Trepov proclaims Russia's right to Constantinople

On 2 December 1916 (19 November in the Julian calendar) the new Chairman of the Council of Ministers, that is, the prime minister of Russia, Alexander Trepov, appeared in the State Duma for the first time and read out his government’s programme. Its most resounding sentence concerned war aims: Russia had concluded an agreement with its allies which established “in the most definite manner” its right to the Straits and Constantinople. The secret agreement of the spring of 1915 was made public for the first time, and, as the prime minister stressed, in agreement with the allies. In the same speech Trepov responded to the Act of 5 November: he announced the restoration of a free Poland in indissoluble union with Russia.

Three attempts at the rostrum

Trepov had become head of the government less than two weeks earlier, after the dismissal of Boris Stürmer, and the Duma had adjourned for a week so that the new cabinet could settle in. The deputies were hoping for a change of course, yet the Minister of the Interior, Alexander Protopopov, the member of the cabinet most hated by the Duma, remained in the government. The Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov later wrote that Trepov had actually been warned against appearing in the Duma, but the prime minister came.

The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, who watched the proceedings from the gallery, noted that the storm broke as soon as the ministers appeared in the doorway and Protopopov was seen among them. From the far left came shouts of “Down with the ministers! Down with Protopopov!” The socialists and the Trudoviks three times shouted the prime minister down and forced him to leave the rostrum before he was finally allowed to speak.

Constantinople and Poland

Trepov declared that the government would wage war until complete and final victory, until German militarism had been destroyed. He recalled that for more than a thousand years Russia had pressed southwards towards free access to the open sea, and that this age-old dream of the nation was close to fulfilment. According to a translation of the speech published soon afterwards by the American monthly Current History, he said that at the start of the war Russia and its allies had promised Turkey the inviolability of its territory in return for neutrality, but Turkey had treacherously attacked Russia “and thereby sealed her own fate”. It was then that the agreement with the allies on the Straits and Constantinople had been concluded. “The Russian people should know for what they are shedding their blood,” the prime minister said, explaining why he was revealing it from the rostrum. He also promised that Russia, once it held the free passage to the Mediterranean, would guarantee freedom of navigation to the Romanian flag, now fighting alongside Russia’s.

The agreement he spoke of was an exchange of notes from March and April 1915. The foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, had then demanded the allies’ consent to the annexation by Russia after the war of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits. Britain agreed in March and France in April, though both reserved gains of their own. For a year and a half the agreement remained secret.

The second announcement was a reply to the manifesto in which, on 5 November, the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary had promised to create an “independent” state out of the part of the Kingdom of Poland they occupied. The Russian government had protested at the time with a note, and now Trepov declared in the Duma that Russia’s aim was “the re-creation of a free Poland within her ethnographic boundaries and in indissoluble union with Russia”. It was a promise to unite the Polish lands of all the partitions, but still under the Tsar’s sceptre.

A cool reception

Paléologue noted that the passage about continuing the war was greeted with stormy applause, but the words about Constantinople left the house indifferent and at the same time surprised. Two days later he added that the public in the city had reacted in the same way, as if the prime minister had dug up a long-forgotten utopia. In the ambassador’s view, the Byzantine dream that had still inflamed Russian opinion in 1915 had faded over the past months. Milyukov later judged that not even such a trump card helped Trepov: the government had long since ceased to command respect, and that day it showed that it had also ceased to inspire fear.

After the break the debate took a turn nobody had expected. Two politicians of the right, Count Vladimir Bobrinsky and Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the leaders of the extreme monarchists, sharply criticised the government. Purishkevich spoke of the “dark forces” that raised to the highest offices men incapable of holding them. He called on the ministers to go to Headquarters, throw themselves at the Tsar’s feet and beg him to free Russia from Grigori Rasputin. According to a press report, he was answered with long and general applause. Purishkevich later recorded that the next day the telephone in his flat rang from morning till night, because dozens of people wanted to congratulate him.

The announcement of the agreement was meant to convince Russians that the war had a concrete aim, and to dispel the rumours of a separate peace with Germany that had circulated under Stürmer. The American Current History pointed out that Britain, which for more than a hundred years had barred Russia’s access to the Straits, had now, as Russia’s ally, clearly consented to it. The speech did not help Trepov himself: he failed to remove Protopopov or to come to terms with the Duma, and at the beginning of January 1917 he lost his post. Constantinople never became Russian, and after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties of tsarist diplomacy and renounced the gains promised to Russia.