Category Archives: Russia

by Joel | 3 November 2026 · 5:44 am

European Presses Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 229-231:

It remained unclear how the public opinion within articulate elites with direct access to the press related to the attitudes prevailing among the masses of the population. War scares and jingo campaigns made good newspaper copy, but how socially deep were they? It was a grave mistake, the German consul-general in Moscow warned in December 1912, to assume that the belligerence and Germanophobia of the Russian ‘war party’ and the Slavophile press were characteristic of the mood in the country, for these circles entertained only ‘the loosest connection with the actual tendencies of Russian life’. The problem with German newspaper coverage of these issues, the consul argued, was that it tended to be written by journalists with little experience of Russia and a very narrow range of elite social contacts. In May 1913, the Belgian minister in Paris, Baron Guillaume, acknowledged the efflorescence of ‘a certain chauvinism’ in France. It could be observed not just in the nationalist papers, but also in the theatres, reviews and café-concerts, where numerous performances offered jingoist fare that was ‘calculated to over-excite spirits’. But, he added, ‘the true people of France do not approve of these manifestations . . .’

All the governments, with the exception of Britain, maintained press offices whose purpose was both to monitor and, where possible, to shape press coverage of issues touching on security and international relations. In Britain, the foreign secretary appears to have felt little need to convince (or even inform) the public of the merits of his policies and there were no official efforts to influence the press; many of the major newspapers received handsome subsidies, but these came from private or party-political sources, rather than from government. This did not, of course, prevent a dense network of informal relationships from developing between Whitehall officials and key journalists. The picture in Italy was rather different. Giovanni Giolitti, prime minister (for the fourth time) in 1911–14, made regular payments to at least thirty journalists in return for supportive coverage of his policies. The Russian foreign ministry acquired a press department in 1906, and from 1910 Sazonov orchestrated regular tea-time meetings at the ministry with the most important editors and Duma leaders. Relations between the Russian diplomats and some favoured newspapers were so close, one journalist reported in 1911, that the ministry of foreign affairs in St Petersburg ‘often seemed a mere branch office of the Novoye Vremya’. The newspaper’s editor, Jegorov, was often to be seen in the ministry’s press bureau, and Nelidov, chief of the bureau and himself a former journalist, was a frequent visitor to the paper’s editorial offices. In France, the relationship between diplomats and journalists was especially intimate: nearly half of the foreign ministers of the Third Republic were former writers or journalists and the ‘lines of communication’ between foreign ministers and the press were ‘almost always open’. In December 1912, when he was prime minister of France, Raymond Poincaré even launched a new journal, La Politique Étrangère, to promote his views on foreign policy across the French political elite.

Semi-official newspapers and ‘inspired’ articles planted in the domestic press to test the climate of opinion were familiar tools of continental diplomacy. Inspired journalism masqueraded as the autonomous expression of an independent press, but its effectiveness depended precisely on the suspicion among readers that it emanated from the seat of power. It was universally understood in Serbia, for example, that Samouprava represented the views of the government; the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was considered the official organ of the German Foreign Office; in Russia, the government made its views known through its own semi-official journal, Rossiya, but also ran occasional inspired campaigns in other more popular papers, like Novoye Vremya. The French foreign ministry, like the German, disbursed cash to journalists from a secret fund and maintained close ties with Le Temps and the Agence Havas, while using the less serious-minded Le Matin to launch ‘trial balloons’.

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Official manipulations of the press also took place across national borders. Early in 1905, the Russians were distributing around £8,000 a month to the Parisian press, in the hope of stimulating public support for a massive French loan. The French government subsidized pro-French newspapers in Italy (and Spain during the conference at Algeciras), and during the Russo-Japanese and Balkan Wars the Russians handed out huge bribes to French journalists. The Germans maintained a very modest fund for supporting friendly journalists in St Petersburg and plied newspaper editors in London with subsidies in the hope, mostly disappointed, of obtaining more positive coverage of Germany.

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by Joel | 2 November 2026 · 6:44 am

European Militarism Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 214-217:

‘The situation [in Europe] is extraordinary,’ Colonel Edward House reported to American President Woodrow Wilson after a trip to Europe in May 1914. ‘It is militarism run stark mad.’ House’s views may have been shaped in part by a personal experience: he was a ‘political colonel’ of the American type. He had been appointed to that rank in the Texas militia in return for political services there. But when Colonel House visited Berlin, the Germans took him to be a military man and always sat him with the generals at dinner. His views on the prevalence of militarism may have owed something to this unfortunate misunderstanding. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, viewed from across the Atlantic, pre-war Europe presented a curious spectacle. Senior statesmen, emperors and kings attended public occasions wearing military uniform; elaborate military reviews were an integral part of the public ceremonial of power; immense illuminated naval displays drew huge crowds and filled the pages of the illustrated journals; conscript armies grew in size until they became male microcosms of the nation; the cult of military display entered the public and the private life of even the smallest communities. In what ways did this ‘militarism’ shape the decisions that led Europe to war in 1914? Did the roots of the July Crisis lie, as some historians have argued, in an abdication of responsibility by civilian politicians and a usurpation of political power by the generals?

There was without doubt a struggle between the soldiers and the civilians within the pre-war executives: it was a struggle for money. Defence expenditure accounted for a substantial share of government spending. Military commanders keen to improve equipment, training and infrastructure had to contend (as they do today) with civilian politicians for access to government resources. Conversely, ministers of finance and their political allies fought to impose restraint in the name of fiscal rigour or domestic consolidation. Who prevailed in these contests depended on the structure of the institutional environment and the prevailing domestic and international political constellation.

Until 1908, the chaotic structure of the Russian military command made it difficult for the generals to lobby government effectively. But the balance began to shift from 1908, when reforms to the military administration created a more concentrated executive structure, establishing the minister of war as the pre-eminent defence official with the exclusive right to report to the Tsar on military matters. From 1909, a rivalry of epic bitterness evolved between the new war minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov (who was still in post in July 1914) and the strong-willed conservative finance minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov. Backed by the powerful premier Pyotr Stolypin, Kokovtsov, a champion of fiscal responsibility and domestic economic development, routinely blocked or curtailed Sukhomlinov’s draft budgets. Professional friction swiftly deepened into lively personal hatred.118 Sukhomlinov thought Kokovtsov ‘narrow, verbose and self-seeking’; Kokovtsov accused the minister of war (with more justice) of incompetence, irresponsibility and corruption.

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We can discern analogous tensions in every European executive. In Britain, the Liberals campaigned (and won an absolute majority) in 1906 on the promise to cut back the vast military expenditure of the Boer War years under the slogan ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’. Budgetary constraints were a significant factor in the decision to seek an understanding with France and Russia. One consequence was that, while British naval budgets continued to soar (British naval spending was three times the German figure in 1904 and still more than double in 1913), army expenditure remained static throughout the pre-war years, forcing War Minister Haldane to focus on efficiency savings and reorganization rather than expansion. In Austria-Hungary, the tumultuous domestic politics of dualism virtually paralysed the monarchy’s military development after the turn of the century, as autonomist groups within the Hungarian parliament fought to starve the monarchy’s joint army of Hungarian tax revenues and recruits. In this environment, proposals for increased military allocations were worn down in endless legislative feuding, and the Habsburg military languished in a condition, as the Austrian staff chief put it, of ‘persistent stagnation’. This was one reason why, as late as 1912, Austria-Hungary spent only 2.6 per cent of its net national product on defence – a smaller proportion than any other European power and certainly far below what its economy could afford (the figures for Russia, France and Germany in that year were 4.5, 4.0 and 3.8 per cent respectively).

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by Joel | 30 October 2026 · 5:14 am

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 199-202:

Britain presents a rather different picture. Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign. George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Nor did he have to contend, as his French colleagues did, with over-mighty functionaries in his own Foreign Office. Grey’s continuity in office alone assured him a more consistent influence over policy than most of his French colleagues ever enjoyed. While Edward Grey remained in control of the Foreign Office for the years between December 1905 and December 1916, the same period in France saw fifteen ministers of foreign affairs come and go. Moreover, Grey’s arrival at the Foreign Office consolidated the influence of a network of senior officials who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy. Grey was without doubt the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe.

Like most of his nineteenth-century predecessors, Sir Edward Grey was born into the top tier of British society. He was the descendant of a distinguished line of Whig grandees – his great grand-uncle was the Earl Grey of the 1832 Reform Bill and eponym of the popular scented tea. Of all the politicians who walked the European political stage before 1914, Grey is one of the most baffling. His aloof and lofty style did not go down well with the rank and file of the Liberal Party. He had long been a Liberal MP, yet he believed that foreign policy was too important to be subjected to the agitations of parliamentary debate. He was a foreign secretary who knew little of the world outside Britain, had never shown much interest in travelling, spoke no foreign languages and felt ill at ease in the company of foreigners. He was a Liberal politician whose vision of policy was opposed by most Liberals and supported by most Conservatives. He became the most powerful member of the faction known as ‘the liberal imperialists’, yet he appears to have cared little for the British Empire – his views on foreign policy and national security were tightly focused on the European continent.

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There was a curious dissonance between Grey’s persona – private and public – and his modus operandi in politics. As a young man, he had shown little sign of intellectual curiosity, political ambition or drive. He idled away his years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent most of his time becoming Varsity champion in real tennis, before graduating with a third in Jurisprudence, a subject he had chosen because it was reputed to be easy. His first (unpaid) political post was fixed up through Whig family connections. As an adult, Grey always cultivated the image of a man for whom politics was a wearisome duty, rather than a vocation. When parliament was dissolved in 1895 following a Liberal defeat in a key vote, Grey, who was then serving as an MP and parliamentary under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, professed to feel no regrets. ‘I shall never be in office again and the days of my stay in the House of Commons are probably numbered. We [he and his wife Dorothy] are both very relieved.’ Grey was a passionate naturalist, birdwatcher and fisherman. By the turn of the century, he was already well known as the author of a justly celebrated essay on fly-fishing. Even as foreign secretary, he was apt to leave his desk at the earliest opportunity for country jaunts and disliked being recalled to London any sooner than was absolutely necessary. Some of those who worked with Grey, such as the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, felt that the country excursions were getting out of hand and that the foreign secretary would be well advised to ‘spare some time from his ducks to learn French’. Colleagues found it difficult to discern political motivation in Grey; he struck them as ‘devoid of personal ambition, aloof and unapproachable’. And yet Grey did develop a deep appetite for power and a readiness to deploy conspiratorial methods in order to obtain and hold on to it. His accession to the post of foreign secretary was the fruit of careful planning with his trusted friends and fellow liberal imperialists, Herbert Asquith and R. B. Haldane. In the ‘Relugas Compact’, a plot hatched at Grey’s fishing lodge in the Scottish hamlet of that name, the three men agreed to push aside the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and establish themselves in key cabinet posts. Secretiveness and a preference for discreet, behind-the-scenes dealing remained a hallmark of his style as foreign secretary. The posture of gentlemanly diffidence belied an intuitive feel for the methods and tactics of adversarial politics.

Grey quickly secured unchallenged control over the policy-making process, ensuring that British policy focused primarily on the ‘German threat’. It would be going too far, of course, to view this reorientation of British policy as a function solely of Edward Grey’s power. Grey was not the puppet-master; the men of the new policy – Bertie, Hardinge, Nicolson, Mallet, Tyrrell and so on – were not manipulated or controlled by him, but worked alongside him as the members of a loose coalition driven by shared sentiments. Indeed, Grey was quite dependent on some of these collaborators – many of his decisions and memoranda, for example, were modelled closely on reports from Hardinge. The ascendancy of the Grey group was eased by recent structural reforms to the Foreign Office whose object had not been to reinforce the authority of the foreign secretary, but rather to parcel influence out more widely across a range of senior officials. Nevertheless, the energy and vigilance with which Grey maintained his ascendancy are impressive. It helped, of course, that he enjoyed the firm support of his former co-conspirator Herbert Asquith, prime minister from 1908 until 1916. The backing of a large part of the Conservative bloc in the House of Commons was another important asset – and Grey proved adept at maintaining his cross-party appeal.

But Grey’s plenitude of power and consistency of vision did not entirely protect British policy-making from the agitations characteristic of the European executives. The anti-German position adopted by the Grey group did not enjoy wide support outside the Foreign Office. It was not even backed by the majority of the British cabinet. The Liberal government, and the Liberal movement more generally, were polarized by the tension between liberal imperialist and radical elements. Many of the leading radicals, and they included some of the most venerable figures in the party, deplored the foreign secretary’s policy of alignment with Russia. They accused Grey and his associates of adopting a pose towards Germany that was unnecessarily provocative. They doubted whether the advantages of appeasing Russia outweighed the potential benefits of friendship with the German Empire. They worried whether the creation of a Triple Entente might not pressure Germany into adopting an ever more aggressive stance and they pressed for détente with Berlin. A further problem was the complexion of British public opinion, especially within the cultural and political elite, which, despite intermittent Anglo-German ‘press wars’, was drifting into a more pro-German mood during the last few years before the outbreak of war. Antagonism to Germany coexisted across the British elites with multi-layered cultural ties and a deep admiration of the country’s cultural, economic and scientific achievements.

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by Joel | 29 October 2026 · 5:52 am

Who Ruled France’s Third Republic?

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 190-193:

In France, there was a different but broadly analogous dynamic. To a much greater extent than in Russia, the foreign ministry, or the Quai d’Orsay as it was known on account of its location, enjoyed formidable power and autonomy. It was a socially cohesive and relatively stable organization with a high sense of its own calling. A dense network of family connections reinforced the ministry’s esprit de corps: the brothers Jules and Paul Cambon were the ambassadors to Berlin and London respectively, the ambassador to St Petersburg in 1914, Maurice Paléologue, was Jules and Paul’s brother-in-law, and there were other dynasties – the Herbettes, the de Margeries, and the de Courcels, to name just a few. The ministry of foreign affairs protected its independence through habits of secrecy. Sensitive information was only rarely released to cabinet ministers. It was not unusual for senior functionaries to withhold information from the most senior politicians, even from the president of the Republic himself. In January 1895, for example, during the tenure of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux, President Casimir Périer resigned after only six months in office, protesting that the ministry of foreign affairs had failed to keep him informed even of the most important developments. Policy documents were treated as arcana. Raymond Poincaré was informed of the details of the Franco-Russian Alliance only when he became premier and foreign minister in 1912.

But the relative independence of the ministry did not necessarily confer power and autonomy upon the minister. French foreign ministers tended to be weak, weaker indeed than their own ministerial staff. One reason for this was the relatively rapid turnover of ministers, a consequence of the perennially high levels of political turbulence in pre-war France. Between 1 January 1913 and the outbreak of war, for example, there were no fewer than six different foreign ministers. Ministerial office was a more transitory and less important stage in the life cycle of French politicians than in Britain, Germany or Austria-Hungary. And in the absence of any code of cabinet solidarity, the energies and ambition of ministers tended to be consumed in the bitter factional strife that was part of the everyday life of government in the Third Republic.

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Of course, there were exceptions to this rule. If a minister stayed in power for long enough and possessed sufficient determination and industry, he could certainly imprint his personality upon the workings of the ministry. Théophile Delcassé is a good example. He remained in office for a staggering seven years (from June 1898 until June 1905) and established his mastery over the ministry not only through tireless work, but also by ignoring his permanent officials in Paris and cultivating a network of like-minded ambassadors and functionaries from across the organization. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the waxing and waning of specific offices within the system produced adjustments in the distribution of power. Under a forceful minister like Delcassé, the power-share of the senior civil service functionaries known collectively as the Centrale tended to shrink, while the ambassadors, freed from the constraints imposed by the centre, flourished, just as Izvolsky and Hartwig did during the early years of Sazonov. Delcassé’s long spell in office saw the emergence of an inner cabinet of senior ambassadors around the Cambon brothers (London and Berlin) and Camille Barrère (Rome). The ambassadors met regularly in Paris to discuss policy and lobby key officials. They communicated with the minister through private letters, bypassing the functionaries of the Centrale.

The senior ambassadors developed an extraordinarily elevated sense of their own importance, especially if we measure it against the professional ethos of today’s ambassadors. Paul Cambon is a characteristic example: he remarked in a letter of 1901 that the whole of French diplomatic history amounted to little more than a long list of attempts by agents abroad to achieve something in the face of resistance from Paris. When he disagreed with his official instructions from the capital, he not infrequently burned them. During a tense conversation with Justin de Selves, minister of foreign affairs from June 1911 until January 1912, Cambon somewhat tactlessly informed de Selves that he considered himself the minister’s equal. This claim looks less bizarre if we bear in mind that between 1898, when he became ambassador to London, and the summer of 1914, Cambon saw nine ministers enter and leave office – two of them did so twice. Cambon did not regard himself as a subordinate employee of the government, but as a servant of France whose expertise entitled him to a major role in the policy-making process.

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Underpinning Cambon’s exalted sense of self was the belief – shared by many of the senior ambassadors – that one did not merely represent France, one personified it. Though he was ambassador in London from 1898 until 1920, Cambon spoke not a word of English. During his meetings with Edward Grey (who spoke no French), he insisted that every utterance be translated into French, including easily recognized words such as ‘yes’. He firmly believed – like many members of the French elite – that French was the only language capable of articulating rational thought and he objected to the foundation of French schools in Britain on the eccentric grounds that French people raised in Britain tended to end up mentally retarded. Cambon and Delcassé established a close working relationship whose fruit was the Entente Cordiale of 1904. It was Cambon, more than anyone else, who laid the groundwork for the Entente, working hard from 1901 to persuade his British interlocutors to settle over Morocco, while at the same time urging Delcassé to relinquish France’s putative claims on Egypt.

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by Joel | 28 October 2026 · 4:57 am

Europe’s Monarchs in Early 1900s

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 170-175:

Early twentieth-century Europe was a continent of monarchies. Of the six most important powers, five were monarchies of one kind or another; only one (France) was a republic. The relatively new nation-states of the Balkan peninsula – Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania – were all monarchies. The Europe of fast cruisers, radio-telegraph, and electric cigar-lighters still carried at its heart this ancient, glittering institution yoking large and complex states to the vagaries of human biology. The European executives were still centred on the thrones and the men or women who sat on them. Ministers in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were imperial appointees. The three emperors had unlimited access to state papers. They also exercised formal authority over their respective armed forces. Dynastic institutions and networks structured the communications between states. Ambassadors presented their credentials to the sovereign in person and direct communications and meetings between monarchs continued to take place throughout the pre-war years; indeed they acquired a heightened importance, creating a parallel plane of interaction whose relationship to official diplomacy was sometimes difficult to ascertain.

Monarchs were symbolic as well as political actors, and in this role they could capture and focus collective emotions and associations. When Parisian onlookers gawped at Edward VII sprawled in a chair outside his hotel smoking a cigar, they felt they were looking at England in the form of a very fat, fashionable and confident man. His triumphant ascent in Parisian public opinion in 1903 helped smooth the path to the Entente signed with France in the following year. Even the mild-mannered despot Nicholas II was greeted like a conquering hero by the French when he visited Paris in 1896, despite his autocratic political philosophy and negligible charisma, because he was seen as the personification of the Franco-Russian Alliance. And who embodied the most unsettling aspects of German foreign policy – its vacillations, lack of focus and frustrated ambition – better than the febrile, tactless, panic-prone, overbearing Kaiser Wilhelm, the man who dared to advise Edvard Grieg on how to conduct Peer Gynt? Whether or not the Kaiser actually made German policy, he certainly symbolized it for Germany’s opponents.

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At the core of the monarchical club that reigned over pre-war Europe was the trio of imperial cousins: Tsar Nicholas II, Kaiser Wilhelm II and George V. By the turn of the twentieth century, the genealogical web of Europe’s reigning families had thickened almost to the point of fusion. Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. Tsar Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, was Victoria’s granddaughter. The mothers of George V and Nicholas II were sisters from the house of Denmark. Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas II were both great-great grandsons of Tsar Paul I. The Kaiser’s great-aunt, Charlotte of Prussia, was the Tsar’s grandmother. Viewed from this perspective, the outbreak of war in 1914 looks rather like the culmination of a family feud. Assessing how much influence these monarchs wielded over or within their respective executives is difficult. Britain, Germany and Russia represented three very different kinds of monarchy. Russia’s was, in theory at least, an autocracy in which the parliamentary and constitutional restraints on the monarch’s authority were weak. Edward VII and George V were constitutional and parliamentary monarchs with no direct access to the levers of power. Kaiser Wilhelm II was something in between – in Germany, a constitutional and parliamentary system was grafted on to elements of the old Prussian military monarchy that had survived the process of national unification. But the formal structures of governance were not necessarily the most significant determinants of monarchical influence. Other important variables included the determination, competence and intellectual grasp of the monarch himself, the ability of ministers to block unwelcome initiatives and the extent of agreement between monarchs and their governments.

One of the most striking features of the influence wielded by the sovereigns on the formulation of foreign policy is its variation over time. Edward VII, who presided over the diplomatic realignments of 1904–7, had strong views on foreign policy and prided himself on being well informed. His attitudes were those of an imperialist ‘jingo’; he was infuriated by Liberal opposition to the [Second] Afghan War of 1878–9, for example, and told the colonial administrator Sir Henry Bartle Frere: ‘If I had my way I should not be content until we had taken the whole of Afghanistan and kept it.’ He was overjoyed at the news of the raid against the Transvaal Republic in 1895, supportive of Cecil Rhodes’s involvement in it, and infuriated by the Kaiser’s Kruger telegram. Throughout his adult life he maintained a determined hostility to Germany. The roots of this antipathy appear to have lain partly in his opposition to his mother, Queen Victoria, whom he regarded as excessively friendly to Prussia, and partly in his fear and loathing of Baron Stockmar, the unsmiling Germanic pedagogue appointed by Victoria and Albert to hold the young Edward to a regime of unstinting study. The Prussian-Danish War of 1864 was a formative episode in his early political life – Edward’s sympathies in that conflict rested firmly with the Danish relatives of his new bride. After his accession to the throne, Edward was an important sponsor of the anti-German group of policy-makers around Sir Francis Bertie.

The king’s influence reached its height in 1903, when an official visit to Paris – ‘the most important royal visit in modern history’, as it has been called – paved the road towards the Entente between the two imperial rivals. Relations between the two western empires were still soured at this time by French outrage over the Boer War. The visit, which had been organized on Edward’s own initiative, was a public relations triumph and did much to clear the air. After the Entente had been signed, Edward continued to work towards an agreement with Russia, even though, like many of his countrymen, he detested the tsarist political system and remained suspicious of the designs that Russia had on Persia, Afghanistan and northern India. In 1906, when he heard that the Russian foreign minister Izvolsky was in Paris, he rushed south from Scotland in the hope that a meeting could be set up. Izvolsky responded in kind and made the journey to London, where the two men met for talks that – according to Charles Hardinge – ‘helped materially to smooth the path of the negotiations then in progress for an agreement with Russia’. In both these instances, the king was not deploying executive powers as such, but acting as a kind of supernumerary ambassador. He could do this because his priorities accorded closely with those of the liberal imperialist faction at Whitehall, whose dominance in foreign policy he had himself helped to reinforce.

George V was a very different case. Until his accession in 1910, he took little interest in foreign affairs and had acquired only the sketchiest sense of Britain’s relations with other powers. The Austrian ambassador Count Mensdorff was delighted with the new king, who seemed, by contrast with his father, to be innocent of strong biases for or against any foreign state. If Mensdorff hoped the changing of the guard would produce an attenuation of the anti-German theme in British policy, he was soon to be disappointed. In foreign policy, the new monarch’s seeming neutrality merely meant that policy remained firmly in the hands of the liberal imperialists around Grey. George never acquired a political network to rival his father’s, refrained from backstairs intrigue and avoided expounding policy without the explicit permission of his ministers. He was in more or less constant communication with Edward Grey and granted the foreign secretary frequent audiences whenever he was in London. He was scrupulous about seeking Grey’s approval for the content of political conversations with foreign representatives – especially his German relatives. George’s accession to the throne thus resulted in a sharp decline in the crown’s influence on the general orientation of foreign policy, even though the two monarchs wielded identical constitutional powers.

Even within the highly authoritarian setting of the Russian autocracy, the influence of the Tsar over foreign policy was subject to narrow constraints and waxed and waned over time. Like George V, the new Tsar was a blank sheet of paper when he came to the throne in 1894.

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by Joel | 27 October 2026 · 6:14 am

Europe’s Shifting Alliances, 1887-1907

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 122-123, 157-159:

If you compare a diagram of the alliances among the European great powers in 1887 with a similar map for the year 1907, you see the outlines of a transformation. The first diagram reveals a multi-polar system, in which a plurality of forces and interests balance each other in precarious equilibrium. Britain and France were rivals in Africa and South Asia; Britain confronted Russia in Persia and Central Asia. France was determined to reverse the verdict of the German victory of 1870. Conflicting interests in the Balkans gave rise to tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Italy and Austria were rivals in the Adriatic and quarrelled intermittently over the status of Italophone communities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while there were tensions between Italy and France over the latter’s policy in northern Africa. All these pressures were held in check by the patchwork of the 1887 system. The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy (20 May 1882) prevented the tensions between Rome and Vienna from breaking into open conflict. The defensive Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia (18 June 1887) contained articles deterring either power from seeking its fortunes in war with another continental state and insulated the Russo-German relationship against the fallout from Austro-Russian tensions.* The Russo-German link also ensured that France would be unable to build an anti-German coalition with Russia. And Britain was loosely tied into the continental system through the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887 with Italy and Austria – an exchange of notes rather than a treaty – whose purpose was to thwart French challenges in the Mediterranean and Russian ones in the Balkans or the Turkish Straits.

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Move forward twenty years to a diagram of the European alliances in 1907, and the picture has changed utterly. You see a bipolar Europe organized around two alliance systems. The Triple Alliance is still in place (though Italy’s loyalty to it is increasingly questionable). France and Russia are conjoined in the Franco-Russian Alliance (drafted in 1892 and ratified in 1894), which stipulates that if any member of the Triple Alliance should mobilize, the two signatories will ‘at the first news of this event and without any previous agreement being necessary’ mobilize immediately the whole of their forces and deploy them ‘with such speed that Germany shall be forced to fight simultaneously on the East and on the West’. Britain is linked to the Franco-Russian Alliance through the Entente Cordiale with France (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. It will be some years before these loose alignments tauten into the coalitions that will fight the First World War in Europe, but the profiles of two armed camps are already clearly visible.

The polarization of Europe’s geopolitical system was a crucial precondition for the war that broke out in 1914. It is almost impossible to see how a crisis in Austro-Serbian relations, however grave, could have dragged the Europe of 1887 into a continental war. The bifurcation into two alliance blocs did not cause the war; indeed it did as much to mute as to escalate conflict in the pre-war years. Yet without the two blocs, the war could not have broken out in the way that it did. The bipolar system structured the environment in which the crucial decisions were made. To understand how that polarization came about, it is necessary to answer four interlinked questions. Why did Russia and France form an alliance against Germany in the 1890s? Why did Britain opt to throw in its lot with that alliance? What role did Germany play in bringing about its own encirclement by a hostile coalition? And to what extent can the structural transformation of the alliance system account for the events that brought war to Europe and the world in 1914?

…

The Convention of 1907 was not driven by hostility towards, or fear of, Germany. It was rather the other way around: since Russia posed the greater threat to Britain across a greater range of vulnerable points, it was Russia that must be appeased and Germany that must be opposed. This had been the dominant British thinking on a rapprochement with Russia since before the turn of the century and it remained valid after the Convention was signed. In March 1909, Sir Charles Hardinge put the matter succinctly. ‘We have no pending questions with Germany except that of naval construction,’ he told Sir Arthur Nicolson, who would soon succeed him, ‘while our whole future in Asia is bound up with maintaining the best and most friendly relations with Russia. We cannot afford to sacrifice in any way our entente with Russia, even for the sake of a reduced naval programme.’ The same point can be made for the Russian decision-makers who agreed the Convention: this was not, for them, a policy directed against Germany, but rather a retrenching move designed to secure breathing space for domestic consolidation or (depending on whom you asked) greater freedom of external action. Of particular interest was the link between a deal over Persia and the prospect of British support for improved Russian access to the Turkish Straits. For Izvolsky and his ambassador in London, Count Benckendorff, the Straits question was ‘the core of the Convention’ and the key to securing favourable revision of Russian access rights at a ‘suitable time’ in the near future.

In other words: while the new international system that emerged from 1907 chiefly disadvantaged Germany, we should not assume that this outcome faithfully reflected the designs that brought it about. Only in the case of France can one speak of a policy that consistently assigned a high priority to containing Germany. It makes more sense to think of this array of agreements as the European consequence of world-historical transitions – the Sino-Japanese War and the emergence of Japan as a regional power, the fiscal burdens imposed by African conflicts and the Great Game in Central Asia, the retreat of Ottoman power in Africa and south-western Europe, and the rise of the China Question, meaning not just the great-power competition there but also the high levels of Chinese domestic turbulence that resulted. Germany’s ‘restlessness’ and its parvenu importuning were part of the picture, but they were perceived within a field of vision that encompassed broader concerns. The once widely held view that Germany caused its own isolation through its egregious international behaviour is not borne out by a broader analysis of the processes by which the realignments of this era were brought about.

In fact the causal relationship between antagonism to Germany and the new alliance system ran to some extent in the other direction: it was not that antagonism to Germany caused its isolation, but rather that the new system itself channelled and intensified hostility towards the German Empire. In Russia’s case, for example, the victory of Japan in the East and the provisional settlement of the imperial quarrel with Britain in Central Asia inevitably refocused foreign policy on the sole remaining theatre in which it could still pursue an imperial vision – the Balkans, an area where conflict with Austria-Hungary and, by extension, Germany was going to be difficult to avoid. The old factional divide within the Russian foreign policy community between ‘Asianists’ and ‘Europeanists’ was resolved in the latter’s favour. Under Izvolsky and Sazonov, Europeanists, who tended to distrust Germany and to favour good relations with Britain and France, always occupied a majority of the key positions. The Anglo-French Entente likewise neutralized the anti-British sentiment that before 1904 had intermittently diluted the Germanophobia of French statesmen.

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Filed under Japan, China, military, Turkey, Mediterranean, Europe, Russia, nationalism, Britain, Balkans

by Joel | 26 October 2026 · 5:32 am

This week’s newsletter from Culture.pl contains several articles about Poland’s connections with Asia. Here are some excerpts (minus photos) from Harbin: A Polish City in China by Anna Cymer (2021), which utilises material from Edward Kajdański’s article ‘The Role of Poles in the Construction and Organisation of the East China Railway: The Memoirs of Engineer Stefan Offenberg’ published in Gdańsk East Asian Studies in 2016.

In the 1890s, Russia committed itself to a major investment: the construction of a rail link between the south Siberian town of Chita and the important Russian port on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok. The shortest possible route was mapped out through Manchuria, a region that belonged to China. The two countries came to an agreement – in exchange for Russia’s military assistance, the Chinese agreed to the building of the nearly 1500-kilometre railway line through its territory.

The initiator and manager of this enormous project was the then-finance minister of Russia (soon to become premier) Sergei Witte. It is he who hired Polish engineers to design and build the East China Railway. Although the late 19th century was not a time of good relations between Russia and partitioned Poland, Witte nonetheless recognised the talents of Polish specialists in the field of construction; he appointed Polish engineer Stanisław Kierbedź as the de facto manager of this vital project (he was the nephew of another Stanisław Kierbedź, the famed designer of then-innovative iron truss bridges – notably the bridge over the Wisła River in Warsaw which opened in 1864 and was popularly known as the Kierbedź Bridge).

The precise laying out of the route of the railway was undertaken by railroad engineer Stefan Offenberg, who had earlier managed the construction of one of the key stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Offenberg described his experiences in Manchuria in his book The Role of Poles in the Construction and Organisation of the East China Railway. Thanks to his memoirs, we know, for example, about the harsh weather and challenging landscape conditions the Polish engineers had to endure as they fought their way across the taiga laying out the railway’s route.

Construction of the East China Railway commenced in 1897. Selected as the base of the project was a small fishing village called Harbin (also known as Charbin). That is where the officials overseeing the project were to live, along with the planning engineers. Engineer Adam Szydłowski undertook the planning of the new city that was to arise and the organisation of the massive project’s entire support infrastructure.

Some sources indicate that it was Szydłowski himself who selected Harbin as the central location for the enterprise. Its convenient location on the Sungari River not only lent itself to effectively oversee the construction work, but Harbin also connected with a new branch of the southern bound railway which led to Russian bases in the Yellow Sea port of Dalian.

In the spring of 1898, Szydłowski purchased the building of the former brewery in Harbin and made it the cornerstone of his new city. Other than Szydłowski, early residents of the new settlement included his technicians Raweński, Wysocki and Pawlewski, whose given names have been lost over time. It was not long before the first new homes for construction workers were built in the fishing village. The rail line was divided into a number of segments of which Poles were responsible for roughly half, but the work was not done only by Russians and Poles. From the very start, the city of Harbin was a melting pot of nationalities: Germans, Belgians, Austrians and Englishmen lived there as well, representatives of various firms that supplied the railroad with machinery and other necessities. Even more nationalities were to be found amongst the railroad construction workers: while Poles played a significant role in the actual physical construction work (among them Polish revolutionaries who had been exiled to Siberia), the East China Railway was also built by Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Greeks, Turks, and Mongolians.

The first cars of the East China Railway rolled out in 1903. That is when the growth of the city of Harbin began in earnest – thanks to the opening of the vital rail link, it became a fast growing metropolitan area with a steadily growing population (amongst whom was a large cohort of businessmen and traders).

Not insignificant, too, was the city’s special renown as a welcoming international city. Thanks to this reputation, the city attracted political activists who had been forced to flee their own countries (such as opponents of the Soviet October Revolution). In 1917, Harbin was already a city of over 100,000 residents, including members of some 33 nationalities. The most numerous of these groups for many years were the Poles, who, at their height, numbered ten thousand. From the beginning of the 20^th century, Polish schools were open in Harbin (e.g. the Henryk Sienkiewicz High School, among whose alumni was the future author Teodor Parnicki), a Polish press flourished and a neo-Gothic Polish church stood on a parcel of land acquired by Offenberg.

One of the builders of the railroad, engineer Karol Weber, established the ‘Gospoda Polska’ (Polish Inn) Association in 1907 for which he built a lavish headquarters in the city. Harbin hosted a Polish scout chapter and a chapter of the Polish Youth Union. For many years, the director of the Russo-Chinese Bank was neither Russian nor Chinese, but rather a Pole, Stanisław Gabriel; for a year, a Pole was the city’s mayor; and a number of Poles sat on the board of the East China Railway. Among the many enterprises established in Harbin by Poles was the local brewery established in 1900 by Jan Wróblewski. The brewery remains active to this day and it is probably China’s oldest beer brewery.

In 1937, Russia and China signed an agreement according to which only members of those two nations could work on the railway. This agreement forced many Poles to leave Harbin; the Polish diaspora was also shaken by the arrival of the Red Army in 1945. Harbin’s last Polish newspaper ceased to appear in 1940. In 1947, the authorities decided to deport the Poles who remained in the city; the repatriated Poles were resettled in Elbląg, Olsztyn, Opole, Wałbrzych, Szczecin and elsewhere. A Harbiners’ Club is still active in Szczecin and it lobbied successfully for a traffic circle to be named for ‘Polish Manchuria’. The Pomeranian Library in Szczecin holds a collection of archives and memorabilia recalling the Polish presence in Harbin.

Today, Harbin has a population of five milllion and is the second largest and second most important city in north-eastern China. Few traces remain of the Polish presence in Harbin’s early years: the neo-Gothic church (formerly St Stanislaus Church; since 2004, the Church of the Most Holy Heart of Jesus) still stands in the city centre; the brewery mentioned above continues to operate; and the bridge over the Sungari River was long referred to as the Kierbedź Bridge. For over a dozen years, there has been a Polish-language program offered at the Harbin Normal University (HNU).

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Filed under China, education, industry, language, migration, Poland, Russia, USSR

by Joel | 24 October 2026 · 5:50 am

Many Tentacles of Montenegro

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 90-92:

Vienna could in theory offset Serbian hostility by seeking better relations with Bulgaria. But pursuing this option also entailed difficulties. Since there was still a bitter dispute over the border between Bulgaria and Romania, cosying up to Sofia brought the risk of alienating Bucharest. A hostile Bucharest was extremely undesirable because of the huge Romanian minority in Hungarian Transylvania. If Romania were to turn away from Vienna towards St Petersburg, the minority issue might well become a question of regional security. Hungarian diplomats and political leaders in particular warned that ‘Greater Romania’ posed as serious a threat to the dual monarchy as ‘Greater Serbia’.

A further concern was the little principality of Montenegro on the Adriatic coast. This picturesque, impoverished kingdom provided the backdrop for Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, where it appeared thinly disguised as the ‘Grand Duchy of Pontevedro’ (the German libretto gave the game away by explicitly stating that the singers should wear ‘Montenegrin national costume’). Montenegro was the smallest of the Balkan states, with a population of only 250,000 scattered across a beautiful but unforgiving terrain of black peaks and plunging ravines. This was a country where the king, dressed in a splendid uniform of gold, silver, red and blue, could be seen smoking at dusk in front of his palace, hoping to chat with a passer-by. When the Prague journalist Egon Erwin Kisch travelled by foot from Cetinje, then the capital of Montenegro, to the beautiful port city of Rijeka (now in Croatia) in the summer of 1913, he was disconcerted to hear gunshots ringing out across the valleys. He wondered at first whether a Balkan war had broken out, but his guard assured him that it was just the Montenegrin youth with their Russian rifles shooting small fish in the fast-flowing mountain streams.

Though poor and tiny, Montenegro was not unimportant. Its mountain guns on the Lovčen heights overlooked the indefensible Austrian harbour facilities at Cattaro on the Adriatic, to the vexation of Habsburg naval planners. Nikola, the reigning prince since 1861 and thus the third-longest-serving European monarch after Queen Victoria and Franz Joseph, was extraordinarily ambitious. He had succeeded in doubling the territory of his kingdom at the Berlin Congress of 1878, expanded it again during the annexation crisis of 1908, and thereafter had his eye on a piece of northern Albania. He elevated himself to the status of king in 1910. He also married off his female offspring with quite extraordinary skill. King Petar Karadjordjević of Serbia was his son-in-law (though his Montenegrin wife had died by the time Petar was crowned); another of Nikola’s daughters, Elena, married Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (king from 1900); two others married Russian archdukes in St Petersburg, where they became prominent figures in Russian high society. Nikola exploited his strategically sensitive position in order to attract funding from powerful foreign sponsors, most importantly Russia. In 1904, he demonstrated his solidarity with the great Slav ally by solemnly declaring war on Japan. The Russians reciprocated with military subsidies and a military mission whose task was the ‘reorganisation of the Montenegrin army’.

Italy, linked through its royal house with Montenegro, was a further complication. Italy had been a member of the Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany since May 1882 and renewed its membership in 1891, 1902 and 1912. But public sentiment on the question of relations with Austria was deeply divided. Broadly speaking, liberal, secular, nationalist Italy tended to favour a policy of confrontation with Austrians, especially in the Adriatic, which Italian nationalists regarded as a natural avenue for the consolidation of Italian influence. Catholic, clerical, conservative Italy tended by contrast to favour a policy of rapprochement and collaboration with Vienna. Reflecting these divided loyalties, Rome operated an elaborate, multi-layered and often contradictory diplomacy. In 1900 and 1902, the Italian government signed secret agreements with France that cancelled out most of its treaty obligations to Vienna and Berlin. From 1904, moreover, the Italians made it increasingly clear that they viewed Austro-Hungarian policy in the Balkans as impinging on their interests in the area. Montenegro was seen as a promising field for the expansion of Italian commercial and cultural influence in the Balkans and Foreign Minister Tomaso Tittoni cultivated very friendly relations with Belgrade and Sofia.

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Filed under Romania, military, Russia, nationalism, Italy, Hungary, Balkans, Austria, Bulgaria

by Joel | 19 October 2026 · 5:21 am

When Serbia Forsook Austria for France

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 28-30:

In June 1881, Austria-Hungary and Serbia agreed a commercial treaty. Three weeks later, it was supplemented by a secret convention, negotiated and signed by Prince Milan himself, which stipulated that Austria-Hungary would not only assist Serbia in its efforts to secure elevation to the status of a kingdom but would also support Serbian claims to territorial annexations in Macedonia. Serbia, for its part, agreed not to undermine the monarchy’s position in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Article II stated that Serbia ‘would not permit any political, religious or other intrigue to be directed from her territory against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, including Bosnia, Herzegovina and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar’. Milan reinforced these agreements with a personal engagement in writing not to enter into ‘any kind of treaty’ with a third state without first consulting Vienna.

These agreements were, to be sure, a fragile foundation for good Austro-Serbian relations: they had no anchorage in the sentimental life of the Serbian public, which was deeply anti-Austrian; they symbolized a relationship of economic dependency which was increasingly unacceptable to Serbian nationalist opinion; and they depended on the cooperation of an erratic and increasingly unpopular Serbian monarch. But as long as Milan Obrenović remained on the throne, they at least ensured that Serbia would not side with Russia against Austria, and that the sharp end of Belgrade’s foreign policy would stay pointed in the direction of Macedonia and the coming contest with Bulgaria, rather than at Bosnia and Herzegovina. A new trade treaty was signed in 1892 and the Secret Convention was renewed for ten years in 1889; it was allowed to expire thereafter, though it continued to be the operative platform for Serbian policy vis-à-vis Vienna.

The change of dynasty in 1903 signalled a major realignment. Austria was quick to recognize the Karadjordjević coup, partly because Petar had assured the Austrians beforehand that it was his intention to keep Serbia on an Austrophile course. But it was soon evident that Serbia’s new leaders planned to push towards greater economic and political independence. During 1905–6, a crisis unfolded in which trade policy, armaments orders, high finance and geopolitics were closely intertwined. Vienna pursued a threefold objective: to secure a commercial treaty with Serbia, to ensure that Serbian armaments orders would continue to be placed with Austrian firms, and to contract a major loan to Belgrade.

The failure to achieve agreement on any of these questions produced a drastic cooling of relations between the two neighbours, and the outcome was an unmitigated disaster for Vienna. The Serbian armaments orders went to the French firm Schneider-Creusot instead of to the Austrian rival, Škoda of Bohemia. The Austrians reacted by closing the border to Serbian pork, triggering a customs conflict that came to be known as the ‘pig war’ (1906–9). But this was a counter-productive measure, since Serbia quickly found other export markets (especially in Germany, France and Belgium) and at last began to build slaughterhouses on a substantial scale, thus emancipating itself from its long-standing dependence on Austro-Hungarian processing facilities. Finally, Belgrade secured a major loan again not from Vienna, but from Paris (offered in return for the placement of armaments orders with French firms).

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the larger significance of this French loan. Like all the emergent Balkan states, Serbia was an inveterate borrower, totally dependent on international credit, most of which was used to finance military expansion and infrastructural projects. Throughout the reign of King Milan, the Austrians remained willing lenders to Belgrade. But since these loans outran the debtor state’s financial resources, they had to be hypothecated against various pledges: for each loan some definite revenue was pledged, or some railway property mortgaged. It was agreed that pledged revenues from railways, stamp and liquor taxes should be paid into a special treasury controlled jointly by the representatives of the Serbian government and the bondholders. This arrangement kept the Serbian state afloat during the 1880s and 90s, but did nothing to restrain the financial profligacy of the Belgrade government, which had managed to accumulate an indebtedness of over 350 million francs by 1895. With bankruptcy looming, Belgrade negotiated a new loan through which almost all of the old debts were consolidated at a lower rate of interest. The pledged revenues were placed under a separate administration run partly by the representatives of the creditors.

In other words, fragile debtors like Serbia (the same applied to the other Balkan states and to the Ottoman Empire) could secure loans on reasonable terms only if they agreed to concessions of fiscal control that amounted to the partial hypothecation of sovereign state functions. For this reason among others, international loans were a political issue of the highest importance, inextricably wound up with diplomacy and power politics. French international lending in particular was highly politicized. Paris vetoed loans to governments whose policies were deemed unfriendly to French interests; it facilitated loans in return for economic or political concessions; on occasion it reluctantly conceded a loan to unreliable but strategically important clients in order to prevent them from seeking relief elsewhere. It pursued potential clients aggressively – in Serbia’s case the government were given to understand in the summer of 1905 that if they did not give France first refusal on the loan, the Paris money markets would be closed altogether to Serbia. Acknowledging this nexus between strategy and finance, the French foreign ministry merged its commercial and political divisions in 1907.

Seen against this background, the Serbian loan of 1906 was an important turning point. French financial relations with Belgrade became, in the words of an early American analyst of pre-war high finance, ‘more intimate and dominant’.66 The French came to own more than three quarters of all Serbian debt. These were vast commitments for the Serbian state – repayment schedules extended forwards to 1967 (in fact Belgrade defaulted on the greater part of its obligations after 1918). The lion’s share of this money went into military purchases (especially fast-firing artillery), most of which were transacted in France, much to the annoyance not just of Austrian, but also of British diplomats and armaments suppliers. The loan of 1906 also enabled Serbia to resist Vienna’s commercial pressure and to wage a protracted tariff war. ‘The undoubtedly successful issue of [Prime Minister] Mr Pašić’s resistance to [Austrian] demands,’ the British envoy in Belgrade reported in 1906, ‘marks a distinct step in the economic and political emancipation of Servia.’

These successes in the field of high finance should not distract us from the parlous condition of the Serbian economy as a whole. This had much less to do with Austrian tariff policy than with a process of economic decline that was deeply rooted in the country’s history and agrarian structure. The emergence and subsequent expansion of Serbia were accompanied by a process of drastic de-urbanization, as the mainly Muslim towns were depopulated through decades of harassment and deportations. What replaced the relatively urbanized and cosmopolitan imperial structures of the Ottoman periphery was a society and an economy entirely dominated by smallholding Christian peasants, a consequence in part of the absence of a home-grown Serbian aristocracy and in part of the ruling dynasty’s efforts to prevent the emergence of such a ruling class by blocking the consolidation of latifundial estates. While the cities shrank, the population grew at an awesome rate; hundreds of thousands of hectares of marginal land were opened up for exploitation by young families, loosening social constraints on marriage and fertility. But this rampant growth in the production of people did nothing to reverse the cycle of underperformance and decline that gripped the Serbian economy between the middle of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Per capita output in farming fell by 27.5 per cent between the early 1870s and 1910–12, partly because the expansion of arable land led to large-scale deforestation and thus to a decline in the pasture lands needed to sustain large-scale pig-husbandry, traditionally the most profitable and efficient arm of Serbian agricultural production. By the 1880s, the beautiful forested wilderness of the Šumadija – perfect pasture land for swine – had all but disappeared.

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Filed under Austria, Balkans, economics, France, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey

Tagged as Europe, Germany, history, politics, war

by Joel | 8 August 2026 · 5:21 am

Małgorzata Rejmer’s Book Bukareszt

This week’s newsletter from Culture.pl contains some articles about Polish connections with Romania. Here are some excerpts from an article by Mikołaj Gliński titled “Everyone Remembers Their Own Past Differently: Małgorzata Rejmer on Romania & Albania“:

The author Małgorzata Rejmer talks about similarities between Romania and Poland, and reveals the way Poland is perceived from a Romanian perspective. She shares details of the first reactions to her book ‘Bukareszt’, which is due to be released in Romanian. The writer also reveals the beginnings of her latest project, a book about Albania.

Mikołaj Gliński: When and how did you first find yourself in Romania?

Małgorzata Rejmer: I think it all began with the documentary Dzieci z Dekretu (The Decree Children), which I saw in 2007. It tells the story of a Romania in which Ceaușescu banned access to contraception, and it conveys how the absurd becomes normal, and how the everyday becomes hell, with a constant string of humiliation. It’s [shot in] the late 1980s, and factories run gynaecological check-ups of women, with testing material made of frog skin which changes colour in contact with the urine of a pregnant woman. I read all of Herta Muller’s books at the time, but it was only after my trip to Bucharest in 2009 that my curiosity was truly aroused. It was the longing for a city which I associated on the one hand with chaos and crumminess, and on the other hand, with beauty and pathos. For me, in a way it was a ‘crooked Paris’, an absolute mishmash, the glamorous and the plebeian all in one.

MG: When did you first have the idea of writing about Romania?

MR: In 2010, I began to write my doctoral thesis about Romanian cinema, and I read many books about Romania in a short period of time. And I just couldn’t believe it all. I knew that Romania was a fascinating country for a writer and anthropologist. On the one hand, it’s European and looks up to France and Germany, and on the other hand, it also looks back onto the Balkans and Turkey, it’s a mix of the culturally unique, of the provincial and the peripheral.

MG: Why did you choose reportage as a form of description? Your previous book, Toksymia, was a novel…

MR: I am not too attached to the idea that Bukareszt is a reportage piece. I don’t really consider myself a writer, and even less so a reporter. I am just a person who writes. I don’t have the workshop of a journalist, it’s difficult for me to write about a given subject. Either a subject flows out of me and writes itself, or no one could drag me with horses to sit down by my laptop. My writing is very capricious, and it costs me a lot of energy.

MG: The style in Bukareszt is very rich and diverse. You used different conventions (for example, the chapter about the revolution is written as a play, or even a parody, with acts, etc). You also draw on different cultural texts, (The Ballad of Master Manole, the epic of a lamb) as well as styles. I suppose those are not the typical elements of a reporter’s workshop?

MR: Bukareszt is literary and varied in style, because I had the feeling that this city is eclectic, and and that all of Romania is one big patchwork, and this was something that I wanted to render in the book’s language. When I write about a famous Romanian ballad, the language imitates the ballad, and when I write about the chaos of the revolution, I choose the form of a drama. I wanted to adapt the style to the theme, for the polyphony of the book to match the diversity of Bucharest. In the end, if I tried to write all the texts in one style, I would die of boredom. I have to have some fun in my life, to play around with form, and to try out different things. I adore Herta Muller’s reportage from Hunger and Silk, although nobody calls Muller a reporter. Using short sentences, she sketches out touching human portraits and universal stories about humanity. Muller is relentless, she writes with images, doesn’t back away from symbols, and she is at the very centre of the texts herself. I prefer this kind of writing to the most meticulous kind of reportage about some incredibly important and pertinent issue of our times.

MG: How did your Romanian friends react to your book? You do write about rather terrifying and shameful things from the country’s history: the terror of the security services, people spying on each other, prisons, the completely inhuman stories of women which resulted from the 1966 anti-abortion decree, and the taboo of a revolution – which perhaps never even took place?

MR: The book was read by a couple of Polish friends who live in Romania, and they were quite enthusiastic. Some time ago, a Romanian woman wrote to me saying that after reading Bukareszt, she felt proud of her country again, and wanted to get to know its history. This was moving for me. Only the chapter on abortion has been released in Romania so far, and it was well received. I read comments by young people for whom the text was a discovery, because they had become accustomed to an idealised vision of the Ceausescu era.

Bukareszt is my way of seeing Romania, and a certain selection of facts. You can polemicize about this selection, but it would be harder to argue with the facts. The question of memory is a separate issue – everyone remembers their own past differently, and everyone has their own vision of it. Bukareszt would be a collection of these crumbs, but they are all fragments of a shattered mirror, and they don’t reflect a reality but rather convey a mosaic.

Bukareszt will probably get released in Romania this year, and, possibly, there will then be a discussion around it. It’s possible, but not certain. Romanians are not interested in working through the collective memory. Even at book readings in Cluj and Bucharest, the question hanging over me was “Why do you write about such difficult things from the past? If the present is terrible, why would we need to dig into the past, on top of that?”

MG: Was the work on Bukareszt a difficult experience for you, personally? I am addressing the talks that you had to conduct with people who have had some terrible experiences. Almost all of the topics from the first part touch upon some kind of trauma…

MR: I always approached my protagonists with the conviction that I really want to talk to them, and not that I want to do an interview. These talks went on for hours. I had to recover after many of these stories, and I repeatedly returned to some of them. At times, I would cry together with the people who told me those stories. Suffering is inscribed into life, but I am most interested in the way that these people were able to cope with it. We all strive for normality even in the most abnormal of times.

MG: What was the most difficult thing for you get used to when you lived in Romania?

MR: I didn’t have any problems with getting used to Romania, but for a long time, I live there in house which very much resembled a squat, with parties running on until 5 in the morning. Recently I went to Bucharest once again, and I decided to stay in the old place out of nostalgia. There was a party once again, and this is something that is hard to get used to.

But apart from that, I didn’t have any problems getting acquainted with Bucharest. I spent some time growing up in a small town, and some time in the northern Praga district [in Warsaw], so Bucharest is close to my heart both in terms of the aesthetics and the atmosphere. And when a Romanian friend came to visit me, he even began to mark out [the district of] Grochów in his own way. For him, the Wiatraczna roundabout was evocative of the Fifth Iancului, the Astoria restaurant reminded him of Intermacedonia, and he would call the local kebab place the same way he would in Bucharest: ‘Ali Baba’.

MG: While reading your book, one can have the impression that many of these historical experiences and situations are, to a certain degree, similar to Polish history, except for over there, things were somehow… a lot worse, a bit like a nightmare. Is it possible to compare these histories? Where do the parallels end?

MR: I cannot answer your question, because I am not able to define where the limits of these similarities lie. I am not the one to trace them out, let the Polish and Romanian readership do it themselves, in accordance with their own subjective feelings.

But looking at this issue from an objective side, looking at the facts, we could say that after 1965, the Romanian version of communism was completely different to the Polish one. It had the face of one man, Nicolae Ceaușescu. He was the one responsible for the situation in the country, he bestowed all of the important posts upon members of his family, and prepared his son to become his successor. Historians call this ‘dynastic communism’. Ceaușescu was Romania. But let’s not forget that in the 1960s and 1970s Romanians led rather good lives, and in many ways, their situation was much better than the one in Poland. It was only the 1980s that brought about a sudden collapse and the fall of the state, as well as a suffering of the people with the complete indifference of the authorities.

The chapters on Romanian communism stir a lot of emotion, but it’s enough to read Kolymskoye Stories to see a completely different scale of human suffering. No matter what atrocity we would think of, man is capable of inventing a greater and more effective one. In this place, the book should have some kind of quotation about man being the most cruel of all animals. I agree.

MG: What is the stereotypical idea that Polish people have about Romania?

MR: To put it bluntly, Poles associate Romania with poverty, Gypsies and Dracula. It’s all stems from ignorance. Just go there, visit Transylvania, Bukovina and Maramuresz and your whole stance towards Romania changes. Poles have no idea about the scale of Romanian influence on European heritage. They don’t know what extraordinary intellectuals surfaced in Romania in the interwar period. A majority of the most acclaimed ones emigrated. And very few Poles know that Romanian cinema has been storming European film festivals for more than a decade, it’s the country’s best export commodities.

MG: Was your perspective as a person coming from Poland at all helpful in understanding Romania? Poland is unarguably also a country from the East of Europe, and a member of the former communist bloc. It possibly has a similar cultural and historical background, being a quite big but peripheral country, under foreign rule for a period of time, and one looking up to the West with both admiration and fascination…

MR: Yes, I think that this kind of stance that we are saturated with as Poles – the sense that we have been wronged by history, that we are underappreciated and marginalised in Europe – helped me understand Romanians. I often explained to them that Poles have a very similar inferiority complex, a problem of peasant roots, and that they are terribly sensitive to any outside criticism. But for Romanians, Poland is Europe, and it’s almost Germany. When I told them about the 123 years of history under partitions, about the sense of inferiority, Romanians would cry out: ‘But in the Middle Ages you were a superpower! And we never had a period of imperial Romania.’ They would also often say: ‘we have a common enemy, Russia!’ In the area I lived in in Bucharest, I once saw a huge, dirty garbage container with the phrase ‘Russia e gunoi’, meaning ‘Russia is garbage’.