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Could
Rasputin Have Prevented the First World War?
David
Clark
November,
2003
Grigory Rasputin was spending the
summer of 1914 in Siberia with his wife and children when on the afternoon
of June 29 [1] he was stabbed in the abdomen by a former prostitute named
Khioniya Kozmishna Guseva. “I’ve killed the Antichrist!” she
screamed as she was mobbed by angry villagers. Rasputin staggered back
into his house clutching his entrails in his hand. He was critically ill
for ten days but a skilled doctor and his own enormous physical strength
finally pulled him through. One cynic remarked on his survival that,
“the soul of this cursed muzhik was sewn on his body.” [2]
 One day earlier and thousands of
miles away the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in Sarajevo.
As the events of the next month drifted towards war Tsar Nicholas
maintained an almost casual indifference to the gathering threat. After
all, “the German emperor had frequently assured him of his sincere
desire to safeguard the peace of Europe.” Rasputin was recovering in his
bed in Siberia and fully alert to the danger, one of the few people who
accurately foresaw the coming disaster. He sent a letter to Nicholas
coached in his mystical, prophetic style, “A terrible storm menaces
Russia … Woe, disaster, suffering without end … Do not let fools
triumph. Do not let them do this thing.” Nicholas did not respond and
continued with his summer activities.
Austria-Hungary declared war on
Serbia on July 28 and began the bombardment of Belgrade the next day.
Nicholas signed the orders for partial mobilization along the
Austro-Hungarian frontier on July 29 and general mobilization on July 30
with great reluctance at the urging of foreign minister Sazonov. “Think
of the responsibility you advise me to take,” he declaimed, “It would
mean sending hundreds of thousands of Russians to their deaths.” Also on
July 30, Austria-Hungary declared general mobilization. Germany delivered
an ultimatum to Russia, demanding a halt to her mobilization, on July 31
and then declared war on its expiration. When Empress Alexandra learned
the news she fled to her bedroom weeping, “War! And I knew nothing of
it! This is the end of everything!”
These are the events that actually
occurred. But let us suppose that Rasputin had not been gravely wounded in
the attack. He would surely have returned to St. Petersburg as the war
crisis grew and used his considerable influence to try to avert it. The
German born Empress Alexandra was completely under his sway by this time
and could have been worked into a state of near hysteria. One or the other
of them might have prevailed on Nicholas to show a greater degree of
restraint at the moment of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Although
there is a certain sense of inevitability in the month’s fatal chain of
events it remained true that only the Tsar could order the mobilization of
the Russian army. If the Tsar had held back then Germany and in turn
France must have also.
There is a precedent for imagining
that this might have been possible. In 1913 at the outbreak of the Second
Balkan War, Nicholas was warned of the danger of war with Germany by his
advisers. “All is in the will of God,” he responded. Rasputin’s own
response was much more alarmist, “Let the Turks and foreigners eat each
other. They are blind, and this is their misfortune … Fear, fear War.”
One newspaper credited Rasputin with having preserved the peace in 1913.
So did Alexandra who reminded her husband, “He always said the Balkans
were not worth fighting over.”
Rasputin’s influence over Tsar
Nicholas was again at work in 1915. Out for revenge over a perceived
threat to his own position, Rasputin manipulated the Tsar into believing
that the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, commander of the army, was
lying about the state of the army as a pretext for forcing the abdication
of the Tsar. According to Rasputin the reports from the Grand Duke of food
shortages were fabricated to create an excuse for him to retreat. He would
then occupy Petrograd [3] and take over the government. In fact the
Russian army was reeling back through Poland under the shock of a major
German offensive. After a late night drinking session with Rasputin the
Tsar dismissed the Grand Duke from the army command, sent him to an
obscure post in the Caucasus, and took over the command of the army
himself.
There are three questions then to
be asked. Did Rasputin have sufficient influence in the Russian court that
he could have deterred Nicholas from committing Russia to the defense of
Serbia? Was Nicholas sufficiently powerful that he could have blocked the
Russian mobilization order if he chose? And would Russia declining to back
Serbia have broken the chain of events that led to the outbreak of a
general European war? I will suggest there is a very good chance that had
Rasputin been in St. Petersburg at the crucial time he could have
persuaded Nicholas to his point of view. In that situation, given the
centralization of power in the Russian government, Nicholas could almost
certainly have prevented Russia from committing any act that would have
been provocative to Germany. And in turn if Russia were reluctant to enter
the war, Germany would not have been compelled to enter in the defense of
Austria-Hungary and thus France would have had to hold back whether she
wished to or not. Then Austria-Hungary would have proceeded to subjugate
Serbia and one more of the “powder kegs” in the Balkans would be
defused.
Given the web of alliances and
tensions in Europe it is often hard to imagine that a general war could
have been forestalled indefinitely but warfare had been contained to the
Balkans in 1913 and a number of earlier crises had passed peacefully.
Russia had watched from the sidelines while Austria-Hungary had absorbed
Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909 and had not asserted herself when Bulgaria
threatened Serbia in 1913. Russia’s response to the crisis of 1914 was
much more a matter of her national pride than any vital interests in
Serbia. Russia could have acquiesced in the chastisement of Serbia without
any injury to herself. The next great European crisis, wherever it would
be, might have been years in the future with every chance that diplomacy
could again prevail.
[1] Or June 16, 1914 in the
Russian old calendar.
[2] All quotations are from
“Rasputin, The Saint Who Sinned”, Brian Moynahan, 1997, a fascinating
account of one of the strangest figures in modern European history.
[3] Petrograd was the less German
sounding, wartime name for St. Petersburg. |
