Petr Durnovo was the formidable minister of internal
affairs who played a key role in crushing the Russian Revolution of 1905.
Subsequently, he led the so-called Right Group in Russia’s upper house, namely
the State Council. In other words he was the leader of the most conservative
political “party” within the Russian ruling elite. For all his eminence in
1914, Durnovo had never entirely shed the shady reputation he acquired from a
decades service as the head of Russia’s police forces. Secret policemen seldom
have the clearest hands, though by the standards of his twentieth century
successors Durnovo was a lamb. His career as director of the Police Department
had come to a spectacular end when he had used his agents to purloin letters of
his mistress from the home of a foreign diplomat, a competitor for her
affections. The story reached Alexander III, who was enraged. Gogol could have
written a fine comedy about the tsar’s decision to boot his miscreant police
chief into the Senate, the body responsible for upholding the rule of law in
the Russian Empire.
The interest of Durnovo’s memorandum is increased by the fact that he was apparently offered the position of chairman of the Council of Ministers by Nicolas II in the winter of 1913-14. According to admittedly to a second-hand source, Durnovo turned down the offer with the fooling words:
Your Majesty, my system as head of government and minister of internal affairs cannot provide quick results. It can only tell after a few years, and these years will be a time of complete rumpus: dissolutions of the Duma, assassinations, executions, perhaps armed uprisings. You, Your Majesty, will not endure these years and will dismiss me; under such conditions, my stay in power cannot do any good and will bring only harm.
These words, recounted by the former minister of agriculture, Prince Boris Vasilchikov, may not be accurate, but they do convey Durnovo’s view of the emperor, whom he once described as “the kind of man who, if you asked him flor his last shirt, would take it off and give it to you.” Durnovo’s lack of faith in Nicolas’s firmness or reliability was understandable but it is also easy to sympathize with the monarch’s dilemma. Had he appointed Durnovo to his head of government, Nicolas II would have been denounced from almost all sides of Russian educated society. Vasilchikov told this story in order to illustrate the tsar’s weakness, but his own biography and political loyalties make it certain that he himself would have joined the chorus of disapproval.
Durnovo’s memorandum was a remarkable and in some respects brilliant work. Although brief, it covered international politics and economic relations, the nature of the future European war, and internal Russian politics. The clarity and insight of Durnovo’s thinking and the accuracy of his predictions are unrivaled by any other document written from within the ruling elite in these years. Durnovo’s entire experience after leaving the navy had been in Russian domestic affairs. He played no role in foreign policy. It is therefore not surprising that the weakest side of his memorandum, was its analysis of international affairs.
The memorandum was shot through with suspicion of England, which in Durnovo’s opinion had a long history of using continental allies to fight its wars against London’s European rivals. The danger of this happening again was now acute because in Durnovo’s estimation Anglo-German rivalry was the key element in contemporary international relations and was bound in time to lead to armed conflict. This was a widespread view in Russia and elsewhere and was rooted in a mercantilist and Darwinian understanding of the international economy. Like most of his peers in the Russian elite, Durnovo viewed economics much less as a means to satisfy individual needs and aspirations than as a factor in a state’s power. Given this premise, it was logical to see the international economy as a zero-sum game and to predict that Anglo-German competition would lead to war to dominate maritime trade routes and overseas colonies.
In reality, by 1914 an Anglo-German war was much less likely than a Russo-German conflict over the fate of the Habsburg lands (in Bohemia especially), the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire. Durnovo’s memorandum neither reflected this reality nor offered a convincing strategy for reconciling Russian and German interests in this vast area.
Far more convincing was Durnovo’s argument that Russia had nothing to gain even from a victory over German and Austria. On the contrary, such a victory would leave Russia’s conservatives at the mercy of its liberal and democratic allies. Not merely would a war against Germany wreck Russia’s main trading partner and the key bulwark of European conservatism, but its immense costs would make Russia dependent on British and French loans. Having probably borne the main burden of wat on land, Russia would get no thanks form its allies. On the contrary, with the demise of German power its uses to them would be gone.
This would, for example, become evident even if Russia secured the Straits as the result of the war. Holding the Bosphorus might be useful as a means to keep enemies out of the Black Sea, but Durnovo insisted that hopes of defending Russian commercial and maritime interests in the Mediterranean or on the oceans was a chimera. The British navy could easily block all such ambitions, regardless of who controlled the Straits. Even less sensible were the dreams of some Russian nationalists of annexing Hapsburg Galicia. Durnovo argued that as yet the Ukrainian nationalist threat within Russia was fully manageable, but it would be fatal to absorb into the empire the cradle of potentially “extremely dangerous Little Russian separatism, which in a favorable context was capable of assuming completely unexpected proportions.” During World War I, Russia occupied Galicia for a time, and Russian nationalists pressed for its annexation. In 1945 Stalin did annex Galicia and incorporated it into the Soviet Ukrainian Republic, thereby enormously increasing the potential threat of Ukrainian nationalism to the Russian state. Durnovo’s prediction turned out to be true; without Galicia, it is very possible that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus would have survived the demise of communism in some version of an east Slavic federation.
Durnovo’s predictions about the nature of a future European war were prescient. Unlike most civilian and military members of the Russian elite, he expected the European war to be long. He was even in a smaller minority in rejecting Bloch’s argument that Russian backwardness would be an asset in a long drawn-out conflict. On the contrary, wrote Durnovo, in a European war the most industrially and financially developed powers would hold the advantage. The Russian army would enter such a war deficient in the heavy artillery and machine guns that would be of crucial significance on the modern battlefield. More important, in key areas of high technology essential to the military economy, Russia was still dependent on foreign imports and expertise. In general, its industrial base was too narrow to sustain years of conflict against the more formidable military-industrial power in the world. A war between the most advanced nations would, for instance, spawn any number of new military inventions, but Russia had no chance of matching German abilities to develop such new weaponry. Nor were the railway network or rolling stock adequate for an all-out, lengthy war. The inevitable crisis of the wartime economy would be compounded by the fact that the enemy would control the Sound and the Straits, thereby isolating Russia from its Western allies.
The biggest danger of all, however, was revolution in Russia. Durnovo was convinced that revolution was inevitable in a defeated Germany or a defeated Russia. If Germany suffered a revolution, then the risks of this spreading even to a victorious Russia considerable. Nor in fact was Russia’s military defeat a necessary precursor to a revolution even during the course of the war. The needs and casualties of war would destroy the main bulwark of the regime against revolution, namely the peacetime army. The basic point, Durnovo wrote, was that Russia was uniquely vulnerable to extreme social revolution. No political concessions could moderate the fanaticism of the revolutionary parties. More important, the mass of the population – both workers and peasants- were unconscious socialists. This was the product of Russian history and culture. European values – at whose core stood private property- as yet meant nothing to them. Peasant and worker felt no sense of solidarity with the educated classes. In time, socioeconomic modernization might change this state of affairs, but for least a generation only the authoritarian police state could hold class war in check. Russia’s upper and middle classes could not survive without its support. In any genuinely democratic election, they themselves, their values, and their property would be swept aside. The Duma parties representing propertied and enlightened Russia were therefore committing suicide when they demanded that the tsarist regime make way for a liberal, democratic political order.
In Durnovo’s opinion, a merely political revolution or a liberal political system had no chance of success in Russia: tsarism’s demise would lead to anarchy and to some version of revolutionary socialism. The strains inevitable in wartime, especially when fighting so formidable enemy as Germany, provided the ideal breeding ground for socialist revolution. Although ultimate defeat was not inevitable for Russia, major setbacks were certain both on the battlefield and in the economy. It was the nature of upper-and-middle-class Russians to blame all such setbacks on the government, rather than accepting the consequences of economic backwardness and geopolitical weakness. Demands for political reform and for the transfer of power to the Duma would inevitably increase dramatically amid wartime defeats and difficulties. But any weakening of the political state in the midst of the enormous strains of war would make revolution not just a major threat but instead an unavoidable certainty.
Given Durnovo’s status and reputation, it is probable that the conscientious emperor read his memorandum, but it had no discernable influence on Russian policy. . .
The End of Tsarist Russia; The March to World War I & Revolution by Dominic Lieven; Penguin Books, 2015; pages 303-307
The interest of Durnovo’s memorandum is increased by the fact that he was apparently offered the position of chairman of the Council of Ministers by Nicolas II in the winter of 1913-14. According to admittedly to a second-hand source, Durnovo turned down the offer with the fooling words:
Your Majesty, my system as head of government and minister of internal affairs cannot provide quick results. It can only tell after a few years, and these years will be a time of complete rumpus: dissolutions of the Duma, assassinations, executions, perhaps armed uprisings. You, Your Majesty, will not endure these years and will dismiss me; under such conditions, my stay in power cannot do any good and will bring only harm.
These words, recounted by the former minister of agriculture, Prince Boris Vasilchikov, may not be accurate, but they do convey Durnovo’s view of the emperor, whom he once described as “the kind of man who, if you asked him flor his last shirt, would take it off and give it to you.” Durnovo’s lack of faith in Nicolas’s firmness or reliability was understandable but it is also easy to sympathize with the monarch’s dilemma. Had he appointed Durnovo to his head of government, Nicolas II would have been denounced from almost all sides of Russian educated society. Vasilchikov told this story in order to illustrate the tsar’s weakness, but his own biography and political loyalties make it certain that he himself would have joined the chorus of disapproval.
Durnovo’s memorandum was a remarkable and in some respects brilliant work. Although brief, it covered international politics and economic relations, the nature of the future European war, and internal Russian politics. The clarity and insight of Durnovo’s thinking and the accuracy of his predictions are unrivaled by any other document written from within the ruling elite in these years. Durnovo’s entire experience after leaving the navy had been in Russian domestic affairs. He played no role in foreign policy. It is therefore not surprising that the weakest side of his memorandum, was its analysis of international affairs.
The memorandum was shot through with suspicion of England, which in Durnovo’s opinion had a long history of using continental allies to fight its wars against London’s European rivals. The danger of this happening again was now acute because in Durnovo’s estimation Anglo-German rivalry was the key element in contemporary international relations and was bound in time to lead to armed conflict. This was a widespread view in Russia and elsewhere and was rooted in a mercantilist and Darwinian understanding of the international economy. Like most of his peers in the Russian elite, Durnovo viewed economics much less as a means to satisfy individual needs and aspirations than as a factor in a state’s power. Given this premise, it was logical to see the international economy as a zero-sum game and to predict that Anglo-German competition would lead to war to dominate maritime trade routes and overseas colonies.
In reality, by 1914 an Anglo-German war was much less likely than a Russo-German conflict over the fate of the Habsburg lands (in Bohemia especially), the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire. Durnovo’s memorandum neither reflected this reality nor offered a convincing strategy for reconciling Russian and German interests in this vast area.
Far more convincing was Durnovo’s argument that Russia had nothing to gain even from a victory over German and Austria. On the contrary, such a victory would leave Russia’s conservatives at the mercy of its liberal and democratic allies. Not merely would a war against Germany wreck Russia’s main trading partner and the key bulwark of European conservatism, but its immense costs would make Russia dependent on British and French loans. Having probably borne the main burden of wat on land, Russia would get no thanks form its allies. On the contrary, with the demise of German power its uses to them would be gone.
This would, for example, become evident even if Russia secured the Straits as the result of the war. Holding the Bosphorus might be useful as a means to keep enemies out of the Black Sea, but Durnovo insisted that hopes of defending Russian commercial and maritime interests in the Mediterranean or on the oceans was a chimera. The British navy could easily block all such ambitions, regardless of who controlled the Straits. Even less sensible were the dreams of some Russian nationalists of annexing Hapsburg Galicia. Durnovo argued that as yet the Ukrainian nationalist threat within Russia was fully manageable, but it would be fatal to absorb into the empire the cradle of potentially “extremely dangerous Little Russian separatism, which in a favorable context was capable of assuming completely unexpected proportions.” During World War I, Russia occupied Galicia for a time, and Russian nationalists pressed for its annexation. In 1945 Stalin did annex Galicia and incorporated it into the Soviet Ukrainian Republic, thereby enormously increasing the potential threat of Ukrainian nationalism to the Russian state. Durnovo’s prediction turned out to be true; without Galicia, it is very possible that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus would have survived the demise of communism in some version of an east Slavic federation.
Durnovo’s predictions about the nature of a future European war were prescient. Unlike most civilian and military members of the Russian elite, he expected the European war to be long. He was even in a smaller minority in rejecting Bloch’s argument that Russian backwardness would be an asset in a long drawn-out conflict. On the contrary, wrote Durnovo, in a European war the most industrially and financially developed powers would hold the advantage. The Russian army would enter such a war deficient in the heavy artillery and machine guns that would be of crucial significance on the modern battlefield. More important, in key areas of high technology essential to the military economy, Russia was still dependent on foreign imports and expertise. In general, its industrial base was too narrow to sustain years of conflict against the more formidable military-industrial power in the world. A war between the most advanced nations would, for instance, spawn any number of new military inventions, but Russia had no chance of matching German abilities to develop such new weaponry. Nor were the railway network or rolling stock adequate for an all-out, lengthy war. The inevitable crisis of the wartime economy would be compounded by the fact that the enemy would control the Sound and the Straits, thereby isolating Russia from its Western allies.
The biggest danger of all, however, was revolution in Russia. Durnovo was convinced that revolution was inevitable in a defeated Germany or a defeated Russia. If Germany suffered a revolution, then the risks of this spreading even to a victorious Russia considerable. Nor in fact was Russia’s military defeat a necessary precursor to a revolution even during the course of the war. The needs and casualties of war would destroy the main bulwark of the regime against revolution, namely the peacetime army. The basic point, Durnovo wrote, was that Russia was uniquely vulnerable to extreme social revolution. No political concessions could moderate the fanaticism of the revolutionary parties. More important, the mass of the population – both workers and peasants- were unconscious socialists. This was the product of Russian history and culture. European values – at whose core stood private property- as yet meant nothing to them. Peasant and worker felt no sense of solidarity with the educated classes. In time, socioeconomic modernization might change this state of affairs, but for least a generation only the authoritarian police state could hold class war in check. Russia’s upper and middle classes could not survive without its support. In any genuinely democratic election, they themselves, their values, and their property would be swept aside. The Duma parties representing propertied and enlightened Russia were therefore committing suicide when they demanded that the tsarist regime make way for a liberal, democratic political order.
In Durnovo’s opinion, a merely political revolution or a liberal political system had no chance of success in Russia: tsarism’s demise would lead to anarchy and to some version of revolutionary socialism. The strains inevitable in wartime, especially when fighting so formidable enemy as Germany, provided the ideal breeding ground for socialist revolution. Although ultimate defeat was not inevitable for Russia, major setbacks were certain both on the battlefield and in the economy. It was the nature of upper-and-middle-class Russians to blame all such setbacks on the government, rather than accepting the consequences of economic backwardness and geopolitical weakness. Demands for political reform and for the transfer of power to the Duma would inevitably increase dramatically amid wartime defeats and difficulties. But any weakening of the political state in the midst of the enormous strains of war would make revolution not just a major threat but instead an unavoidable certainty.
Given Durnovo’s status and reputation, it is probable that the conscientious emperor read his memorandum, but it had no discernable influence on Russian policy. . .
The End of Tsarist Russia; The March to World War I & Revolution by Dominic Lieven; Penguin Books, 2015; pages 303-307
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