Russia breaks off relations with Bulgaria

On 5 October 1915 at 2.40 p.m., or 22 September by the Julian calendar, the Russian minister in Sofia, Alexander Savinsky, received the Bulgarian government’s reply to the ultimatum handed over the day before. It came a few hours before the deadline expired. Bulgaria protested “with all its strength” against the charge that it had placed its fate in German hands. It categorically denied that there were German and Austrian officers in its war ministry and on its army staffs, while adding that even if some foreign officers had joined the army, this would not be an act of hostility towards anyone. It explained the loan from German banks by the need to repay foreign debts, including its debt to Russia itself. It regarded the demand to break with Russia’s enemies as a call to abandon neutrality. It ended with words of regret that the efforts of the Bulgarian nation towards a close bond with Russia were being wrecked against its will.

Savinsky, as he wrote in his memoirs, was outraged by this “height of hypocrisy”. In accordance with his instructions he immediately informed the Bulgarian government of the break in relations and asked for his passports. According to the Associated Press correspondent in Petrograd, the Bulgarian reply was transmitted to the Russian capital in Bulgarian rather than in Russian, as was customary between Slav states, and it was so garbled in transmission that the foreign ministry was long unable to reconstruct the text. In Petrograd it was described as “insolent to the point of impudence”.

According to contemporary reports, the ministers of the other Entente states and of Serbia also asked for their passports that same day. Their departure, however, dragged on over the following days. The British minister, Hugh O’Beirne, and the French minister, de Panafieu, were summoned before leaving to further audiences with the Tsar, and the final break in relations by the Western powers came only with the Bulgarian attack on Serbia in mid-October.

The staff of the Russian legation and consulates left Bulgaria on 7 October. Savinsky himself could not leave, because he fell ill with acute appendicitis and for more than a month lay in bed in the deserted legation building. Russian interests in Bulgaria were taken over by the chargé d’affaires of the Netherlands. Savinsky left only after he had recovered, on a special train placed at his disposal by Tsar Ferdinand.

In Russia the break was received with bitterness. A few days earlier the French ambassador in Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, had noted that Bulgaria’s “fratricidal” step towards Serbia had provoked a wave of indignation in all classes of Russian society. For many Russians Bulgaria was a country liberated by Russian blood in the war with Turkey of 1877–1878, and the foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, had still been arguing to the Allies in the second half of September that it could not be treated as an enemy. Now the road to war between two Orthodox Slav states lay open.