McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 569 McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2013. xii + 324 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $18.95: £14.95 (paperback). Sean McMeekin, an American-trained historian who teaches in Turkey, has a lot of scores to settle with several dead statesmen as well as several living and dead historians on the origins of World War One. His primary concern — one might say obsession — is with war guilt and who is responsible for the outbreak of the Great War. He is impatient with recent efforts to argue for a ‘no-guilt war’ or an accidental war. Nor does he have much sympathy for Fritz Fischer and his acolytes, who placed the blame for the outbreak of war on Germany’s war aims and its ‘grab for power’, though McMeekin himself made a very persuasive case for German war guilt and the Kaiser’s fantasies of raising a German jihad against the Entente in an earlier book, The BerlinBaghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918 (London, 2010). For McMeekin the clearly guilty party was Russia. The overriding motivation of Russian diplomats and generals was the conquest of Constantinople and the partition of the Ottoman Empire. The leading villain in the drama is Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov, whose ‘own deeply dishonest memoirs’ (p. 238) are one of the primary sources of the fundamental misunderstanding of the beginnings of the war, a history the author seeks to rescue from ‘the deep freeze’ (p. 1). This enthusiastic revisionism is based only partly on the recent availability of Russianarchives;McMeekinreports,‘thereisnowmoreformerlysecretmaterial available on Russia’s war aims in 1914 than on those of any other power’ (p. 2). The problem, however, is only partly in the gap in the documentary record (and there is evidence that even the surviving Russian archives were purged to conceal embarrassing diplomatic exchanges). The more serious problem is a historical amnesia for which McMeekin holds Winston Churchill largely responsible, who, out of misplaced pity for the Russian people after the Bolshevik atrocities, forgot how Russia was a signatory to what has long been known as the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide up the post-war Ottoman world. Our author insists we ought to properly call it the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov agreement. But for the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the new government’s repudiation of British and French debts and their murder of the tsar and his family, Russia would have been a full-fledged partner in the final settlement of the accursed Eastern Question. Even Norman Stone’s classic, The Eastern Front 1914–1918 (New York, 1975), comes under scrutiny for adopting the AustroHungarian and German perspectives of the archives he relied on. McMeekin acknowledges Luigi Albertini’s equally classic three-volume study (New York, 1952–57) and C. Jay Smith Jr.’s 1956 book as predecessors, but correctly argues SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 570 that those studies, though based on Russian archival materials available at the time in the West and in published sources, were largely ignored by the broader community of historians of World War One. It’s not clear how helpful this frame of war guilt is to understanding the origins of the war, especially as McMeekin’s prosecutorial gaze is also fixed on the French, who are portrayed, through a sharply drawn portrait of a cynical French Ambassador Maurice Paleologue, as ‘colluding’ with the Russians to conceal from the British a plan to partition the Ottoman empire after the war. The British, by contrast, are portrayed as clueless and naive, sometimes obtuse — this includes a roster of Sir Edward Grey, Sir George Buchanan and Herbert Horatio Asquith. McMeekin even describes the British as ‘ventriloquists’ for Russia’s position on issues, further evidence of Sazonov’s remarkable skills as the diplomat of a power that had imperial ambitions beyond its means and needed to resort to these schemes. He also partially absolves the British for their responsibility because British diplomats, after all, operating in liberal democratic conditions, had more constraints on their freedom than did a Sazonov who negotiated on behalf of...