Pokrovsky becomes Russian foreign minister

On 13 December 1916 (30 November by the Julian calendar) Tsar Nicholas II by ukase entrusted the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Nikolai Pokrovsky, until then State Comptroller. The French ambassador in Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, recorded the news in his diary the following day, 14 December, and the American press reported it the same day. The British chronology of the war records the appointment a day earlier, under 12 December.

The ministry had been without a head for three weeks. Prime Minister Boris Stürmer, who in July, after Sazonov’s dismissal, had also taken over foreign affairs, lost both posts in November after an attack by the Duma, which accused him of seeking a separate peace with Germany. The ministry was temporarily run by the deputy minister, Anatoly Neratov.

A financier in diplomacy

Pokrovsky was 51 and had spent his whole working life in state finance. He was born in 1865 in St Petersburg, graduated in law from the university there and in 1888 entered the Ministry of Finance. There he headed the department of direct taxes, and from 1906 to 1914 he was deputy minister of finance. He drafted many tax laws, including the first income tax law in Russian history, passed in the spring of 1916. From 1914 he sat in the State Council, and during the war he worked on committees dealing with food supply and the struggle against high prices. From January 1916 he was State Comptroller, that is, head of the office supervising the spending of the treasury.

Paléologue considered the choice unexpected. Pokrovsky had no experience whatever of foreign policy and diplomacy, but the ambassador judged him a sensible, hard-working, modest man, entirely devoted to the alliance with France and Britain. He stressed that in several decades of service in finance no one had cast a shadow of suspicion on him. In the Duma he was called “crystal-honest”. Part of the press, especially the British press, saw the appointment as a defeat for the supporters of Rasputin and the advocates of a settlement with Germany.

The first task

The appointment came a day after the German peace offer, which Berlin had transmitted on behalf of the Central Powers on 12 December. The new minister’s first task was therefore to prepare the Russian reply. Two days later, on 15 December, Pokrovsky spoke in the Duma and, as he stressed, with the Tsar’s full authority, rejected the German proposal. He called it an attempt to break up the alliance and declared that a premature peace with an enemy whose strength had been shaken but not broken would waste countless sacrifices. He also referred to the Act of 5 November as an “illusory independence” for part of Poland. The Duma unanimously supported the refusal to enter into any negotiations. Paléologue noted that the minister’s words made a great impression, because they sounded quite different from Stürmer’s evasive formulas.

Pokrovsky led Russian diplomacy for only two and a half months. According to contemporary accounts he felt ill at ease in his new post and asked the Tsar to relieve him, complaining of behind-the-scenes attempts by the court camarilla to open talks on a separate peace. After the February Revolution the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov became foreign minister of the Provisional Government. Pokrovsky went into finance and banking, and at the beginning of the 1920s he left for Lithuania. He lectured at the university in Kaunas, where he died in 1930 as the last foreign minister of the Russian Empire.