Pro-Germans and Russian Foreign Policy 1890–1914

Abstract

Throughout the history of Imperial Russia, relations between the Russian state and the other European powers greatly influenced political development within the Empire. In the last decades of old Russia's existence, however, internal political and economic factors also played a considerable part in defining the course taken by Russian foreign policy. The aim of this article is to shed some light on the causes of Russian involvement in the Great War by looking at the relationship between external and internal policy as seen largely through the eyes of a number of leading statesmen of Nicholas n's reign, particularly those who can, with a varying degree of accuracy, be described as having favoured a pro-German line in Russian foreign policy. From the time of the great coalition to overthrow Napoleon to the retirement of Bismarck in 1 890, friendship between the Courts of Petersburg and Berlin was one of the most stable elements in European diplomacy. Alone among the great powers, Prussia was not a member of the Crimean coalition, and Alexander 11 maintained a benevolent neutrality during the Prussian wars against Austria and France which led to the creation of the German Empire. Though it is true that the Congress of Berlin aroused much Russian indignation against Bismarck and that in the 1880s important voices in Russia began to call for closer links with France, it was in fact the Germans who ended many decades of RussoPrussian alliance in 1890 by refusing to renew the Reinsurance Treaty, a move which caused dismay in the Russian Foreign Ministry. 1