Count Sergei Witte and the Twilight of Imperial Russia

A Biography

Sidney Harcave

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317473749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Sergei Witte served as finance minister and later prime minister of Russia during the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, and was in large part responsible for the development policies which saw Russia transformed from a peasant economy into an industrial nation. This is the first biography of Witte in English.

Chapter 1

The Formative Years, 1849–1865

He was acclaimed as “the one statesman who has arisen in Russia since Peter [the Great],¹ a Russian Colbert,² and “John the Baptist of the great Russian political reformation.”³ He was denounced as “Russia’s evil genius”⁴ and as a partner in a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy to make him president of a Russian republic.⁵ No one ever called Sergei Iulevich Witte a mediocrity. Beyond question, he was the ablest and most influential minister to have served in the twilight years of the Russian monarchy.

Witte was born on June 17, 1849, in Tiflis, the administrative center of the viceroyalty of the Caucasus, at a time when the power of imperial Russia was at its zenith. Weeks earlier Field Marshal Prince Paskevich had led Russian troops across the Carpathian Mountains to help the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph crush the Hungarian revolution and thus extend the life of conservative monarchism, a cause to which the Russian emperor and Tsar Nicholas I devoted himself. It would be Witte’s fate to spend much of his career shoring up the Russian monarchy and to die just as Russian forces were preparing to cross the Carpathian Mountains in a vain effort to defeat the aged Franz Joseph, an effort that would, despite its failure, speed the collapse of conservative monarchism.

The viceroyalty of the Caucasus, with an area about the size of Montana, was one of Russia’s many borderlands, areas added, for the most part, by force of arms, inhabited at the time of annexation by non-Russians. It was dominated by the Caucasus Mountains, widely considered to constitute one of the borders between Europe and Asia. Its combination of towering mountains, highlands, plateaus, and occasional plains contributed to a bewildering assortment of ethnic groups—Azerbaidzhanis, Armenians, Chechens, and Georgians, just to name a few.

Tiflis, with a mix of Armenians, Georgians, Russians, and others, reflected some of the ethnic diversity of the Caucasus, the Russians being in large part civil servants or members of the considerable military force stationed there. For many centuries the crossing point of two major trade routes, it bestrode the Kara River for some seven miles. Not unexpectedly, ethnic groups tended to live in separate neighborhoods, with the Wittes living in the Russian quarter, where the residents tended to have no permanent commitment to the Caucasus.

Julius (né Christoff-Heinrich-Georg-Julius) F. Witte, the father of Sergei, was one such. Born in Courland, part of Russia’s borderlands, a specialist in agriculture and mining, he was a civil servant in the province of Saratov when he met and sought the hand of Catherine Andreevna Fadeeva, daughter of the provincial governor, Andrei M. Fadeev. An obstacle to marriage was the fact that Julius was a Lutheran; he overcame it by conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith. In 1844 they were married. A son, Alexander, was born to them in the same year.⁶

Two years later Julius Witte and Andrei Fadeev, at the invitation of Prince Michael Vorontsov, viceroy of the Caucasus, moved to Tiflis with their families to assume major posts in the Caucasian administration. The Wittes and the Fadeevs had some land and serfs but were in debt and had to watch their kopeks if they were to cope with the high cost of living they found in Tiflis. To save money they set up a joint household in a large dwelling once owned by a Georgian prince.⁷

As the years passed, the household grew. After Alexander, Catherine Witte gave birth to Boris, Sergei, Olga, and Sophie. Elena Fadeeva (née Princess Dolgorukaia), wife of Andrei, was past childbearing age, but two of her children, Rostislav and Nadezhda, had not yet left the nest. Granddaughters Helena and Vera had joined the household on the death of their mother. Vera would gain fame as a children’s writer, and Helena both fame and notoriety as Madame Blavatsky, one of the founders of Theosophism. A very colorful and controversial person, to say the least, she was given to holding séances and performing such feats as levitation, which she learned from D.D. Home, a spiritualist who had conducted séances for the tsar. Add governesses, wet nurses, tutors, and dozens of household serfs, plus occasional visits from the Fadeev grandchildren, and you have a household in which it was easy to get lost.

Like so many others of his class, Sergei spent his formative years under the supervision of servants, governesses, and tutors, with little time given him by his parents. But he was close enough to his father to develop both affection and respect for him. And indeed, there was much in the father to inspire respect: he was an able civil servant who was considered “the most learned man in Tiflis.”⁸ But Sergei barely mentions his mother in his memoirs and does not even refer to her death. He writes, however, with warmth and respect of his maternal grandmother, a gifted woman who imparted the rudiments of reading, writing, and religion to him and Boris.⁹

Of the five children of Julius and Catherine Witte, Sergei was the only one who distinguished himself. Alexander chose to make his career in the military, where he proved to be a courageous officer but no shining star. Boris, who lacked the drive that distinguished Sergei, had a respectable but unremarkable career in the judiciary. There is little to note about the girls except that they never married and that Sophie was the author of a minor novel.¹⁰ Why Sergei stood out among them is a matter of fruitless speculation, but the what and why of his spectacular career are something else again.

In 1855 Julius Witte and his family were admitted to the ranks of the hereditary nobility. This class was proportionally more numerous than its counterpart in, let us say, Prussia, and the title of hereditary noble did not of itself confer material benefits. It did, however, confer prestige and a degree of privilege. Sergei would make much of the fact that he was a hereditary noble and that on his mother’s side he was descended from the illustrious Princes Dolgorukii. His father’s side did not provide such ammunition. What is more, he felt compelled to blur the truth that his father was a Baltic German by origin by stating that his paternal ancestors came from Holland.¹¹ He was brought up to identify himself as Russian by nationality and Russian Orthodox by faith, which probably explains why he dissociated himself from the Baltic Germans, so visible in the Russian civil and military service, who tended to hold fast to their ethnicity and Protestant religion.

As noted, Sergei and Boris learned their ABCs from their maternal grandmother. They were then given over to tutors, some of whom were not indifferent to the bottle, to be instructed in French, German, history, geography, music, and other elementary subjects. Finally, the time came for formal schooling, and they were enrolled in the local gimnaziia (secondary school) as auditors. They proved to be indifferent and undisciplined students who regularly cut classes. Their chief interest then was in music, leading them, among other things, to learn to play the flute. Sergei mistakenly thought he had a good voice and in later years, when out in the open country, would sing arias from Russian operas.¹² The two also enjoyed fencing, horseback riding, and hunting. Sergei would continue riding for decades and watching horsemanship even longer. In short, like many youngsters lacking parental discipline and not motivated by the need to earn a living, they did pretty much as they pleased.

Although the two were less than diligent, they managed to pass their yearly examinations, thanks to coaching by teachers from the gimnaziia. Finally, in 1865, they took their school-leaving examinations, the results of which would determine whether or not they graduated and whether or not they were eligible for admission to higher schools. They managed to pass all the examinations with mediocre grades, and each received a failing grade in deportment. Nonetheless, they were graduated and given school-leaving certificates entitling them to apply for admission to a university. The two were particularly galled by the low grades they received in French since they considered their command of the language to be superior to that of the two instructors who had examined them. Scamps that they were, they harassed the instructors.

Sergei was sixteen when he graduated from gimnaziia, quite tall for his age. A photograph of him together with Theodore Roosevelt and Komura, the Japanese plenipotentiary, taken in 1905, shows him a head taller than the president and at least two heads taller than Komura. His large torso and slender hips combined to give the impression of an “overgrown schoolboy,” a bearded one, to be sure, in his later years. His was a commanding presence, yet one that lent itself to caricature by those hostile to him. His manners were rough and his accent provincial, and he did not soften with age. A British journalist wrote after seeing him in 1896: “In voice and manner he is rough and unsympathetic, and he has none of the bonhomie and suavity which are so common in Russia.”¹³ Sergei’s French was not as good as he believed it to be: a Frenchman later wrote that Sergei’s French was “rough, but at least intelligible,” something he would not say about the French of most Russians who claimed mastery of that language. Sergei’s German was slight indeed, and his Russian was marred by grammatical and spelling lapses. As indicated, he was musically inclined, played the flute, was a good horseman, and could fence. There is no indication then or later that he was bookish. Jeremiah Curtin, a renowned American Slavist who knew the Wittes in this period, later wrote: “I noticed in the boy [Sergei] the same remarkable energy, decision, and will power, imperious and strong, which later characterized Count Witte.”¹⁴ Curtin may or may not have been accurate in his recollection, but he certainly put his finger on the traits that Sergei was to show. Still, Sergei had yet to demonstrate that he was anything but a slightly spoiled teenager.

For Sergei these were carefree years, of privilege and what seemed like plenty, spent almost exclusively among civil servants and military officers and their families. Also, he felt touched by the aura of glamour that surrounded Field Marshal Prince Bariatinskii, who had replaced Vorontsov as viceroy and had brought with him from St. Petersburg officers who belonged to high society. And then there was the excitement surrounding Bariatinskii’s campaign in the mountains to end the Moslem insurgency led by Shamil, a remarkable figure who was not captured until 1862. It was easy enough for Sergei to be caught up in the excitement, what with his uncle Rostislav Fadeev serving as an aide to the prince and playing a prominent role in the capture of Shamil. Years later, Shamil’s banner, which had been given to Fadeev, would find a home in Sergei’s library.

Life in the Caucasus had some resemblance to the life he would have had in India by being born and reared as part of the conqueror’s establishment, one with a large military establishment that was frequently called to action. Like the English in India, Russian military and civilians from places such as Tiflis took to the mountains during the hot summers. As in India, so in the Caucasus the native nobility was brought into the establishment, their titles accepted by Russia and the ranks of the officer corps open to them. But unlike their counterparts in India, these nobles were white and Christian and, consequently, more socially acceptable. Sergei easily accepted the Armenians and Georgians with whom he was in contact. He also accepted the view that the Caucasus, like other borderlands won by Russian arms, should remain under Russian sovereignty.

The Caucasus was indeed remote from the center of power, but it was part of Russia. While Sergei was enjoying the pleasures of youth, Tsar Alexander II was enacting a series of major reforms triggered by Russia’s shameful defeat in the Crimean War. The first of these, a milestone in the country’s history, was the emancipation of the serfs on February 19, 1861. This historic step was followed by legislation establishing local elective governmental bodies, mitigating censorship, reforming the judicial system and the legal codes, and restoring university autonomy. These were accompanied by military reforms and measures to improve the economy, with railroad construction at the head of the list.

The reforms were intended to modernize the backward country, the chief aim being the regaining of great-power status without weakening the power of the autocratic sovereign or creating an urban proletariat. Alexander and his aides envisioned a future in which Russia remained essentially an agrarian country, with a strong landed nobility serving as the tsar’s right arm. It was an unrealistic vision, at odds with both the forces at work and the expectations raised by the reforms. Those were exciting, if troubling, times in which Sergei Witte would soon be embroiled.

With graduation from the gimnaziia it became necessary for Sergei and Boris to leave the Caucasus if they were to receive a university education, as was their father’s wish. This would be their first trip away from the Caucasus and a mighty long one at that, a jarring trip by horse and carriage, there being no railroad yet in the region, to a port on the Black Sea and then on to Odessa by ship. Like other adolescents going off to school, they were accompanied by their parents. The father would have preferred that the boys attend Kiev University, but circumstances led to the choice of the recently established Novorossiisk University, located in Odessa. The father had reason to believe that the superintendent of the Odessa Educational District would use his influence to get the boys into the university, but that was not enough. The father thereupon enrolled the boys in the Richelieu gimnaziia, where they could improve their records enough for them to be able to matriculate at the university. Odessa would be home to Sergei and Boris for a long time to come.¹⁵

Chapter 2

The Odessa Years, 1865–1879

Sergei and Boris had hardly begun their studies when the future premier decided that a change of venue and a change of lifestyle were required if he were to make something of himself. As he tells it:

Now that we were on our own I began to take life seriously for the first time. I realized that I and Boris had wasted our years in play, had learned nothing but to chatter in French, and that if we continued in this way we would come to nothing. So I began to strengthen my character, began to become my own man and have been so ever since. It was a different story with Boris: having been my parents’ favorite he was spoiled and he did not have as strong a character as I.¹

Sergei does not exaggerate the change that took place, from a feckless youngster into a responsible young man, driven by ambition, determined to use his many talents to achieve whatever goals he set for himself. He would soon show that he had an iron will, an amazing capacity for work coupled with an equally amazing capacity to learn, be it in school or on the job. But he also had within him the ability to empathize and to agonize—in short, a combination of traits that one close observer called a mixture of iron and cotton wool combined into an almost “hysterical temperament.”² One is reminded of Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” with whom he w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Formative Years, 1849–1865
• 2. The Odessa Years, 1865–1879
• 3. St. Petersburg and Kiev, 1879–1891
• 4. Monsieur Vite, 1889–1892
• 5. Minister of Finance, 1892–1894
• 6. A New Reign, an Old Course, 1894–1896
• 7. The Witte System in Operation, 1892–1899
• 8. Questions of War and Peace, 1896–1899
• 9. Decline and Fall, 1899–1903
• 10. A Mere Spectator, 1903–1904
• 11. Political Spring, July–December 1904
• 12. In the Wake of Bloody Sunday, January–June 1905
• 13. Peace with Honor?
• 14. Return Home
• 15. Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire
• 16. Honeymoon? The First Ten Days
• 17. Keeping the Promise of October 17
• 18. Revolution and Counterrevolution
• 19. “The Loan That Saved Russia”
• 20. Implementing the October Manifesto
• 21. The Last Lap
• 22. Exile? Assassination? May 1906–June 1907
• 23. The Stolypin Years, June 1907–September 1911
• 24. Last Years, 1911–1915
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index