Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Foreign policy and the armed forces

nineteenth-century Russians were even more scrupulous in their observance

of diplomatic protocol than some of the other powers. Fully equating civili-

sation with Europe, tsarist diplomats and their imperial masters understood

that relations among the continent’s states were carried out according to a

strict code of conduct, which respected honour and the sanctity of national

sovereignty.

Despite occasionally being branded as ‘Asiatic’ in the West, senior ofﬁcials at

the Choristers’ Bridge

shared an outlook common throughout the European

diplomatic corps. Often educated by foreign tutors, speaking French more

easily than their native tongue, and sharing the same aristocratic tastes as their

colleagues in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, the elite that shaped Russian diplomacy

consciously identiﬁed with a cosmopolitan European upper strata that often

still valued class over nation. Indeed, other Russians occasionally criticised the

Foreign Ministry as an alien preserve, and not without reason. Because of the

rareﬁed skills required of an ambassador, most important a familiarity with

the social milieu of foreign courts, tsarist diplomats often bore distinctly non-

Slavic surnames, such as Cassini, Stackelberg, Tuyll van Serooskerken, Pozzo

di Borgo and Mohrenheim.

While Russia was an integral member of the continent’s exclusive club of

great powers, its foreign policy did exhibit some distinctive features. Contem-

porary Western observers were often struck by the concentration of authority

in the hands of the sovereign. It was not unusual even in parliamentary regimes

for the monarch to be closely involved in diplomacy. Great Britain’s Queen

Victoria was an active player in her kingdom’s foreign affairs, while Hohen-

zollerns and Habsburgs often took an even stronger part in such matters. But

right up to the reign of Nicholas II, Russia’s tsars saw the relations of their

empire with other nations as their exclusive preserve. Even the Fundamen-

tal Laws of 1906, which established the Duma, declared, ‘Our Sovereign the

Emperor is the supreme leader of all external relations of the Russian state

with foreign powers. He likewise sets the course of the international policy

of the Russian state.’ The statute explicitly forbade legislators from debating

17 With respect to the European states, at any rate. Elsewhere, matters could be dif-

ferent. Referring to Central Asia, the Foreign Ministry’s legal expert, Fedor Martens,

argued that international law did not apply to ‘uncivilised peoples’. F. F. Martens,

La Russie et l’Angleterre dans l’Asie Centrale (Ghent: I. S. van Dooselaere, 1879),

pp. 8–19.

18 Because of its location near a bridge that was traditionally used by members of the

Imperial Court Choir on their way to sing at the Winter Palace’s chapel, the Russian

Foreign Ministry was given this nickname.

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foreign policy, a provision unknown in any other European constitution at the

time.

This did not mean that Romanovs were reluctant to delegate authority to

their foreign ministers. When the Choristers’ Bridge was headed by a trusted

and competent individual,as it was during much of the nineteenth century,that

ofﬁcial naturally came to exercise a great deal of inﬂuence on tsarist diplomacy.

One indication of the minister’s prestige was the fact that Russia’s highest civil

service chin (level on the Table of Ranks), chancellor, was typically bestowed

on only distinguished holders of that post. Prince Gorchakov once explained,

‘in Russia there are only two people who know the politics of the Russian

cabinet: The emperor, who sets its course, and I, who prepare and execute

it’.

Nevertheless, as in many governments, the foreign minister’s authority

could be eclipsed by others. This was particularly true during Nicholas II’s

reign, when at various times Finance Minister Sergei Witte or a shadowy

group of imperial intimates had a much stronger say in Russian diplomacy.

Even when the Foreign Ministry was ﬁrmly in charge of the empire’s rela-

tions with other states, it did not always speak with one voice. Ofﬁcials at

the Asian Department, which had ofﬁcially been established in 1819 to deal

with Eastern states (including former Ottoman possessions in south-eastern

Europe), had a very different outlook on the world than their colleagues who

dealt with Western and Central Europe. Unlike the latter, who tended to be

well-born, cosmopolitan dilettantes, the Asian Department was largely staffed

by ethnic Russians, often with special training in Oriental languages. Caution

and aristocratic etiquette were alien to its modus operandi. Acting as a semi-

autonomous institution, the Asian Department at times conducted a policy at

odds with the broader lines of tsarist diplomacy. This had particularly unfortu-

nate consequences in the Balkans, where more enthusiastic patriots like Count

Ignat’ev could frustrate his minister’s efforts to defuse tensions.

Despite the autocratic nature of the tsarist regime, by the second half of the

nineteenth century public opinion increasingly began to play a role in Russian

diplomacy. As throughout Europe, the development of an assertive press and

the rise of nationalism began to involve educated Russians in what had hith-

erto been regarded as the sovereign’s exclusive preserve. During Nicholas II’s

reign, the St Petersburg daily Novoe vremia (the New Times) had an authority

19 M. Szeftel, The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906 (Brussels: Les

editions de la librairie

encyclop

edique, 1976), pp. 86, 127.

20 In Baron B. E. Nol’de, Peterburskaia missiia Bismarka 1859–1862 (Prague: Plamia, 1925),

p. 39.

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roughly analogous to The Times. Read at the Winter Palace and at the

Chorister’s Bridge, NovoeVremia advocated a pro-entente line, largely reﬂecting

the sentiments of most literate Russians. The creation of the Duma, an elected

legislature, in 1907 further involved civil society in foreign policy. Although

according to the Fundamental Laws, deputies could not discuss such matters,

they nevertheless used their right to approve the Foreign Ministry’s annual

budget to impose their views on its policies. The relatively liberal Izvol’skii

understood the importance of a favourable public and was careful to court the

Duma’s more moderate members.

But the most dramatic feature of nineteenth-century tsarist diplomacy was

its relative success, at least until 1894. During the eight decades that followed

the Congress of Vienna, Russian foreign policy displayed a remarkable degree

of consistency and, with two major exceptions in the Near East, it achieved the

empire’s principal geopolitical objectives. It was only under Nicholas II, when

impatience and excessive ambition replaced realism, that the achievements of

earlier Romanovs came undone.

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Thenavyin1900: imperialism,

technology and class war

nikolai afonin

At the turn of the twentieth century the Russian navy was in a difﬁcult position.

Traditionally, its main theatre of operations was the Baltic Sea. Since the ﬁrst

half of the nineteenth century Russia had been the leading naval power among

the countries bordering on this sea. Its main enemy had been the British. The

Royal Navy could easily block Russian access to the open ocean by patrolling

the Sound, in other words the passage between Denmark and Sweden. As

was shown in both the Napoleonic and Crimean wars, not only could it also

blockade Russian ports and thereby stop Russia’s seaborne trade, it could also

mount a realistic threat against Kronstadt and the security of St Petersburg,

the imperial capital.

From the early 1880s a new threat emerged on the Baltic Sea as newly united

Germany began to build its High Seas Fleet. To some extent this was a worse

danger than the British navy had been, since a German ﬂeet enjoying superi-

ority over Russia in the Baltic theatre would be able to operate in conjunction

with Europe’s most formidable land forces – in other words the German army.

Given the right circumstances, joint operations by the German army and ﬂeet

could pose a major threat to the security of Russia’s capital and her Baltic

provinces.

Meanwhile the situation in Russia’s second theatre of maritime operations,

namely the Black Sea, was also difﬁcult. In the early twentieth century 37 per

cent of all Russian exports and the overwhelming majority of her crucially

important grain exports went through the Straits at Constantinople. On these

exports depended Russia’s trade balance, the stability of the rouble, and there-

fore Russia’s credit-worthiness and her ability to attract foreign capital. The

Ottoman government could block this trade at any time by closing the Straits.

1 See e.g. on the Crimean War: Andrew Lambert, The Crimean War: British Naval Grand

Strategy 1853–1856 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

2 On the early growth of the German navy, see L. Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik:

German Sea Power before the Tirpitz Era (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997).

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As was shown in the Crimean War, in alliance with a major naval power the

Ottomans could also allow in foreign ﬂeets which could blockade and cap-

ture Russia’s Black Sea ports. So long as the weak Ottoman regime controlled

Constantinople and the Straits it was unlikely to use its geopolitical advan-

tage against Russia except in wartime. But the Ottoman Empire was in steep

decline. In the decades before the First World War it was a recurring night-

mare for the Russians that a rival great power might come to dominate the

Straits either directly or by exercising a dominant inﬂuence over the Ottoman

government. Should there arise any immediate threat of Ottoman collapse,

the Russians were determined at least to seize and fortify the eastern end of

the Straits in order to deny access to the Black Sea to the navies of rival great

powers.

Faced with these threats, in 1881 the Russian government stated in the

prologue to its twenty-year naval construction programme that Russia ‘must

be able to challenge the enemy beyond the limits of Russian coastal waters

both in the Baltic and Black seas’.

The ﬁnancial implications of this decision to

build major ﬂeets in both seas to meet possible British or German challenges

were daunting. Partly for that reason, in 1885 the twenty-year programme

was somewhat reduced. Nevertheless by 1896, fourteen modern battleships

and many other vessels were in service or nearing completion in the Baltic

and Black Sea ﬂeets. Meanwhile the new 1895–1902 construction programme

envisaged the building of still more units. The additional cost just of the ships

designated for the Baltic ﬂeet would be almost 149 million roubles. One gains

some sense of the enormous pressure of military budgets on Russia’s economic

development when one compares this sum (devoted to just one ﬂeet of Russia’s

junior military service) to the 33.6 million roubles which comprised the budget

of the Russian Ministry of Education in 1900.

By 1896, however, a new threat and a new potential theatre of naval oper-

ations had emerged in the Paciﬁc. In this period competition for empire was

reaching its peak. Between 1876 and 1915 roughly one-quarter of the world’s

land surface was annexed by the European imperialist powers and the United

States. The ‘Scramble for Africa’ was completed in 1899–1902 by the British

conquest of the Boer republics. Meanwhile the centre of imperialist competi-

tion had moved to East Asia, where the Ching Empire’s days seemed clearly

3 On the broader context, see M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question (London: Macmil-

lan, 1966). On Russian plans, see O. R. Airapetov, ‘Na Vostochnom napravlenii: Sud’ba

Bosforskoi ekspeditsii v pravlenie imperatora Nikolaia II’, in O. Airapetov (ed.), Posledni-

aia voina imperatorskoi Rossii (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2002), pp. 158–261.

4 V. P. Kostenko, Na ‘Orle’ v Tsusime (Leningrad: Sudpromgiz, 1955), pp. 14–22.

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The navy in 1900: imperialism, technology and class war

numbered. In 1898 the Americans annexed the Philippines. In 1900 the Boxer

rebellion threatened the Ching dynasty’s survival and resulted in Great Power

military intervention in China.

Russia had a long border with China and was a near neighbour too of Japan,

whose military and economic power was growing rapidly. Saint Petersburg

neither could nor wished to stand outside imperialist competition in East Asia,

on which the whole future global balance of power seemed likely to depend.

However, by taking the lead ﬁrst in 1895 in blocking Japanese annexation of

Port Arthur and then three years later in taking the port herself, Russia

made herself Japan’s potential enemy. The large-scale Japanese 1895 naval

programme, funded partly by the proceeds of victory over China in 1894,

made clear the potential threat to Russian security. A conference summoned

to consider this threat by Nicholas II noted that ‘in comparison to 1881 circum-

stances in the Far East have changed radically and not at all in our favour’. The

emperor himself correctly commented that ‘our misfortune is that Russia has

to build and maintain three independent ﬂeets’.

The main reason whythis was the case was the enormous distances between

the three theatres in which the Russian navy operated. In addition, however,

until the Montreux agreement of 1936 warships had no right of passage through

the Straits at Constantinople. The Black Sea ﬂeet was therefore entirely iso-

lated. When Russia wished to send ships even to the Mediterranean they had to

come from the Baltic ﬂeet. Russia’s Paciﬁc squadron was also made up of ships

built in and despatched from the Baltic. Not merely was the voyage to the Far

East very long but Russia had no bases between Libau and Port Arthur. This

caused difﬁculties even in peacetime. In wartime, with neutral ports closed,

it was a huge problem. Meanwhile the need to create a new infrastructure to

sustain the Paciﬁc ﬂeet in Vladivostok and Port Arthur was extremely difﬁcult

and expensive, given their geographical remoteness from industrial centres

and their dependence on the carrying capacity of the single-track Siberian and

East-Chinese railways. Though ﬁnances were the main problem surrounding

the creation of three independent ﬂeets they were not, however, the only one.

The types of ships suitable for war against Germany in the conﬁned coastal

waters of the Baltic were wholly unsuitable for long-distance raids against

British commerce in the Atlantic or Paciﬁc. A battleship squadron capable of

contesting Japanese domination of the Yellow Sea had still other requirements.

The Russian government attempted to prioritise the East Asian theatre. In

December 1897 it was decided to limit the Baltic ﬂeet to a purely defensive

5 RGAVMF, Fond 417,op.1,d.1728, 13-ob.

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role. Though the build-up of the Black Sea ﬂeet was to continue, most of

the available naval forces were to be concentrated in the Far East. For this

purpose a new construction programme (‘For the Requirements of the Far

East’) was agreed in 1898 in addition to the existing 1895 programme. It aimed

to add a further ﬁve battleships and numerous smaller ships to the Paciﬁc ﬂeet

by 1905.

The new programme was very expensive. In total the navy was allocated

732 million roubles between 1895 and 1903. This was more than three times

the Japanese naval budget and it also shifted the share of the navy in over-

all Russian military expenditure from 17 per cent in 1895 to 25 per cent in

1902.

The Russian Ministry of Finance insisted that the new naval construction

programme should be completed in 1905, although the rival Japanese pro-

gramme was intended to reach fruition signiﬁcantly earlier. Finance Minister

Witte claimed both that it was impossible for Russia to afford such vast sums

for shipbuilding in a shorter period and that the Japanese would never be able

to ﬁnance the completion of their naval programme before 1908. The ﬁnance

minister proved mistaken. The Japanese programme was completed by 1903.

Moreover, awareness that Japan possessed a window of opportunity before

the completion of the Russian shipbuilding programme was a major incen-

tive for the Japanese to go to war in 1904. Meanwhile, however, the Russian

government was convinced that its build-up of naval forces in the Paciﬁc had

checkmated the Japanese. Its attention was returning to Europe and partic-

ularly to the Straits, where crisis loomed and the Ottoman regime’s survival

seemed ever more doubtful. In 1903 a vast new twenty-year naval construc-

tion programme was agreed for the Baltic and Black seas. Russia’s unexpected

involvement in war with Japan changed all these plans.

Within the Naval Ministry responsibility for the design, construction, oper-

ation and repair of ships lay with the Naval Technical Committee (MTK),

whose basic job was to ensure that the ﬂeet was fully up-to-date in technical

terms. However, in the 1890s the committee was too understaffed to do its job

properly, which caused much delay and many mismatched and unco-ordinated

requirements for new ships. As regards the 1898 programme the MTK only

6 V. Iu. Griboevskii, ‘Rossiiskii ﬂot Tikhogo okeana. Istoriia sozdaniia i gibeli 1898–1905’,

Briz (2001), no 3: 2. R. M. Melnikov, Kreiser Variag (Leningrad: Sudostroenie, 1975),

pp. 17–19.

7 Griboevskii, ‘Rossiiskii ﬂot Tikhogo okeana’, Briz (2001), no. 4: 3.

8 On Japanese preparations for the war, see D. C. Evans and M. R. Peattie, Kaigun. Strategy,

Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy 1887–1941(Annapolis: Naval Institute

Press, 1997).

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deﬁned requirements for the draught, speed, cruising range and armament

of the new ships. This resulted in ships supposedly of the same class which

were built in different factories having signiﬁcantly different features, which

complicated future operations.

The MTK in any case had no control over money: the realisation of all its

plans depended on the release of funds by the so-called Chief Administration

of Shipbuilding and Supply (GUKiC). Even department chiefs in the GUKiC

had no engineering background and little grasp of shipbuilding, however. In

the light of spiralling naval budgets, the GUKiC put much effort into enforcing

economies in many aspects of naval life. Areas hardest hit included provision

of effective modern shells instead of the existing poor explosives; adequate

shooting practice; training at sea in order to practise squadron manoeuvres

and bring ships and their companies up to a high state of readiness. These

economies were a key cause of Russia’s defeat in the war against Japan.

Inevitably, the overall economic and technological backwardness of Russia

had an impact on the shipbuilding industry. Matters were worsened by the

government’s reliance on state-owned works (Baltic, Admiralty, Obukhov,

Izhorsk, etc.) to build most of its ships. Management of these works at that

time was usually very bureaucratic, with little conception of proﬁt, costs or

productivity.Thenavalofﬁcers whoranthese works alsofrequentlyhad limited

engineering knowledge. As a result, ship-construction in Russia was expensive

by international standards and slow.

At a time when naval technology was

improving rapidly slow construction times were particularly dangerous, since

even new ships risked being obsolescent on completion. The MTK itself often

introduced changes while construction was already under way. This caused

further delay and confusion, and could result in errors in design. One solution

to Russia’s problems would have been greater reliance on private industry, as

occurred after 1906, when the government privatised some works and gave

many orders to private ﬁrms (especially for non-capital ships), thus attracting

large-scale private injection of capital into the Russian shipbuilding industry.

Before 1905, however, Russia had only ﬁve private works even partially engaged

9 Russian completion rates were very slow by British or German standards, less so by

French or Italian ones. See eg. chapter 5 of P. Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy:

French Naval Policy 1871–1914 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987) and the statistics

on individual ships in Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1860–1905 (London: Conway

Maritime Press, 1979). In 1911 the Naval General Staff reckoned that it cost 1,532 roubles

per ton to build a battleship in Russia, 913 in Britain, 846 in Germany, 876 in the United

States and 1,090 in Italy: M. A. Petrov, Podgotovka Rossii k mirovoi voine na more (Moscow:

Gos. voennoe izd., 1926)p.143. Admittedly, this was at a time when Russia was spending

heavily to upgrade construction facilities in order to build dreadnoughts.

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Foreign policy and the armed forces

in shipbuilding: these ﬁrms operated at a loss, partly because when forced to

give orders to private ﬁrms the naval ministry preferred to place them abroad.

As a result of the naval construction programmes, by the ﬁrst years of

the twentieth century Russia had moved into third place among the world’s

navies, with 229 ships as against Britain’s 460 and France’s 391.

Many new

types of ships were built, including Russia’s ﬁrst submarine, Delﬁn, which was

launched in 1903. Among the classes of ships built were armoured coastal

defence ships (Admiral Ushakov class of 4,127 tons) whose obvious theatre was

the Baltic Sea; Poltava class battleships (10,960 tons) which followed the normal

European model and the three faster battleships of the Peresvet class (12,674

tons), designed to operate for long periods at sea. A few battleships were

ordered abroad but their design was closely supervised by the MTK and in

the case of the Tsesarevich (12,912 tons), built in France, served as a model for

a class of ﬁve battleships subsequently built in Russia (Borodino class of 13,516

tons).

During these years a major shift occurred in the design and proposed

deployment of armoured cruisers. The earlier cruisers (Rurik, Rossiia and Gro-

moboi) were designed as long-distance commerce raiders, with British trade

as their obvious target. Equal in size to battleships and incorporating many

new technologies, they initially aroused exaggerated fears in Britain which

resulted in a very expensive class of British armoured cruisers being built to

match them.

The armoured cruisers of the Bayan class (the Bayan itself was

launched in 1900) were, however, designed to operate in more limited waters

and to ﬁght alongside battleships if necessary.

Their likeliest enemy was

seen as Japan, which had already built a number of similar armoured cruis-

ers. For this reason, in comparison to the earlier commerce-raiders the new

cruisers sacriﬁced long-range cruising capability in order to maximise armour

and guns for ﬂeet actions. A similar evolution was evident among Russia’s

lighter (‘protected’) cruisers with earlier ships (e.g. the Diana class of the 1895

programme) being seen primarily as commerce-raiders and later ships (e.g.

10 K. F. Shatsillo, Russkii imperialism i razvitie ﬂota (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 217, 228–9.

11 L. G. Beskrovnyi, Armiia i ﬂot Rossii v nachale XXv: Ocherki voenno-ekonomicheskogo

potentsiala (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 187.

12 For good coverage of these ships in English, see S. McLaughlin, Russian and Soviet

Battleships (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2003).

13 R. M. Melnikov, Istoriia otechestvennogo sudostroeniia, 3 vols. General ed., B. N. Malakhov

(St Petersburg: Sudostroenie, 1996), vol. II, p. 533. On British fears, see e.g. V. E. Egorev,

Operatsiia vladivostokskikh kreiserov v Russko-iaponskuiu voinu 1904–1905gg. (Moscow and

Leningrad: V-Morskoe izd., 1939), p. 9; Conway’s,p.67.

14 RGAVMF, Fond 421,op.8,d.6,l.356.

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The navy in 1900: imperialism, technology and class war

Variag, Askold, Bogatyr and Novik) being designed to operate together with the

battle-ﬂeet.

The structure and governance of the ﬂeet and the Naval Ministry were

deﬁned by the laws of 1885 and 1888. The ministry was comprised of a num-

ber of chief administrations (e.g. medical: hydrographic) and committees (e.g.

the MTK) but its most important core institution was the Main Naval Staff,

which was responsible for the navy’s preparedness for war. The Main Naval

Staff, however, was swamped in various day-to-day administrative responsibil-

ities. Like many other navies at the time, Russia lacked a true naval general

staff, responsible for pre-war strategic planning and overall control of wartime

operations. A proposal to establish such a staff was rejected at the end of

the nineteenth century and the small (twelve-man) strategic unit established

within the Main Naval Staff on the eve of the Japanese war had no chance of

seriously affecting wartime operations. The annual war games at the Nicholas

Naval Academy had some impact on strategic thinking but although Admi-

ral Makarov had intelligent and aggressive ideas about strategy, the dominant

tendency among Russia’s senior admirals was defensive – stressing the defence

of key positions (e.g. Port Arthur during the war with Japan) and seeing naval

assistance to the army largely in terms of the secondment of personnel and

weapons. The staffs of the individual ﬂeets saw themselves as mere advisory

bodies and showed little initiative.

The prevailing view of tactics was to ﬁght in line ahead or in surprise

encounter battles. The squadron’s commander was supposed to control move-

ments by ﬂag, semaphore and telegraph from his ﬂagship. The ‘two-ﬂag’

system was spreading slowly at the turn of the century. S. O. Makarov, N.

L. Klado and N. N. Kholodovskii all published useful work on tactics but

the point to stress is that the Russian navy had no single and ofﬁcial tac-

tical doctrine which could have provided a common guide for senior ofﬁ-

cers. The ﬁghting instructions which did exist were either uselessly general

(e.g. ship captains should obey the signals of the commanding admiral as

much as possible), extremely narrow (e.g. where to keep tubs of sand) or

absurdly pedantic (e.g. the requirement for ofﬁcers to wear swords in com-

bat). Not until the war with Japan had already begun was the ﬁrst true battle

15 Beskrovnyi, Armiia i ﬂot,p.221. On the question of a naval general staff, see the key

publication of A. N. Shcheglov, Znachenie i rabota shtaba na osnovanii opyta russko-iaponskoi

voiny (St Petersburg: no publ. given, 1905) and the articles by N. Kazimirov entitled

‘Morskoi General’nyi Shtab’, Morskoi Sbornik 372, 9 (Sept. 1912): 55–82; 10 (Oct. 1912):

57–80.

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