Roads to glory? Sergei D. Sazonov, the Turkish Straits, and Russian foreign policy, 1910--1916

One of the central questions in European international relations before the First World War concerned the ownership, control and fate of the Turkish Straits; nevertheless they have occupied an under-appreciated and misunderstood place in Russian foreign policy making as well as in Russian history. Sergei D. Sazonov's tenure as Foreign Minister of Russia from 1910 to 1916 was a critical, transitional period in Russia's policy toward the Straits.; This dissertation shows that Russia followed a consistent policy toward the Turkish Straits throughout most of this period but began to contradict that policy with the conclusion of the Straits Agreements of March and April 1915, which promised the Straits and Constantinople to Russia after the defeat of the Central Powers. A policy of maintaining the status quo at the Straits underpinned everything that Sazonov did before the war and in its earliest months. This meant that Russia opposed allowing any other power aside from itself and Turkey to have any influence over transit of the waterway. Yet at the same time, Sazonov never allowed Russian interests at the Straits to interfere with the containment of or the fight against Germanic expansionism. The consistency of his approach has been misunderstood until now. Furthermore, the manner in which Sazonov interacted with the larger context of Russian government and society has also been neglected. Specifically, although the dynamic between the Foreign Ministry and the Navy was crucial to the rebuilding of the Russian fleet and sheds much light on the compartmentalization that plagued the tsarist regime until its collapse, this relationship has been under-appreciated. Most importantly, the meaning of the Straits agreements in the spring of 1915 has been even less correctly understood. Although many consider these accords to be Sazonov's greatest victory and a solid achievement for Russian diplomacy, this dissertation argues that gaining this “prize” in fact proved to be one of the great Russian tragedies, complicating the Russian war effort and contributing to the ultimate demise of the very state for which Sazonov labored so hard. On this crucial mistake rests the historical judgment of Sazonov's place in Russian and European history, and by extension of the system within which he worked.; In order to come to these conclusions, this dissertation has taken advantage of materials from archives in the Russian Federation, Great Britain, France, and the United States, as well as extensive published materials, to compile one of the most complete pictures of policy toward the Straits to date. Work by historians such as David M. McDonald and William C. Fuller, Jr., have led the way in their pathbreaking analyses of both the attempt to fashion a western-style cabinet government out of the compartmentalized tsarist system, and the nature of the civil-military relationship in the Russian Empire. Political science studies by Paul A. Papayoanou set the stage for the economic side of the rivalry within the Franco-Russian Alliance.