Russia In Revolution 3: 1904-1914 Repression, Revolt and False Promises

While the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks wrestled with each other for control of a revolution in Russian society, events intervened. In February 1904, just six months after the Brussels/London RSDLP conference ended in the infamous Bolshevik v Menshevik split, Russia was inveigled into a disastrous war with Japan in the Far East. Its roots are to be found in the Machiavellian machinations of the British foreign office, the Secret Elite, including King Edward VII, Sir Ernest Cassel, and Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb bank on Wall Street. [1] Outraged by the horrendous anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, Schiff made it a point of honour to help finance Japan in its war against Russia.

To the surprise and delight of the Imperial Japanese government, he volunteered to underwrite half of the ten million pound loan they raised in New York and London. He knew that the Japanese fleet had been built in British shipyards and their latest naval technology outgunned and outpaced the antiquated Czarist navy. Victory was not in doubt. This first of five major Kuhn, Loeb loans to Japan was approved by the Secret Elite’s main agent, King Edward VII at a luncheon with Schiff and Sir Ernest Cassel. In Germany, under-secretary of State Arthur Zimmermann endorsed the move and authorised Max Warburg to negotiate with Japan. [2] The Rothschilds had to tread carefully. While an international consortium of largely British-owned banking houses ensured that around half of Japan’s war debt was financed through bonds sold in London and New York, the Rothschild held massive investments in Russia, not lest in the Baku oilfields. Manipulators at the heart of the Secret Elite, like Lord Esher, facilitated meetings held on the Rothschild premises to enable the Japanese financial envoy, Takahashi Korekiyo, raise their war chest. [3]

As the Russo-Japanese War lurched from one disaster to another, political unrest in Russia deepened. In the infamous ‘Bloody Sunday’ atrocity of 22 January 1905, troops fired on a huge, but orderly, crowd of workers marching to the Winter Palace behind the charismatic Russian priest Father Georgii Gapon. Their intention was to present a petition to the Czar calling for universal suffrage. Around 1,000 peaceful marchers and onlookers were killed. Nicholas II had left the city the night before and did not give the order to fire personally, but he lost the respect of many Russians. 1905 was disrupted with direct action from workers’ demonstrations, strikes and rebellion by sections of the army and navy. The crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied, killing the captain and several officers.

Striking workers formed ‘Soviets’, councils of delegates from workers committees, who could coordinate action. They sprang up in major towns and cities, including St Petersburg, where Trotsky, then twenty-three-years-old, played a major role. He had returned illegally from the safety of Finland under a false name and in the guise of a successful entrepreneur. Trotsky immediately wrote proclamations for distribution in factories and posted these throughout the city. In October 1905 a local strike by print workers flared into a national protest. Gangs of armed right-wing extremists were encouraged by the police to hold counter-demonstrations under the banners of ‘Holy Russia’ and ‘God save the Czar’. In response to the violence, the factory workers armed themselves. A showdown was inevitable.

In December, the Izmailovsky Regiment in St Petersburg was ordered to arrest the entire executive committee of the Soviet in the capital. In sympathy, the Moscow Soviet declared a strike and thousands of Muscovites took to the streets in protest. Cossacks sent to break up the Moscow demonstrations, twice refused orders to charge, and sympathised with the strikers. The crack Semenovsky Guards were less sympathetic, cornering protestors in Presnya, a workers’ district in the city, before shelling the area for three days. Many hundreds were killed including eighty-six children. [4] 1905 had started with the Bloody Sunday massacre and ended with the Presnya massacre. Czarist forces, including the secret and much feared Okhrana secret police, prevailed. Later that year, Trotsky and 13 other members of the St Petersburg Soviet were arrested for political scheming and spent thirteen months as prisoners in the city gaol awaiting trial. In January 1907 each was given a life sentence of exile in a small Siberian village above the Arctic Circle, 600 miles from the nearest railway station. Trotsky escaped on his journey into exile and trekked for hundreds of miles through the Urals before making his way to Finland from where, after an extremely frosty meeting with Lenin, he went on to Stockholm and then Vienna.

Nicholas II ruthlessly persecuted the insurrectionists yet introduced measures of reform, including some basic civil liberties and the creation of a State Assembly, the Duma. It was similar to a parliamentary-type elected body but, much like the British parliament in the early nineteenth century, only male property owners and taxpayers were represented. The Czar retained power over State Ministers, who answered to him, not the Duma. If he was dissatisfied with the representative body not could be dissolved at will and fresh elections held.

Unrest continued. Prime Minister and committed monarchist, Pytor Stolypin, survived an attempt on his life in August 1906 when a bomb ripped his dacha (villa) apart while he was hosting a party. Twenty-eight of his guests were killed and many injured, including his two children. In June 1907, Stolypin dissolved the Second Duma, and restricted the franchise by sacking a number of liberals and replacing them with more conservatives and monarchists. In a further attempt to counter the revolutionaries, he enforced a police crackdown on public demonstrations. On a more liberal note, Stolypin introduced agrarian reforms which helped provide opportunities for many peasants desperate for land. Once noticeable consequence was a huge year-on-year increases in food production. Sir George Buchanan, British Ambassador at St Petersburg, noted that though he failed to destroy the seeds of unrest which continued to germinate underground, Stolypin rescued Russia from anarchy and chaos. His agrarian policy surpassed all expectations, and at the time of his death nearly 19,000,000 acres of farmland had been allotted to individual peasant proprietors, by the land committees. [5]

Peasant emancipation and the consequent increase in food production were abhorrent to the Bolsheviks. They intended to bring all land under state control and implement cooperative food production. Trotsky had called the peasantry ‘a vast reservoir of potential revolutionaries’, and ‘accepted the indispensable importance of a peasant rising as an auxiliary to the main task of the proletariat’. [6] The goal was revolution and government controlled by the proletariat, that is, the working class who sold their labour for a wage, but did not own the means of production.

Peasant farmers had to be brought on-board if the revolution was to succeed, but that prospect receded as ever greater numbers were enabled to own their farms. It was clear to both the Czarist regime and the Bolsheviks that the peasantry would not support a political system that would deny them ownership of their land. Stolypin’s success threatened the revolution; his agrarian reforms had to be terminated. On 14 September 1911, while attending a performance at the Kiev Opera House in the presence of Czar Nicholas II, the prime minister was shot dead by a Jewish revolutionary, Mordekhai Gershkovich. Trotsky later commented: ‘Stolypin’s constitution … had every chance of surviving’. [7] Exactly so. Stolypin was assassinated by the revolutionaries not because he failed to improve the lot of the peasant, but because he was so successful in winning them over.

Nine months later, in April 1912, miners in the Lena goldfields in north-east Siberia went on strike. The mines produced large profits for their London registered company, but workers were paid a pittance for 16 hours per day under atrocious conditions. The strike was savagely crushed. In what proved to be the worst massacre since Bloody Sunday, troops fired on striking workers leaving more than 500 casualties. [8] The slaughter heralded a further wave of industrial unrest, agitation and mounting tension throughout the country. Two weeks after the massacre, the Bolsheviks founded a new newspaper, Pravda.

Despite these tragic events, preparations for the First World War gathered pace. After the humbling defeat to Japan in 1905, Russian industry recovered spectacularly thanks to the Rothschilds and other international bankers who continued to pour massive loans into the country. The Russian economy grew at an average rate of 8.8 per cent and by 1914 there were almost a thousand factories in Petrograd alone, many devoted to producing armaments. The expansion of Russia’s war industry, along with her rail network into Poland, deeply worried war planners in Berlin. But it came at a cost. ‘The pre-war Russian boom was thus highly leveraged, [and] dependent on a constant influx of foreign capital, which if it ever dried up, would leave Russia’s entire economy vulnerable.’ [9]

Shipbuilding, railroad construction and armaments and munitions production significantly expanded. The international bankers earned large profits from substantial interest rates on their loans, and at the same time, enabled Russia to conduct a major rearmament programme in readiness for the Secret Elite’s coming war with Germany. Given that Britain had no land army on European soil, Russian manpower was absolutely critical to an attack on Germany. Bullets and artillery shells were produced by the millions. A powerful new fleet of battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines began rising on the stocks in shipyards across the empire. Conditions attached to large railway loans insisted that these had to be used purely for the construction of new railroads which ran towards Germany’s borders. Why was this particular stipulation given priority? Mobilising an army of millions had never been easy. It required efficient planning and careful logistical organisation. A capable railway network was a prerequisite for the mobilisation of the huge Russian armies which would be critical when war with Germany was declared. [10] Look again at the men who laid down the stipulation. International bankers. How odd, unless of course it was they who were planning the war.

In late July 1914, Czar Nicholas II, urged on in his recklessness by the French president, Poincare, and secret understandings with the British government, used the pretext of protecting Serbia against Austrian retribution to force Germany to declare war. He ordered the general mobilisation of Russia’s armies through a massive build-up of troops along Germany’s Eastern border. General mobilisation was recognised by all nations as an act of war. Faced with invasion by millions of Russian troops, and despite repeated requests from Kaiser Wilhelm directly to Czar Nicholas that he should stop the troop movements, Germany was left with no choice but to mobilise her own forces and go to war with Russia. [11]

To repay the Czar for his ‘loyalty’, the Secret Elite dangled before him the golden carrot of Russia’s ultimate dream. A solemn promise was given that Russia would be given Constantinople and the Straits once Germany had been defeated, the holy grail of Russian leaders for centuries. That was why Russia went to war in July 1914, not, as she claimed, to defend Serbia. As the years dragged on and the Russian losses on the Eastern Front approached six million dead or seriously wounded, even the Czar began to suspect that Perfidious Albion had tricked them into war with an empty promise. [12] It had. Their ownership of Constantinople remained as illusionary as it always had.

In a sense it was as though Russia went to war in 1914 despite the revolutionary undercurrent. Victory on the field of battle, the glittering reward of a warm-water port at Constantinople, the spoils from a broken and defeated Germany would surely have renewed popular faith in the Russian monarchy. In fact the deeply wounded Russian people suffered defeat, disgrace and ultimate disintegration. The socialist forces that had been growing steadily between 1904 and 1914 found direct backing from foreign quarters few ever understood. This has to be fully examined.

1. Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 86-87.
2. Ron Chernow, The Warburgs, p. 110.
3. Takahashi Korekiyo, The Rothschilds and the Russo-Japanese War,1904-6, pp. 20-21.
4. Pearson, The Sealed Train, p. 34.
5. George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories, vol. 1, p. 77.
6. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 60.
7. Trotsky, My Life, p. 208.
8. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution. p. 65.
9. McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, p. xvii.
10. Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, p. 297.
11. Ibid, p. 239.
12. Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 27.

Revolution In Russia 1: Understanding Influences

The First World War drained Russia, literally and metaphorically. By January 1917, after two-and-a-half years of mortal combat, six million young Russians had been killed, seriously wounded or lost in action for no territorial or strategic gain. The dream of winning Constantinople had become a nightmare of miserable defeat. Food shortages, hunger, anti-war agitation and civil unrest increased by the day across the Czar’s once-mighty Empire. On 22 February, 1917, 12,000 workers at the giant Putilov manufacturing plant in Petrograd [1] went on strike and were joined on the streets by thousands of demonstrators chanting ‘Down with the Czar’. Soldiers from the city garrison were sent out to arrest the ring-leaders and end the protest, but they refused to open fire on the angry crowds. The Czar abdicated almost immediately, allegedly because he believed that he had lost the support of his military. The event was bloodless apart from the death of several officers shot by their own men. Thus the first Russian Revolution, known as the ‘February Revolution’, ended 300 years of autocratic monarchical rule. A governing body was established in the Winter Palace in Petrograd by liberal deputies from the existing parliamentary body, the Duma, together with socialists and independents. Termed the ‘Provisional Government’, it kept Russia in the war against Germany and began formulating plans for democratic rule through an elected legislative assembly of the people. It was a beginning.

The seizure of power by Bolshevik revolutionaries on 25 October, 1917, [2] brought communism to Russia and major strife to the entire world for the greater part of the twentieth century. For readers not versed in modern Russian history it is important to note that the Bolshevik Revolution was very distinct from the revolution that had taken place eight months earlier.

During the night of October 24/25, a group of armed communists seized key areas of Petrograd, entered the Winter Palace and assumed control of the country. The coup was led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, two extreme Marxist revolutionaries who had returned to Russia earlier that year from enforced exile. This was the ‘Bolshevik Revolution’, also known as the ‘October Revolution’. Lenin and Trotsky smothered the fledgling attempt at democratic governance, took Russia out of the war with Germany and installed a ruthless communist system that suppressed Russia for the next seventy-four years.

According to received history, the February Revolution was an entirely spontaneous uprising of the people. It was not. The Putilov strike, and the city garrison’s refusal to act against the strikers, was orchestrated from abroad by well-financed agents who had been stirring unrest among the workers and soldiers with propaganda and bribery. The October Revolution was also directly influenced by the same international bankers, with vast financial and logistical support which enabled Lenin and Trotsky to seize power. What is particularly relevant to the Secret Elite narrative is the evidence of their complicity from both sides of the Atlantic. Without external intervention, the Russian Revolutions would never have taken the ruinous direction which destroyed a nation’s hope for justice and democracy. As these blogs unfold over the next weeks please bear this in mind.

Russia had been ruled by the ‘divine right’ of Czars from the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1547-1584) until the abdication of Nicholas II in February 1917. The ruling Romanovs dynasty was one of the richest families in the world, on a par with the Rothschilds. They owned huge estates with elaborate palaces, yachts, a massive collection of diamonds (amounting to 25,300 carats), emeralds, sapphires and fifty-four of the priceless jewel-encrusted Faberge eggs. [3] In May 1917, the New York Times estimated the total wealth of the dynasty to be in the region of $9,000,000,000, [4] a breath-taking sum today let alone a century ago. A significant number of upper and middle class Russians (the bourgeoisie), included merchants, government officials, lawyers, doctors and army officers who enjoyed comfortable incomes and life styles. That said, urban factory workers (the proletariat) and rural agrarian workers (the peasants) comprised the vast majority of the population of 175 million in 1914. But the war haemorrhaged both youth and loyalty. The populace survived on the edge of poverty and hunger, but did not generally support revolutionaries. [5] If radical change was required, it would have to be manufactured.

Czar Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861 but opposed movements for political reform. Having survived several attempts on his life, he was eventually assassinated on the streets of St Petersburg in 1881 by members of a revolutionary group, ‘People’s Will’, led by a Jew, Vera Figner. Thereafter, the Jews in the Pale of Settlement [6] were subjected to a series of terrifying pogroms (religious-ethnic massacres). Over the following decades peasants rebelled over taxes which left them debt ridden and oppressed by hopelessness. Workers went on strike for better wages and working conditions. Students demanded civil liberties for all, and even the comfortable bourgeoisie began calling for representative government. Though this clamour for social change and greater equality was apparent across Europe, the Romanovs resisted challenges to their autocratic authority with bitter determination.

In 1897, in the midst of this social unrest, a 27 year-old Marxist lawyer and intellectual Russian radical, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, was arrested by Czarist secret police (the Okhrana) for subversive activities and sentenced to three years exile in Siberia. Ulyanov was treated lightly in comparison to his older brother, Alexander, who ten years earlier plotted to assassinate Czar Alexander III and was hanged for his troubles. Vladimir Ulyanov took the alias Lenin and would go on to become the most powerful man in Russia following the October Revolution.

Born in Simbirsk (renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour in 1924), a town on the Volga some 900 kilometres east of Moscow, Lenin’s father was an inspector of the provinces schools. His mother, the daughter of a baptised Jewish doctor, Alexander Blank, [7] bought the family a farm of some two hundred acres near Samara for 7,500 roubles. The fact that Lenin had Jewish forebears would have had absolutely no relevance were it not for the fact that many consider the Bolshevik Revolution to have been a Jewish plot. We have already explained how powerful individuals within the Secret Elite who supported Zionism were behind the Balfour Declaration of 2 November, 1917 which led eventually to the creation of the state of Israel. Within 72 hours of that declaration, the men who were financed and aided by these same individuals, seized control of Russia. It does not require a great leap of imagination to consider the possibility that these two seismic events in world history were connected in some way.

In March 1919, The Times reported, ‘One of the most curious features of the Bolshevist movement is the high percentage of non-Russia elements amongst its leaders. Of the 20 or 30 leaders who provide the central machinery of the Bolshevist movement, not less than 75 per cent are Jews …’ [8] Note that The Times differentiated between Russian and Jew, as if it were not possible to be both, while the Jewish Chronicle emphasised the importance of the Jewish influence on Bolshevism: ‘There is much in the fact of Bolshevism itself, in the fact that so many Jews are Bolsheviks, in the fact that the ideals of Bolshevism at many points are consonant with the finest ideals of Judaism’. [9] Another Jewish journal, American Hebrew, reported: ‘What Jewish idealism and Jewish discontent have so powerfully contributed to produce in Russia, the same historic qualities of the Jewish mind are tending to promote in other countries … The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish brains, of Jewish dissatisfaction, of Jewish planning, whose goal is to create a new order in the world. What was performed in so excellent a way in Russia, thanks to Jewish brains, and because of Jewish dissatisfaction and by Jewish planning, shall also, through the same Jewish mental and physical forces, become a reality all over the world.’ [10] It is interesting to note that in 1920, just three years after the Balfour Declaration, Jewish journals were openly discussing the primacy of Jews in creating a new world order.

Rabbi Stephen Wise later commented on the Russian situation: ‘Some call it Marxism I call it Judaism.’ [11] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a victim of the communist regime who spent many years exiled in Siberia and was a later recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was emphatic that Jews were not involved in the first revolution: ‘The February Revolution was not made by the Jews for the Russians; it was certainly carried out by the Russians themselves … We were ourselves the authors of this shipwreck.’ [12] Solzhenitsyn, however, added: ‘In the course of the summer and autumn of 1917, the Zionist movement continued to gather strength in Russia: in September it had 300,000 adherents. Less known is that Orthodox Jewish organisations enjoyed great popularity in 1917, yielding only to the Zionists and surpassing the socialist parties.’ [13] He observed: ‘There are many Jewish authors who to this very day either deny the support of Jews for Bolshevism, or even reject it angrily, or else…only speak defensively about it… These Jewish renegades were for several years leaders at the centre of the Bolshevik Party, at the head of the Red Army (Trotsky), of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, of the two capitals, of the Comintern …’ [14] Given the repression of the Jews in Russia, it is hardly surprising that they swelled the numbers of active revolutionaries during this period. They had suffered the horror of the pogroms. They had nursed a genuine resentment for Czarist repression. They were determined to change the world.

The relationship between Jews and revolutionaries was explained by Theodor Herzl, one of the fathers of the Zionist movement in a pamphlet, De Judenstat, addressed to the Rothschilds: ‘When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties, and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse’. [15] On Herzl’s death, his successor as president of the World Zionist Organisation was the Russian born David Wolfsohn. In his closing speech at the International Zionist Congress at The Hague in 1907, Wolfsohn pleaded for greater unity among the Jews and said that eventually ‘they must conquer the world’. [16] He did not expand on the role that Jewish Bolshevik revolutionaries might play in this Jewish global aspiration, but from his position it seems apparent that political Zionism and the future ‘homeland’ certainly would. [17] Wolfsohn’s successor as president of the Zionist organisation in 1911 was Otto Warburg, a noted scientist and relative of the Warburg banking family which features heavily in this book. Warburg later spoke of the ‘brilliant prospects of Palestine’ and how an extensive Jewish colonisation would ‘expand into neighbouring countries’. [18]

A report in 1919 from the British Secret Service revealed: ‘There is now definite evidence that Bolshevism is an international movement controlled by Jews; communications are passing between the leaders in America, France, Russia and England, with a view toward concerted action.’ [19] Hilaire Belloc, Anglo-French writer, philosopher and one time Liberal MP at Westminster, wrote: ‘As for anyone who does not know that the present revolutionary movement is Jewish in Russia, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppression of our despicable Press. [20] Contemporary commentators failed to link the Balfour Declaration and the Russian Revolution in October/November 1917, despite their links to Zionism and the ‘concerted action’ from both sides of the Atlantic. It should not be seen as a criticism; it was a fact.

1. The Russian capital, St Petersburg, was renamed Petrograd at the beginning of WW1 to give it a less German sounding name. It reverted to St Petersburg on the fall of communism.
2. The date, October 25, 1917, was calculated by the old-style the Julian calendar then still used in Russia – The Gregorian calendar used elsewhere in Europe and the United States registered the date as November 7, 1917, thus the old style Julian calendar was 13 days behind the Gregorian.
3. Sean McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks, p. xix.
4. New York Times, 12 May, 1917.
5. Peter Waldron, The End of Imperial Russia, 1855 – 1917, p. 22.
6. The Pale of Settlement was territory within the borders of czarist Russia wherein Jews were legally authorised to live. It included present day Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Moldova and much of Latvia and Lithuania.
7. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin, Life and Legacy, p. 5.
8. The Times, 29 March, 1919.
9. Jewish Chronicle, 4 April, 1919.
10. American Hebrew, 20 September, 1920.
11. Rabbi Stephen Wise, The American Bulletin, 5 May, 1935.
12. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Juifs et Russes pendant la periode soviétique, Volume 2, pp. 44–45.
13. Ibid., p. 54.
14. Ibid., p. 91.
15. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_7cNJAAAAMAAJ
16. New York Times, September 17, 1914, David Wolfsohn obituary.
17. Zionism in Europe and America proved to be a comparatively slow-burning evolution. Between 1900 -1917 there was a serious divergence between Zionists who promoted a faith based assimilist belief, and the political Zionists who had one aim – a return to what they claimed as their former homeland in Palestine.
18. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 14, 1929. http://www.jta.org/1929/07/14/archive/german-zionists-celebrate-seventieth-birthday-of-otto-warburg
19. Scotland Yard, A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad, July 16, 1919.
20. Hilaire Belloc. G.K.’s Weekly, 4 February, 1937.

GUEST BLOG: Professor Hans Fenske (2) Early German Peace Proposals

Right away, the war was ideologically charged by the Allies. During a tour of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Asquith – in Edinburgh, in September – called the war a crusade against the arrogance of a single power trying to dominate the development of Europe. In Dublin, he declared the need to prevent small nations being annihilated by an overbearing power, and claimed that the war was about the final abolition of militarism as the ruling factor in the relationships between states. In London, on 9 November, he spoke on the necessary abolition of Prussian militarism, and his fellow party member Lloyd George wanted to see the German people liberated from the hell of the military caste. The speech from the throne of 11 November held that England would continue for as long as it could dictate the peace. All this was accompanied by sharp anti-German propaganda in the media. This even went so far that Germany was frequently called “Barbaria”. The British government was later not to leave their position briefly sketched here.

In France, too, there were demands to break up Prussian militarism. In October 1944, Foreign Minister Delcassé told the Russian ambassador that the aim of France was to annihilate the German Reich and to weaken Prussia’s military and political power as much as possible. In a similar vein, in a memorandum for the French government, Sazonov  in September spoke about the destruction of German power and the German arrogance to be predominant in Europe. On 5 September, the three Entente nations contractually committed themselves not to agree on a separate peace and to talk about their war goals in public only after having consulted their Allies. Several treaties were entered into regarding these goals, even with countries like Italy which only joined the Allies later in the course of the war. The plans were about weakening Germany and destroying the Danube Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire, which had joined the war in the autumn of 1914 on the side of the Central Powers.

After the important initial successes of the German army in the West, it could not be excluded that there soon would have to be talks about peace with the opponents. That’s why Bethmann-Hollweg, who stayed in the headquarters at the time, had a catalogue of possible goals compiled – which he expressly declared provisional – which he sent to the state secretaries of the exterior and the interior for revision on 9 September. The proposals required France to commit itself to reparations for the duration of 15 to 20 years to be calculated so that she would not be capable of spending much on armament, but without calling for territorial sacrifices with the exception of the Briey ore basin. Moreover, she should be closely linked to Germany by means of a trade agreement. A different section talked about a Central European economic association under German leadership. Bethmann-Hollweg could most identify with this. But this paper did not represent a firm agenda. With the Marne battle, the German offensive came to a halt, static warfare began, and hopes for the war ending soon had to be given up.

In mid-November, the Prussian War Minister General von Falkenhayn who now led the operations in the West, told the Chancellor that it was impossible to reach a decent peace as long as Russia, France and England stuck together. So they would have to break Russia away from the Entente coalition. Their thinking was that France probably would give in once Russia made peace. Russia should have to pay sufficient war reparations but remain territorially intact, apart from slight corrections along the border. France should also have to pay reparations yet receive an honourable peace, since Germany and France would have to amicably coexist again after the war. Bethmann-Hollweg fully agreed with these considerations. If Russia could not be prised away from the opposing coalition, the war might take a disastrous turn for Germany. If this didn’t happen the prospect of the war ending because of a general mutual weariness without any decisive defeat of one party or the other became likely. Bethmann-Hollweg kept to this opinion thereafter. Now, his aim in war was Germany’s self-assertion. He wanted to get guarantees for its safety, but he explained this only in general terms. Belgium and Poland were not to become the ground for preparing military action against Germany ever again.

Shortly after the conversation of von Falkenhayn and Bethmann-Hollweg, the Danish King Christian X. offered – via the Danish ship owner and state councillor Hans Niels Andersen and the German ship owner Albert Ballin, a friend of Emperor Wilhelm II. – his services in mediating a peace in London and St. Petersburg. Bethmann-Hollweg wanted to delay an answer so as to be able to improve the military position in the East, but von Falkenhayn and the Emperor considered an understanding with Russia to be urgent and gave Andersen a positive answer. During his visit to Petrograd, as the Russian capital was now called, in 1915, Andersen was told by Nicholas II. that he would never leave his Allies in the lurch, and that he was decidedly against a separate peace. The British and French ambassadors, who had come to know about Andersen’s visit, also tried to influence Sazonov in this sense.

When, following Bethmann-Hollweg’s request, Andersen went to Petrograd again in June and in August, he got the same answer. In November of 1914, the Ministry of State also tried to enter into talks with Japan which had declared war on the German Empire in August and had annexed the German leased territory Kiautschou in the Chinese province of Shantung. The state secretary Jagow thought that England could not have any interest in further strengthening Japan. This would offer the German Empire the opportunity to get into closer contact with Japan, provided Germany would accept the loss of Kiautschou.

Then, Japan could mediate with Russia. But this contact effort failed completely. In December 1914, the Japanese ambassador in Stockholm, Uchida, made it known to his German colleague via Swedish intermediaries that Japan was not interested in communicating with Germany. In this, he acted not on orders by his government, but on his own initiative. So these contacts were fruitless. When in early 1916 Uchida first met with the German ambassador in person, he had to declare that according to the London agreement of September 1914, there would be no separate peace and that the German Empire would have to succumb to the peace conditions imposed by the Entente.

Bethmann-Hollweg publicly declared several times that the Reich would be ready to enter into talks provided the offers were appropriate. When talking to Col. Edward Mandel House, a confidant of President Wilson, he declared his sympathy for a step towards peace made by the U.S. As the year went on, there were three more statements in the same vein. In October, he came to an understanding with the Austrian-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Stephan Burián, towards a joint step towards peace. This should happen at a point in time when it could not be construed as a sign of weakness. This was the case after the conquest of Romania. On 12 December, the Central Powers of the Entente submitted the proposal, via neutral countries, to soon enter into peace talks. They would submit proposals to form an appropriate foundation for an enduring peace. They stated this publicly, Bethmann- Hollweg for instance in the German Reichstag. The Allies brusquely refused and declared that Germany and its Allies would have to atone for everything they had committed, as well as providing reparations and security collateral.

They even refused the mediation offer Wilson made on 16 December. They said that currently it was impossible to enter into a peace reflecting their ideas. They wanted the restitution of Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro, the handing back of Alsace-Lorraine to France, the cession of all regions with Polish settlements to Russia and the breaking up of the Danube Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire. Also, they did not want to allow the Central Powers to take part in peace negotiations on equal terms.

In late January 1917, Wilson again offered the German ambassador his services for reaching a reconciliation between the warring opponents and asked to be informed about the German conceptions. He was told that Germany wanted to win a frontier protecting Germany and Poland against Russia – the Central Powers recently had proclaimed the Kingdom of Poland –, an agreement about colonial matters, certain corrections concerning the border to France, and an economic and financial compensation between the warring opponents.

Following the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in November 1916, his great-nephew Karl stepped up to the top of the Habsburg Empire. After the failed peace offer of December 1916, Karl I was looking for peace options on private routes. In the spring of 1917, his brother-in-law Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, a Belgian officer, conducted several talks in Switzerland, Paris and London, which, however, did not achieve any results.

July 1914 (4) The Storm Clouds Darken

Mobilisation meant war. In the first decades of the twentieth century, all of the Great Powers knew that the general mobilisation of the armed forces of a major power signalled its intent on war. Plans for bringing together regular army units, conscripts and reserves, equipping these troops and transporting them to border assembly points had been worked out with great precision. Modern railway systems were the key. The entire process had to be conducted by rail and the general staffs had worked for years to perfect their timetables.

From the moment the command to mobilise was given, everything had to move at fixed times, in precise order, down to the number of train axles that would pass over a given bridge within a given time. [1] Each action in the mobilisation process led logically to the next, in lockstep precision, combining in a practically irreversible escalation to war. In terms of strategic planning, the assumption was that the advantage lay always with the offence, and that speed was of the essence. European leaders believed that a one-to-three-day lead in mobilisation was militarily significant for the course of the war, leaving vulnerable anyone who delayed. [2]

The Franco-Russian Alliance was clearly based on the assertion that mobilisation meant war. [3] Both Russian and French general staffs not only viewed mobilisation as an outright act of war but also insisted that all normal operational decisions be based on that assumption. [4] It is important to clarify that the Russian and French governments understood precisely what mobilisation meant when the decisions were taken in July 1914. Once the order was given and the machinery for mobilisation set in motion, there was little possibility of stopping it.

The kaiser and his military advisors observed the same rule that general mobilisation was the first decisive step towards war. They knew they had no choice but to respond in kind if a general Russian mobilisation was ordered. In such a scenario, the moment Germany mobilised in self-defence, the Franco-Russian Alliance would be triggered. The French would mobilise to support Russia, and Germany would be faced with war on two fronts. This was no secret. Both alliances knew precisely how the other would react in the event of war.

Germany was to be compelled to fight war on two fronts and would be greatly outnumbered by the combined forces of Russia, France and Britain. The czar’s army alone was much larger than that of the kaiser, though neither better trained nor equipped. With her more modern road and rail networks, Germany’s advantage lay in the rapidity of her mobilisation. In comparison, Russia’s military machine was slow, cumbersome and burdened by inefficiency. A mobilisation across the vast lands of the Russian empire, with inadequate infrastructure, less-developed railroad systems near the German frontiers and inefficient local military authorities was necessarily slow. Russia’s strategic aim was to reduce this natural German advantage by keeping her mobilisation secret for as long as possible.

Within hours of Poincare’s departure from St Petersburg on 23 July, the success of his mission became clear. Russia began mobilising her vast armies and took an irrevocable step towards war in Europe. The Secret Elite’s agent had accomplished his prime objective. At the meeting of the Russian Council of Ministers held at three o’clock on 24 July, they decided to mobilise 1,100,000 men in the four southern military districts of Odessa, Kiev, Moscow and Kazan, together with both the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. [5] The czar further agreed that preparation should be made for the mobilisation of 13 army corps at a date to be determined by Sazonov. The minister of war was authorised to ‘proceed immediately to gather stores of war materiel’ and the minister of finance directed to call in at once all Russian money in Germany and Austria. This, remember, was still 24 July, the day before the Serbian Reply was due for submission. [6]

Immediately after the meeting ended, Foreign Minister Sazonov lunched with ambassadors Buchanan and Paléologue at the French Embassy. These were the Secret Elite’s diplomatic enforcers, who ensured that London and Paris were kept fully updated. Sazonov confirmed that the czar had approved both the mobilisation of over 1 million men and the Russian navy.

The imperial order (ukase) was not to be made public until he, Sazonov, considered that the moment had arrived to enforce it, but all the necessary preliminary preparations for the mobilisation had already begun. [7] Sazonov confirmed that Russia was prepared to ‘face all the risks’, and Paléologue reiterated Poincaré’s ‘blank cheque’, placing France unreservedly on Russia’s side. Poincaré had explicitly instructed Paléologue to reassure Sazonov by prompt and persistent promises of French support. [8] The French ambassador informed Sazonov that he had also received a number of telegrams from the minister in charge of foreign affairs, and that not one of them displayed the slightest sign of hesitation. Russia was mobilising for war, and France placed herself unreservedly by her side. [9] Sazonov was thus constantly reassured that France would stand shoulder to shoulder with Russia.

The following morning, 25 July, the Russian Council of Ministers rubber-stamped the military plans and confirmed their readiness for war. [10] Telegrams were sent out in secret ciphers, halting military manoeuvres throughout the Russian empire. Military divisions were instructed to return immediately from their summer camps to their regular quarters. Troops were to be equipped and prepared for transportation to their designated areas on the frontiers. [11] Cadets undergoing training at the St Petersburg Military Academy were immediately promoted to the rank of officer, and new cadets enrolled. A ‘state of war’ was proclaimed in towns along the frontiers facing Germany and Austria, and a secret order given for the ‘Period Preparatory to War’. [12] This enabled the Russia military command to take extensive measures for mobilisation against Germany without a formal declaration of war.

Meanwhile, on the diplomatic front, ambassadors and chargés d’affaires, ministers and imperial officials continued the pretence that they sought a peaceful resolution to the Austro-Serbian crisis and bought precious time for the military. Russia had begun a secret mobilisation in incremental stages before the Pasic government in Serbia had even responded to the Austrian Note.

Sir George Buchanan urged Sazonov to be cautious lest Germany got wind of the mobilisation, reacted immediately and Russia was portrayed as the aggressor. [13] Buchanan did not suggest that Sazonov should halt the mobilisation, far from it, but urged him to keep it well hidden from German view. It was vital that the mobilisation be as far advanced as possible before the Germans became aware of the military build-up on their frontiers. Furthermore, the Secret Elite in London needed to be able to portray Germany as the aggressor, to entice Germany into firing the first shots and so avoid a situation where Russia could be blamed for starting the war. At all costs, blame had to be laid at Germany’s door. The British public would never accept war unless Germany was seen as the aggressor. This absolute conviction became Britain’s secret diplomatic mantra.

Although Buchanan later denied it, the French ambassador, Paléologue, even went so far in his memoirs as to recall Buchanan telling him: ‘Russia is determined to go to war. We must therefore saddle Germany with the whole responsibility and initiative of the attack, as this will be the only way of winning over English public opinion to the war.’ [14] The Secret Elite and their agents knew exactly how the unfolding events would have to be manipulated to dupe the British public.

Sir Edward Grey stubbornly insisted throughout the whole crisis that the Austro-Serbian dispute did not concern him. [15] This lie went unchallenged. By making no parliamentary reference to events in that part of the world, he hid the Secret Elite’s diplomatic incitement to war behind a screen of apparent lack of interest in the Austro-Serbian conflict. He consulted daily with Sir Arthur Nicolson and had a powerful anti-German ally in Sir Eyre Crowe. These two almost outbid each other in their distaste for Germany and their indulgence of Russia. [16] Grey’s minders never veered from the Secret Elite doctrine. Inside Grey’s Foreign Office, the Empire loyalists behaved like a swarm of Jesuit zealots pledged to an anti-German inquisition.

Meanwhile in Belgrade, at 3 p.m. on 25 July (three hours before responding to the Austrian Note), Pasic’s government, confident of Russian military support, announced Serbia’s mobilisation against Austria. At 9.30 that same night, the Austrians responded by declaring a partial mobilisation (some 22 divisions) of its army against Serbia. [17] Austria had made it patently clear that in the event of such a mobilisation, war would remain localised and no territorial claims would be made on Serbia. She intended to occupy Belgrade until such time as Serbia agreed to all of their demands.

This Austrian mobilisation was deliberately misrepresented as a direct threat to Russia, and the reason for Russian mobilisation. That is a ridiculous claim. The Russian mobilisation had been agreed in principle before Poincaré left St Petersburg and before Austria had even delivered the Note to Serbia. Another fiction put about was that the Russian mobilisation was meant to act as a deterrent to war. What nonsense. It was the first act of war, and all involved knew it. The notion that it could be seen as a deterrent is groundless. They clearly understood that to order mobilisation was to cross the Rubicon: there could be no turning back. [18]

Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, offered an interesting insight into what was happening on the streets of the capital:

“At seven in the evening [the 25th] I went to the Warsaw Station [in St Petersburg] to bid farewell to Isvolsky, who was leaving to rejoin his post. Great activity at the terminus, the trains crowded with officers and troops. All this points to mobilisation. We hurriedly exchanged our views of the situation and both arrived at the same conclusion: this time it is war.” [19]

Hour by hour, Russia secretly edged Europe closer to war. [20] Austria had been completely fooled by the diplomatic machinations orchestrated in London and Paris. Berchtold was betrayed, utterly deceived by men he thought he could trust. The czar had been convinced of the need for war by the French President while the British foreign secretary feigned little interest in the disputes in eastern Europe. The events of July 1914 were to have cataclysmic consequences.

[1] Jack Levy, ‘Organisational Routines and the Causes of War’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, June 1986, p. 196.
[2] Ibid., p. 195.
[3] Harry Elmer Barnes, Genesis of the World War, p. 354.
[4] Kennan, Fateful Alliance, pp. 250–1.
[5] Memorandum of the day of the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, St Petersburg, 24 July 1914, in Geiss, July 1914, p. 190.
[6] Special Journal of the Russian Council of Ministers, St Petersburg, 24 July
1914, in Geiss, July 1914, pp. 186–7.
[7] Imanuel Geiss, July 1914, p. 214.
[8] Barnes, Genesis of the World War, p. 324.
[9] Buchanan to Grey, St Petersburg, 25 July 1914, BD 125, Geiss, July 1914, p. 214.
[10] Special Journal of the Russian Council of Ministers, St Petersburg, 25 July 1914, in Geiss, July 1914, p. 207.
[11] Sidney B. Fay, Origins of the World War, vol. II, p. 309.
[12] Stephen J. Cimbala, Military Persuasion: Deterrence and Provocation in Crisis and War, p. 58.
[13] George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories, vol. 1, p. 93.
[14] Ibid., p. 94.
[15] Max Montgelas, Case for the Central Powers, p. 129.
[16] Hermann Lutz, Lord Grey and the World War, p. 244.
[17] Barnes, Genesis of the World War, p. 336.
[18] Marc Trachtenberg, ‘The Meaning of Mobilization in 1914’, p. 126.
[19] Fay, Origins of the World War, vol. II, pp. 302–3.
[20] Trachtenberg, ‘The Meaning of Mobilization in 1914’, pp. 120–50.