Entente ultimatum to Bulgaria

At four in the afternoon on 4 October 1915, or 21 September by the Julian calendar then used in Bulgaria and Russia, the Russian minister in Sofia, Aleksandr Savinsky, handed Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov a note from his government. In it Russia accused Bulgaria of having placed its fate in Germany’s hands. The evidence was to be the presence of German and Austrian officers in the War Ministry and on the staffs, the concentration of troops on the border with Serbia, and money accepted from the enemies of the Entente. If within 24 hours the Bulgarian government did not “openly break with the enemies of the Slav cause and of Russia” and remove from the army the officers of the states at war with the Entente, the minister was to leave Bulgaria together with the entire staff of the legation and the consulates.

The tone of the note was exceptionally personal. Russia, “bound to Bulgaria by the imperishable memory of its liberation from the Turkish yoke”, could not, it said, lend its presence to preparations for a “fratricidal aggression” against an allied Slav nation. This was a reference to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, after which Bulgaria regained its statehood. The text of the note had been published in Petrograd the day before, even before it reached its addressee.

A dispute over form

The ultimatum came after two weeks of hesitation. When Bulgaria announced mobilisation on 21 and 22 September, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov, did not yet want to treat it as an enemy. In time, however, he concluded that the matter had to be put plainly. According to the diary of the French ambassador in Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, on 27 September Russia proposed a joint note to its allies: within 24 hours Bulgaria was either to cancel its mobilisation or agree to cooperate with the Entente against Turkey, under threat of a breach of relations. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, wanted to soften the text further and remove from it anything resembling an ultimatum. Paléologue wrote to Paris at the time that the Allies were repeating with Bulgaria the mistake they had made a year earlier with Turkey. In the end there was no joint note. Each of the powers acted separately, and the Russian note was the sharpest.

According to the communiqué that the Bulgarian government issued after the meeting, between 4 and 6 p.m. Radoslavov was visited by the ministers of Russia, France and Great Britain. The Russian and French ministers handed over notes of the nature of an ultimatum, not entirely identical. The British minister, Hugh O’Beirne, made an oral declaration that Great Britain would break with Bulgaria if its mobilisation led to war in the Balkans. The Italian minister had not yet received instructions and did not join his colleagues. Savinsky himself later recalled that his French and British colleagues had presented their demands on the same day.

The answer from Sofia

The ultimatum came too late to change anything. For a month Bulgaria had been bound by a secret alliance with Germany and a military convention on a joint attack on Serbia, and its army was completing its concentration on the Serbian border. The day before, the first ships carrying Entente troops had sailed from Mudros for Salonika.

Radoslavov had no intention of giving way. In the same communiqué the government announced that it would reject the accusations about the presence of German and Austrian officers in the army and declare that it “cannot send away officers who are not there”. The government also prepared a long note to all four Entente powers, dated 4 October. In it it assured the Allied powers of its gratitude for their goodwill, asked for “additional explanations” concerning their promises, and declared that it would not abandon the attitude it had adopted at the beginning of the war. Sofia delivered its answer to the Russian ultimatum the next day, before the deadline had expired.