Czarist Russia - German Relations
Relations between Germany and Russia have been marked by alternate periods of cooperation and war. Russia was under Mongolian rule [the Tatar Yoke] in the late Middle Ages, but lively trade with the Hanseatic German cities continued. The period began with a victory over Teutonic knights in the so-called Battle on the Ice on a frozen lake in 1242. Catherine the Great acceded to the Russian throne in 1762, after the overthrow of her husband, also born in Germany. Her reign oversaw the Russian Enlightenment, whose intellectual ideals — freedom, liberty, and reason — she championed. Those ideals did not extend to Poland, however, which she partitioned with Prussia. Like many of Europe's colonial monarchies, Prussia and Russia found common cause in opposing revolutionary France and the military campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. The alliance was sealed at the Convention of Tauroggen in 1812 between a Prussian general and a German-born general of the Russian Imperial Army, in which many Prussian soldiers served. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were difficult for Russia. Not only did technology and industry continue to develop more rapidly in the West but also new, dynamic, competitive great powers appeared on the world scene: Otto von Bismarck's united Germany, the post-Civil War United States, and Meiji Restoration Japan.
As part of the regime's foreign policy goals in Europe, Russia gave guarded support to the anti-Austrian diplomacy of the French. A weak Franco-Russian entente soured, however, when France backed a Polish uprising against Russian rule in 1863. Russia then aligned itself more closely with Prussia and tolerated the unification of Germany in exchange for a revision of the Treaty of Paris and the remilitarization of the Black Sea. These diplomatic achievements came at a London conference in 1871, following Prussia's defeat of France. After 1871 Germany, united by Prussia, was the strongest continental power in Europe. It supported both Russia and Austria-Hungary, and in 1873 it formed the loosely knit League of the Three Emperors with those two powers to forestall them from forming an alliance with France. At the Congress of Berlin in July 1878, Russia agreed to the creation of a smaller Bulgaria. Russian nationalists were furious with Austria- Hungary and Germany, but the tsar accepted a revived and strengthened League of the Three Emperors as well as Austrian hegemony in the western Balkans.
The Bulgarians became angry with Russia's continuing interference in Bulgarian affairs and sought support from Austria. In turn, Germany, displaying firmness toward Russia, protected Austria from the tsar while mollifying him with a bilateral defensive alliance, the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 between Germany and Russia. Within a year, Russo-German acrimony led to Bismarck's forbidding further Russian loans, and France replaced Germany as Russia's financier.
In 1890 Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck, and the loose Russo-Prussian entente, which had held fast for more than twenty-five years, collapsed. The consequence of this development was that Russia allied itself with France in 1893 by entering into a joint military convention, which matched the German-Austrian dual alliance of 1879.
At the turn of the century, Russia gained maneuvering room in Asia because of its alliance with France and the growing rivalry between Britain and Germany. Tsar Nicholas failed to orchestrate a coherent Far Eastern policy because of ministerial conflicts. Russia's uncoordinated and aggressive moves in the region ultimately led to the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05).
By 1895 Germany was competing with France for Russia's favor, and British statesmen hoped to negotiate with the Russians to demarcate spheres of influence in Asia. This situation enabled Russia to intervene in northeastern Asia after Japan's victory over China in 1895. Japan was forced to make concessions in the Liaotung Peninsula and Port Arthur in southern Manchuria. Russia traded recognition of German economic interests in the Ottoman Empire and Iran for German recognition of various Russian security interests in the region. Similarly, Russia's strategic and financial position required that it remain faithful to its alliance with France and that it bolster the Anglo- French and Anglo-Russian rapprochements with the informal Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia, but without antagonizing Germany or provoking a war.
In 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II invited his cousin Czar Nicholas II to Berlin for the wedding of his daughter. A year later, the two countries were at war, and four years later, both men had lost their thrones, with Nicholas executed in 1918. Millions of Russians and Germans were killed in the war, and both countries felt aggrieved by the terms imposed by the Western Allies.
In 1913, the Bulgarians were defeated by the Serbians, Greeks, and Romanians. Austria became Bulgaria's patron, while Germany remained the Ottoman Empire's protector. Russia tied itself more closely to Serbia. When a Serbian terrorist assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne in late June 1914, Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia. Russia, fearing another humiliation in the Balkans, supported Serbia. The system of alliances began to operate automatically, with Germany supporting Austria and with France backing Russia. When Germany invaded France through Belgium, the conflict escalated into a world war.
Russia's large population enabled it to field a greater number of troops than Austria-Hungary and Germany combined, but its underdeveloped industrial base meant that its soldiers were as poorly armed as those of the Austrian army. Russian forces were inferior to Germany's in every respect except numbers. Generally, the larger Russian armies defeated the Austro-Hungarians but suffered reverses against German or combined German-Austrian forces unless the latter were overextended.
In the spring and summer of 1915, a German-Austrian offensive drove the Russians out of Galicia and Poland and destroyed several Russian army corps. In 1916 the Germans planned to drive France out of the war with a large-scale attack in the Verdun area, but a new Russian offensive against Austria-Hungary once again drew German troops from the west. These actions left both major fronts stable and both Russia and Germany despairing of victory.
After Russian military reversals in 1915, Nicholas II went to the front to assume nominal leadership of the army. His German-born wife, Aleksandra, and Rasputin, a debauched faith healer, who was able to stop the bleeding of the hemophiliac heir to the throne, tried to dictate policy and make ministerial appointments. Support for the tsarist regime simply evaporated in 1917, ending three centuries of Romanov rule.
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