Alexander Izvolsky's Dreadful Mistake of 1908 (Road to WWI)

Alexander Izvilsky 1856-1919

In 1908 Russia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Izvolsky wanted to build a stronger Imperial Russia because of all the terrible trials and tribulations the gigantic country had been through during the previous years. His ambition would be flawed. He would make a dreadful mistake. This error would have horrendous consequences in the future. Something poor Izvolsky could never have envisaged until after the dreadful events occurred. He would be living in exile in Paris and his country under a Bolshevik government – his Tsar dead and Europe turned upside down with Millions Killed.

1905 had been an especially bad year for Tsarist Russia. There had been the 1905 Revolution which had been fiercely put down – leaving many of the nations’ downtrodden population simmering with discontent. In Asia and the Pacific Ocean, the Imperial Russian Navy had suffered a humiliating defeat before the Imperial Japanese Fleet.

All sorts of fractions within the Imperial government were calling for a new effort at expelling Japanese forces from Korea, where Russia had governed until Japanese intervention at Port Arthur in 1904. Others wanted to mount military expeditions into Iran and Afghanistan where Great Britain governed.

Alexander Izvolsky wanted to consolidate and improve what Russia had with her relations towards Europe and avoid wars that he knew Russia would not win in her circumstance of 1908. In particular, he wanted the use of the Dardanelles for Russia’s Black Sea fleet. This would give them access to the Mediterranean and access beyond into the world’s oceans. She would be able to use the contained Black Sea fleet for more distant ventures. Some Russian diplomats might have thought of a new offensive against Japan with the Black Sea fleet.

Foreign Minister, Alexander Izvolsky, would not have been looking to involve Russia in any new wars. He had been approached by Britain’s King Edward VII during the war with Japan to form an alliance. Therefore in 1908, the ambitious Isvolsky began to engineer a plan to get use of the Dardanelles straits for the Russian Black Sea fleet to use to get into the Mediterranean Sea. For this task, he would need to get permission from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had signed an Anglo-Russian convention the year before and made good friends with France. Next, he needed to win over the Central powers of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He secretly met with the Austrian Foreign Minister, Baron Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal to lay down the preliminary conditions before calling a conference of all the major powers concerning such a move. France, Great Britain, The German Empire, The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy would all have major interests in such an undertaking. The Austro-Hungarian Minister agreed in principle to support Russia’s request to let the Black Sea fleet through the Dardanelles straits if Russia would agree not to protest at Austro-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.



Alexander Izvolsky agreed provided that the meeting of the two (Russia and Austria) was not made public. He had no desire for the French or the British to know that Russia would turn a blind eye to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On this note the private meeting was ended – Austria’s Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal pleased with the outcome and so to was Alexander Izvolsky – the later did not know he had been diplomatically compromised by the Austrian ministers careful wording of the agreement and that he had given the Austrians a blank cheque to annex the Balkan countries immediately.

Before he could even try to call a meeting with other nations, Britain and France rejected any notion of a conference on such an issue, but Austria had already annexed the Balkan countries Bosnia and Herzegovina. If Russia protested; the Austrians could wave a paper with Izvolsky’s signed agreement upon it or the Russians could remain silent as agreed. In a masterstroke of trick diplomacy, Russian Foreign Minister had been hoodwinked by futile Austrian support for a scheme that would never have got onto the table in the first place.

This move and lack of Russian support caused deep resentment in the country of Serbia – a nation that insisted Bosnia belonged to them. This problem would not go away and Austrian Foreign Minister Baron Aehrenthal would not live long enough to regret his masterstroke of political trickery in the long run. I wonder what he might think if he could have seen beyond his death in 1912. What would he have made of the fall of the Habsburgs in 1918? 

When Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand went to Sarajevo in 1914, he would be assassinated by a young Serbian and this would trigger the Great War of 1914 – 1918. It would bring about a dreadful demise to the great Imperial House of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when she invaded Serbia as a consequence of the assassination.