Pokrovsky asks to resign

On 16 January 1917 the Russian foreign minister, Nikolai Pokrovsky, had a long conversation with Tsar Nicholas II and asked to be released. According to the diary of the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, to whom the minister gave an account of the audience, he declared in the strongest terms that in present conditions he could not take responsibility for foreign policy. Invoking his long and faithful service, he begged the Tsar to break with the evil counsels of the interior minister, Alexander Protopopov, and with clasped hands implored him to open his eyes to the “impending catastrophe”. Nicholas II heard him out gently and told him to remain at his post, because “the situation is not as tragic as all that, and everything will turn out all right”. That same day the Tsar changed his minister of war. The British chronology of the war records under 27 January that Pokrovsky resigned, but other sources do not confirm this: the minister remained in the government.

A minister without influence

Pokrovsky, a financier without diplomatic experience, took over the ministry in December 1916 as an honest man devoted to the alliance with France and Britain. He soon discovered that state policy was decided not by the government but by the court, and that the greatest obstacle was Protopopov, the Tsarina’s protégé. At the beginning of January he himself had worked to get the Tsar to listen to warnings from outside. Before Paléologue’s audience on 7 January he asked the ambassador to speak to the Tsar frankly and without any reservations, since in that way he would do Russia a great service. The day before Pokrovsky’s conversation, on the evening of 15 January, the Tsar had dismissed in the same way the new prime minister, Prince Golitsyn, who had warned him of the danger and had also asked to be released.

Russian biographies of Pokrovsky, based on contemporary accounts, state that he felt ill at ease in his new post and asked the Tsar to let him resign, complaining of behind-the-scenes attempts by the court camarilla to open talks on a separate peace with Germany, conducted without his knowledge. According to some accounts he offered to leave several times, each time because of disputes with Protopopov. Outwardly, however, he remained loyal. After the change of prime minister, in a statement whose translation the American monthly Current History published in March, he gave assurances that the course of Russian foreign policy was unchanged and that “no changes in the composition of the government” could cause any wavering on the path Russia had chosen. He repeated that the German peace offer had been insincere and that President Wilson’s proposal did not change the situation that offer had created.

To the end of the monarchy

Pokrovsky headed the ministry until the February Revolution, that is until 2 March by the Julian calendar (15 March by the Gregorian). Paléologue lists him as foreign minister among the participants in the preliminary session of the Allied conference in Petrograd on 29 January, and on 1 February Pokrovsky presided over its deliberations in the Mariinsky Palace. In the last days of February (by the Julian calendar), when riots broke out in Petrograd, he proposed at a meeting of the Council of Ministers that the whole cabinet should resign, and on the government’s behalf discussed this with the leaders of the Duma. After the revolution Pavel Milyukov became foreign minister of the Provisional Government. Pokrovsky moved into finance and banking, and in the 1920s settled in Lithuania.