres of influence on the Pacific. More important, Izvol’skii also responded favourably to a British proposal to negotiate an end to the long-standing Asian rivalry. According to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 18 (31) August 1907, the two signatories accorded London influence over Afghanistan and southern Persia, while St Petersburg won dominance in Persia’s more populous north. Although the pact did not entirely end the Great Game, it did much to improve relations between its two players. The convention also facilitated France’s goal of forming an antiGerman Triple Entente.

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Russia’s rebuff in the Far East redirected its attention back to the Near East. By now a number of Orthodox monarchies had gained independence from the Ottoman Sultan, while control over his much-diminished European inheritance was becoming increasingly tenuous. Meanwhile, the bacillus of nationalism had also begun to infect Austria-Hungary, whose Slavic minorities were becoming increasingly restive as well. Among the Dual Monarchy’s subjects most vulnerable to separatist tendencies were Serbians, Croatians and Slovenes, many of whom yearned to join the Kingdom of Serbia into a ‘jugoslav’ or South Slavic federation. Belgrade, which was closely aligned with St Petersburg, naturally did little to discourage such aspirations. As a result, relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia grew increasingly strained in the twentieth century’s first decade. By the same token, the Eastern Question continued to be a source of friction between the Habsburgs and the Romanovs.

It was against this backdrop of mutual suspicion that Izvol’skii similarly attempted to fashion a deal with Russia’s Balkan antagonist. In September 1908, the tsar’s foreign minister secretly met with his Austrian counterpart, Count Alois von Aerenthal, at Buchlau Castle in Moravia. Accounts of the conversation between the two men differ, but their discussion focused on trading Austrian consent in re-opening the Turkish Straits to Russian warships in exchange for Russian recognition of the former’s rule over the former Ottoman provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Thinking that he had scored a brilliant diplomatic coup, Izvol’skii instead was horrified when Aerenthal soon publicised his consent to the Bosnian question without mentioning the Straits. Berlin’s quick pledge of support for Vienna effectively forced the chastened official to accept the count’s fait accompli.

Izvol’skii’s ‘diplomatic Tsushima’ eventually led to his replacement as foreign minister by the relatively ineffectual Sergei Sazonov. But the Bosnian Crisis also had more serious consequences. On the one hand, Austria’s absorption of a province with a large Serbian population inflamed nationalist passions in Belgrade. Meanwhile, Aerenthal’s apparent duplicity along with German bullying over the matter only further aroused Russian hostility to the Teutonic partners. Along with other growing international stresses and strains, this animosity helped to divide the continent into two mutually hostile coalitions, pitting the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Triple Entente of France, Britain and Russia. Armed conflict between the two groups was by no means inevitable. Nevertheless, preserving the peace grew increasingly complicated.

Over the next few years, the Balkans would be convulsed by a number of other crises, including two regional wars between 1911 and 1913. Both conflicts

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