The Bear in the Room: Gallipoli,Russia,and the First World War

As much as anything, Gallipoli was about Russia. This statement seems provocative. Wasn’t Gallipoli more about knocking Ottoman Turkey out of the war and attacking the soft underbelly of Germany? The Anzac soldiers at Gallipoli would probably have been surprised, and probably outraged, to hear that they were risking limb and life for Russia, Britain’s enemy for most of the nineteenth century. Yet Russia was almost certainly more intimately connected to Gallipoli than the historiography suggests. ¹ Books on that epic battle mention Russia little, if at all. Yet the campaign was initiated by a Russian request to Britain for naval assistance to divert Turkish troops from the Caucasus. When this ‘demonstration’ turned, in an accelerated version of what we might now call ‘mission creep’, into a British determination to force the Straits of the Dardanelles and take Constantinople, these objectives collided with deeply held Russian desires, a thousand years in duration, for her possession of precisely these two places. Gallipoli historians rarely note this critical clash of aims between the Allies. What happened next is also generally understated, if not unstated. Russia now demanded the conversion of vague, verbal promises of November 1914 regarding Constantinople and the Straits made by British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey and King George V into specific, written guarantees of those trophies for herself, and threatened, in effect, to sue for a separate peace with Germany if they were not given to her. Britain, in particular, took this threat seriously, fearing that a Russian abandonment of the Eastern front could lose the war for the Entente, with Germany concentrating men and matériel on the Western front. Therefore, Britain and France, in the secret Constantinople Agreement of March-April 1915, negotiated on the eve of the Gallipoli landings, and concluded because of the shadow of Gallipoli, promised Russia what Grey called the ‘richest prize of the entire war’ after the defeat of the Central Powers. ²

Gallipoli, or at least its imminence, thus helped create the conditions in which Russia was able to exert a powerful leverage on its Allies, so that before 25 April 1915, she had already claimed the potential spoils of victory of the campaign. The battle was then fought on one level to try to knock Turkey out of the war and attract neutral countries but also to reopen the Ottoman waterways for the Russian export trade (notably grain) and allow supplies to prop up Russia’s faltering war effort. At another, less-remarked level, the campaign was maintained despite abundant evidence of its futility, in part because of a sense of obligation to the Russian ally and concern that a dissatisfied Russia might make a separate peace with Germany. But Russia did not succumb to the temptation of peace until 1917. The Constantinople Agreement remained on foot until then with, it is suggested, significant effect. This article posits important links between Russia and Gallipoli in the creation and maintenance of the Agreement: it also argues that the solemn promise of the Straits and Constantinople played an important role in keeping Russia in the war until 1917, giving the Allies the time to win the war. ³ In 1915, a dangerous year for the Entente, battered Russians, or initially their leaders, were given a very good reason to remain committed to the Eastern front.

The focus in this article, because the author is an Australian historian, is the lack of a Russian lens in that nation’s historiography of Gallipoli. But Russia is also largely ignored in the international literature on Gallipoli, and some of the strictures in this article will apply to it as well. ⁴ But the lacuna in Australian histories of Gallipoli is stark. There is little, if any, substantive discussion in popular books on or related to Gallipoli regarding the Constantinople Agreement of 1915. One might expect more from academic accounts of Gallipoli. But here too the cupboard appears quite bare. Jeffrey Grey in his The War with the Ottoman Empire concedes that the British had already discounted the ‘cost’ of potential Russian control of the Straits, yet he fails to mention the actual Agreement on the Straits made with Russia. ⁵ Harvey Broadbent and Robin Prior briefly note the Agreement in their principal works on Gallipoli but are inaccurate on some details. Broadbent in Gallipoli: The Turkish Defence calls it the London Agreement, which risks confusion with the Treaty of London and the Pact of London, different World War I agreements. He also cites Italy as a signatory to the Constantinople Agreement in 1915 whereas Italy did not sign until 2 December 1916. ⁶ Broadbent does note that Russia was threatening a separate peace with Germany, putting ‘serious pressure’ on its Allies. ⁷ Prior, in Gallipoli: The End of the Myth, implies that the decision to ‘immediately concede’ to Russia was made without strategic deliberation, implying a British fit of absent-mindedness. ⁸ This was not the case, as outlined below. Prior also claims that no consideration was given to the effect the Agreement would have on Balkan states. Yet this was precisely why the Agreement was kept secret. ⁹ Neither author gives it the significance suggested here, in terms of tethering Russia to the war, or argues the close connection to Gallipoli that this article does. John Robertson notes that ‘the secret treaty in March’ meant ‘the Australians on Gallipoli would be fighting to win the area for Russia, although none of them knew so at the time’. ¹⁰ He appears to be the only Australian historian who acknowledges that Australian soldiers were fighting and dying to win Constantinople, in realpolitik, not for the British, but for the Russian, Empire. Les Carlyon, in possibly the best book on Gallipoli, dismisses the Agreement in one sentence. ¹¹

Only one Australian historian has made a substantive attempt to explore the connections between Russia and Gallipoli. In a 1987 article virtually ignored in the historiography of Gallipoli, Gregory Paget saw the answer to why the British kept fighting at Gallipoli in obligations incurred towards the Russian ally by the November 1914 promises and concerns about a Russian withdrawal from the war if Gallipoli was abandoned. ¹² Paget made a good case, although there were other reasons why the British persisted at Gallipoli: fear of losing prestige in the Middle East and an underestimation of the enemy being not the least. ¹³ Paget places an unwarranted weight on the November 1914 promises, as indicated by his title, and so misses the crucial part that the Gallipoli invasion in 1915 played in the Russian demand for a firmer commitment. ¹⁴ However, his conclusion, that ‘the fight for Gallipoli was essential to the maintenance of Russia’s central place in the Entente’, bears consideration. ¹⁵

The Gallipoli historiography has not then paid sufficient attention to the Russian nexus. Recent studies on Russia and the Great War have unearthed new perspectives regarding the significance that Constantinople and the Straits held for Russia before and during the war. ¹⁶ Yet much of the evidence of the connections between Gallipoli and Russia have existed for 100 years without getting the attention of historians. Knowledge of the Agreement itself, for example, has been public since 1916. Meanwhile, the Australian narrative on Gallipoli has largely ossified to a limited number of familiar themes. It has almost been reduced, as Jeffrey Grey wrote in 2016, to ‘ancestor-worship’, fiercely focused on the iconic mise-en-scène of beach, cliffs, neks, gullies, ridges. ¹⁷ This article hopes to widen the perspective on Gallipoli to include the crucial part that Russia played, not on the battlefield of the Canakkale Peninsula, but on the geopolitical and diplomatic battlefields of World War I. As far as can be determined, this two-stage argument, Gallipoli’s centrality to the Constantinople Agreement, and, more speculatively, the importance of the Agreement in keeping Russia in the war, has never been put. ¹⁸

The two-front war that quickly developed in 1914, with the Allies on the Western front separated from Russia on the Eastern front, meant that Germany, positioned in the middle, had to divide its forces between the fronts. Some Germans conceded early in the war that they could not win such a war and attempts to persuade Russia (and France) into a separate peace began. ¹⁹ On the British side, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener was acutely aware of the critical importance of Russia tying down the German and Austro-Hungarian armies in the East. ²⁰ Equally, Foreign Secretary Grey’s overriding preoccupation became the solidarity of the Entente and, especially, keeping Russia in the fold. ²¹ Despite initiating the Pact of London of September 1914, which bound each Entente partner against signing a separate peace, Russia was seen as the state most likely to abandon the war. ²² Huge military defeats, disastrous manpower and territorial losses, and shortages of matériel, what Peter the Great had called ‘the sinews of war’, led to persistent rumours that Russia was ripe for detaching from the Entente. ²³ Russians began to believe that they were suffering disproportionately to their Allies: it was being said that ‘Britain will fight to the last drop of Russian blood’. ²⁴ In response, Germany intensified efforts to persuade the Tsar to abandon the war. ²⁵

From the time Turkey entered the war on Germany’s side in early November 1914, the British were concerned that Russia might withdraw from the war altogether or divert her attention to Ottoman Turkey to win the Straits and Constantinople. ²⁶ Nicholas II had reaffirmed Russia’s interest in the Ottoman possessions in his declaration of war against Turkey, pronouncing that Russia’s path towards the solution of her ‘historical task, bequeathed to her by our ancestors, on the shores of the Black Sea’ was now open. ²⁷ In fact, as Dominic Lieven clarifies, ‘the overriding priority’ of Russian foreign policy had always been ‘the protection of the empire’s strategic and economic interests at the Straits’, seen traditionally as ‘the keys and gates to the Russian house’. ²⁸ In any case, most Russian eyes now turned south towards Ottoman Turkey. While Russia may not have initially gone into the war to gain the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, as McMeekin and Christopher Clark have suggested, ²⁹ the Turkish entry changed everything and ‘the seizure of the straits went to the top of Russia’s agenda’. ³⁰ Therefore, in order to keep Russia focused on the Eastern front, Grey informed the Russian Ambassador to Britain on 9 November 1914 that, if the Central Powers were defeated, the fate of Constantinople and the Dardanelles ‘could not be decided other than in conformity with Russian interests’. Four days later, the King told the Ambassador that Constantinople ‘must be yours’. ³¹ This was a concerted diplomatic démarche by the British government, otherwise the King would hardly have intervened so directly. ³² Michael Ekstein points out that the British policy of appeasement towards Turkey had changed, and ‘the way was now open for further concessions to Russia’. ³³

Some commentators, along with Prior, have missed the deliberative nature of these verbal promises. Alan Bodger characterizes Grey’s promise as ‘astonishingly casual’ and the King’s promise as ‘an even more laconic aside’. ³⁴ On the contrary, the promises were calculated to say to Russia: stay committed to the Eastern front, don’t distract yourself with the Turkish prizes, you will get them after the war if we win. Grey saw clearly that Russia’s obsession with Turkey could cost the Entente the Eastern front, and possibly the war. ³⁵ As Neilson affirms, the ‘overriding consideration was that the Allies might suffer defeat in the west through a Russian defection’. ³⁶ Grey was reluctant, however, to make these promises any more detailed, preferring to defer such negotiations until after the war. ³⁷

Early in January 1915, Britain received a request from Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, for a naval distraction on Turkey’s west to assist Russian forces in apparent trouble in the Caucasus. ³⁸ Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, immediately took this opportunity to activate his under-utilized Navy. He sent his well-known telegram to Admiral Carden, Commander of the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, on 3 January, in an obvious response to the Russian request, asking if ‘forcing the Dardanelles by ships alone’ was practicable. Carden’s cautious but positive reply shifted the momentum towards Gallipoli. ³⁹ As for the War Minister, the foremost scholar of his war observes that Kitchener ‘took the [Russian] appeal at face value, worried that any further erosion in Russia’s military strength might prompt the Tsarist government to opt out of the war’. ⁴⁰ The Russian request accelerated a British decision on a matter that had been swirling about for some time: ‘the brooding indecision produced by deadlock in the West’. ⁴¹ Those seeking an alternative to ‘chewing wire in Flanders’ on the Western front, the so-called Easterners, including Churchill, were galvanized into action. Gallipoli was the ultimate outcome of the Russian request. It provided, Strachan claims, ‘the most direct of many triggers for the attack on the Dardanelles’. ⁴² The debate about stripping men from the Western front, and where to attack if this was done, may have continued for much longer, without the Russian request. A serious obligation to the Russian ally was now engendered and remained a factor in the subsequent Gallipoli campaign. ⁴³ By the end of February 1915, the British had informed both the Russian military and Foreign Minister Sazonov that they would make a serious attempt to force the Dardanelles and capture Constantinople. ⁴⁴ The Russians knew then that an invasion was imminent. This was key to what followed.

British occupation of the Ottoman capital would have contravened the golden rule of Russian foreign policy that no third party, apart from Russia herself and a compliant Turkey, would control the Straits or Constantinople. ⁴⁵ Sazonov recalled that the news of Britain’s intentions affected him ‘painfully’. ⁴⁶ Russia wanted her prizes unencumbered by any third state, even an ally. ⁴⁷ She was also nervous that if Constantinople fell, the British might make peace with Turkey and foil Russian aspirations in the Ottoman Empire. ⁴⁸ Public sentiment in Russia seemed overwhelmingly in favour of Constantinople and the Straits being brought under Russian possession. ⁴⁹ Sazonov told a wildly applauding Duma, the Russian legislative assembly, in February 1915 that the moment was near ‘for the settlement of the economic and political problems connected with the access of Russia to the open ocean’. ⁵⁰ Everyone knew what he meant. However, after bombings of the Dardanelles’ forts in February, it became apparent that the British would act on their word and attempt to invade Ottoman Turkey through the Dardanelles.

Russia’s demands now hardened. In November 1914, Nicholas II had indicated to French Ambassador to Petrograd Paleologue that he wanted free passage for Russian ships through the Dardanelles, and Constantinople established as a neutral city. ⁵¹ Russia now moved towards demanding full incorporation of both places into her Empire. ⁵² It appears evident from the chronology that it was the imminence of Gallipoli as a major military expedition, with the intention of forcing the Straits and capturing the Turkish capital, which forced the Russians to ramp up their demands. At a War Council meeting on 3 March 1915, Grey indicated that Russia wanted the Straits, and it was not possible to put her off until the end of the war. The Foreign Secretary cautioned his colleagues to avoid any breach with Russia, or ‘any action which would incline Russia to make a separate peace’. ⁵³ On the same day, the Tsar told Paleologue that he had decided to insist on ‘a radical solution of the question of Constantinople and the Straits’. He added: ‘I should not feel justified in imposing on my people the terrible sacrifices of the present War, without granting them as a reward the fulfillment of their centuries-old dream’. ⁵⁴ He did not need to add that to repossess the Byzantine capital and place the Russian cross on the dome of St Sophia had also been the enduring dream of the Tsars of Russia. Events were moving rapidly.

On the next day, 4 March 1915, Sazonov, on behalf of the Tsar, demanded by aide-mémoires handed to the British and French Ambassadors that the Western Allies provide a guarantee that Russia was given possession of the Straits and Constantinople, along with some adjacent territories, in return for Russian consideration of British and French claims in the Middle East. ⁵⁵ Noting French reluctance, Sazonov began to turn the knife. He advised both Ambassadors on the following day that, as Buchanan relayed to Grey, were the Allies to reject the Russian demands, ‘the consequences might be incalculable’ as he would resign and ask to be replaced by a Foreign Minister ‘more capable of protecting Russia’s national interest’. ⁵⁶ This was diplomatic code for a pro-German Minister who would take Russia out of the war. Buchanan added that Sazonov appeared ‘absolutely in earnest’. Grey immediately interpreted Sazonov’s remarks as raising the spectre of Russian acceptance of German peace offers if his not-so-subtle ultimatum was rejected. ⁵⁷ The British Foreign Secretary had, for some time, been sympathetic to the Russian claims. ⁵⁸ But now was the decisive moment. Grey did not believe Sazonov was foxing: ‘This was not bluff; there was real danger’. ⁵⁹ On his advice, and because of his warning that Germany was urgently pressing a separate peace on Russia, the British government accepted the Russian demands, to be delivered after the defeat and partition of Ottoman Turkey and at the end of a successful war, at a meeting of the War Council on 10 March 1915. ⁶⁰ The Allied naval attack on the Straits on 18 March, the next stage of the invasion of Turkey, even though it failed, signalled to Russia the urgency of finalizing the Agreement. The French, under pressure from Britain and the Sazonov ultimatum, finally signed on 12 April. The timing of the 4-5 March demands and warnings had been crucial. It was made soon after the initial Allied assault on the Dardanelles’ forts on 19 February 1915 and the reception of the alarming British advice that an invasion of Turkey was imminent. Gottlieb puts it forcefully: ‘While the Entente guns were pounding at the Dardanelles, Russia reduced the diplomatic forts of Whitehall’. ⁶¹

Why had the Allies agreed? While some alternative explanations are assessed below, the old ‘historical orthodoxy’ that the Agreement had been ‘forced’ by Russian demands and ‘the need to hold together the Entente’ remains the best explanation. ⁶² Neilson agrees: ‘the overriding consideration was that the Allies might suffer defeat in the West through a Russian defection’. ⁶³ A number of other historians have also suggested that the leverage the Russians exercised was an implied and serious threat to sue for a separate peace with Germany. ⁶⁴ Grey knew that Germany was tempting the Russians with peace feelers and that a significant ‘peace party’ existed in Russian elite circles which had never supported a war against Germany. ⁶⁵ Russia had suffered some two million casualties in the first nine months of the war; the temptation for Russia to secede from the war must have been immense. ⁶⁶ Grey feared that if Germany was able to bring half a million men across from the Eastern to the Western front, as Kitchener had calculated in December 1914, they might well win the war. ⁶⁷ Grey’s decision ensured that Germany did not win the war in 1915 or 1916. To paraphrase something he wrote later, the best decisions are not always the ones that win a war but those that avoid losing a war. ⁶⁸

It was not a coincidence that the Allies signed the secret Constantinople Agreement in March-April 1915 just before the landings at Gallipoli. The proposed Dardanelles campaign, with the objective of capturing Constantinople, and telegraphed by the Churchillian declarations of intent in February, was the catalyst that forced the Russian demand. Gallipoli didn’t merely follow the Agreement chronologically, although the chronology is important here. There was an intimate link between the two ‘events’. It was Gallipoli – the Allied attack on the Dardanelles, aimed at Constantinople, and announced by its preliminaries – that had galvanized the Russians into requiring the November promises to be put in writing. Gallipoli could almost be said to have ‘caused’ the Agreement. A staple of causation theory is that if A causes B, A must occur before B. Here somewhat of the reverse applied. Fear of an imminent event, the invasion of Ottoman Turkey, with the possible consequence of Russia ‘losing’ its long-desired prize to a third party, ‘caused’ or provoked the demand for the Agreement. Thus, the Constantinople Agreement came into being, ironically, because of the threat Gallipoli posed, not to the Turks, but to the Russians. ⁶⁹ There were other subsidiary matters such as the mooted Greek participation at Gallipoli that was anathema to Russia. German peace offers also helped to precipitate the Agreement. Nonetheless, Gallipoli was, in terms of provenance, the crux around which all these other factors coalesced. The American historian Harry N. Howard saw this clearly in 1966: ‘It was this campaign [Dardanelles] which led, more than anything else, to the Russian demand for the cession of Tsargrad and the Straits by treaty to Russia’. ⁷⁰

Grey later suggested that ‘it would be going too far to say that, but for the Dardanelles expedition, Russia would never have made the demand’. ⁷¹ It is arguable, however, that the Russian demands came precisely because the possessions the Russians most desired were in immediate danger of being wrested away by a third power. Gallipoli was an existential threat to Russia’s fervent hope of proprietorship over the Straits and Constantinople. A once-in-a-wartime opportunity had arrived to win by diplomacy what she could not gain militarily. ⁷² There might not have been a Constantinople Agreement without Gallipoli and without the Agreement Russia might not have stayed in World War I.

Scholars have investigated why wars continue and, more particularly, why they end, when opposing sides agree on peace terms. ⁷³ One common answer is that wars end when ‘one or more combatants decide they have more to gain, or less to lose, by making peace than by continuing to fight’. ⁷⁴ On almost any rational view, Russia ought to have abandoned the war sometime in 1915, perhaps even before her terrible summer of that year. ⁷⁵ Orlando Figes has drawn a chilling portrait of a demoralized and devastated Russia at war in 1915, with huge casualties, critical shortages of shells, rifles, ammunition, railways, and even (surprisingly) men. ⁷⁶ David Stone’s recent work on the wartime Russian Army provides a slight corrective to such earlier depictions of Russia’s war by pointing out that all European nations in World War I experienced similar problems, the difference with Russia being one of degree rather than kind. Stone concedes, nevertheless, that the orthodox Russian narrative of ‘unrelieved catastrophe culminating in ignominious collapse’ is correct in broad outline. ⁷⁷ The disasters of 1915, the horrific defeats from May following the Gorlice–Tarnow Offensive of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, the Great Retreat, the expulsion from Poland, and the later political crises complicated by the Tsar’s much-lamented self-appointment in September as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, were balanced somewhat by the successes of the Brusilov Offensive in 1916. But Russian men were being shed at an alarming rate. Joshua Sanborn has suggested that even before most of these disasters, by the spring of 1915, such societal properties as ‘trust, legitimacy, reliability, prosperity, accountability, and above all hope for the future’ had been seriously eroded in Russia: ‘The state and an empire teetered on the verge of collapse’. ⁷⁸ Little wonder that many people at the time, Russians, allies and enemies, saw the probability of Russia signing a separate peace. Yet she, and her Tsar, refused to do so. Inertia, loyalty to allies, calculation of an Entente victory, detestation of Germany, and fear of revolution – all must have played a role. But were they the only factors?

The irrational determination to fight on suggests that the Byzantine dream of winning the great spoils of the war, so tantalizingly close once the Constantinople Agreement was finalised, may have interfered with clear vision regarding the peace offers on the table. Perhaps, as Gottlieb proposes, it was only the prospect of ‘Tsargrad’ that enabled Nicholas II to keep the mouzhiks in the trenches as well as the citizenry on the vast Russian home front supporting the war effort. ⁷⁹ Norman Stone sees it as a paradox of the war that ‘war-aims ran up parallel with the difficulties of attaining them’ even though ‘a State in the vulnerable situation of the Tsarist one should not have exposed itself any longer to war’. Stone suggests that the fulfilment of ‘national aspirations’, presumably including the Turkish trophies, were designed to compensate, potentially, for the sacrifices of the people and avert a revolution. ⁸⁰ After Turkey’s entry into the war, it is hard to avoid David MacKenzie’s conclusion that ‘the Turkish Straits became the cornerstone of all Russian war aims’. ⁸¹ It is likely then that the ‘richest prize’ offered by the Western Allies played no small part in the Russian determination to remain in World War I. ⁸²

Was it likely that Russia would have sued for peace in 1915 if the Allies had rejected the Agreement? If Sazonov had resigned in dramatic public protest, such an outcome is conceivable. While considerable anti-German sentiment undoubtedly existed in Russia, the pressure on her to cut her terrible losses would have been immense. A German offer too good to refuse might have persuaded an exhausted Russia and a harried Emperor to sign. Yet while German peace terms did become increasingly more tempting, the Tsar proved unreceptive. ⁸³ His bond of September 1914 not to sign a separate peace as well as fear of revolution if he did sign surely played significant parts in this refusal. However, an important factor must also have been that Nicholas II now had the Constantinople promise in writing in his pocket. Strachan puts it this way: ‘Any thoughts Russia might have had about reneging on the deal [the September 1914 treaty] were weakened by a further Allied agreement brokered in March 1915 as the Dardanelles campaign approached its crisis’. ⁸⁴

Even after the Agreement was made, there were points in the remainder of the Russian annus horribilis of 1915, and even in 1916, when her war improved, when a crisis might have triggered an abandonment of the war with Germany, or even Turkey. ⁸⁵ Notes of the secret meetings of the Council of Ministers during 1915 reveal the ever-present sense of ‘proximate catastrophe’ among government members. ⁸⁶ With defeatism infecting the ‘cabinet’, it could not have been wholly surprising if the premier had suddenly abandoned the war. The Tsar was not averse to sudden changes of mood and mind. In August 1915, he had shocked the Russian elite and his Allies by assuming the role of Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Yet he remained a steadfast ally. The Constantinople Agreement appears then to have contributed to his resolve to fight on until its glittering promises were delivered to Russia.

While Nicholas was an enigmatic public figure, there are clues to his thinking on Constantinople and the Straits. Even before the war, Lieven notes that ‘as always, [they] remained Nicholas’s key priority’. ⁸⁷ On declaring war against Turkey, as noted above, the Tsar triumphantly claimed that the nation’s ‘historical task’ at the Black Sea was near solution. We have his reaction of ‘wonderful!’ to King George V’s November 1914 promise. ⁸⁸ Later, when Sazonov reported the likelihood of Russia possessing the Turkish prizes, Nicholas exclaimed that he owed him ‘the happiest day of his life’. ⁸⁹ In a letter to his wife written the day the British agreed to the Russian demands, Nicholas described a euphoric calmness that had flooded him, part of which he attributed to this acceptance. ⁹⁰ Sazonov in October 1915 warned that any attempt to modify the Agreement might lead to the end of the Entente, and Buchanan advised Grey that the Emperor and the public agreed ‘intensely’: Constantinople alone could compensate them for their enormous losses. ⁹¹ Nicholas had decided that ‘his reign would not end without the acquisition of Constantinople and the Straits’. ⁹² In 1916, he needed reassurance that the Agreement remained on foot. Consequently, King George V telegrammed his cousin in August, guaranteeing the Agreement to be, once victory was secured, one of ‘the cardinal and permanent conditions of peace’. ⁹³ Nicholas in reply suggested that, to ‘disperse every distrust’, and to ensure compliance, the Agreement be made public, which it was in December 1916. ⁹⁴ Finally, in his 1916 Christmas Day manifesto, he explicitly linked the Turkish possessions with the notion of a separate peace: ‘the time [for peace negotiations] has not yet come . . . Russia has not yet attained the aim created by this war: the possession of Tsargrad and the Straits’. ⁹⁵ To conclude a peace now, he said, without the attainment of those prizes, would ‘mean not to profit fully by the heroic efforts of the Russian armies and fleets’. ⁹⁶ These clues demonstrate clearly how much the acquisition of Constantinople and the Straits meant to the Tsar, Russia’s premier foreign policy decision-maker. It must have seemed to Nicholas that his dream was on the cusp of becoming a reality, if only this wretched war could be survived. His biographers tell us that he felt an intense, almost mystical sense of union with his army. ⁹⁷ Is it possible then that, without the coveted gifts of the Ottoman capital and the waterway to the Mediterranean awaiting the mouzhiks in the trenches, gifts presented by the opportune convergence of events around the encounter at the Dardanelles, he may have decided one gloomy day in 1915 to call a halt to the awful travails of his army?

The Constantinople Agreement seems to have become, then, a significant reason why Russia stayed in World War I. ⁹⁸ Without the pledged prizes, the costs of the war would have exceeded the rewards, and the pressures to sue for peace might well have become intolerable. So, in part because of the Agreement, Russia refused all peace offers until 1917, and held up the Eastern front. Foreign Secretary Grey, whose opinion here must carry some weight, believed that Russia remained in the war only in the expectation that she would obtain Constantinople. In November 1916, he wrote, ‘Russia would never have stood five months of reverses in 1915 but for the hope of Constantinople. Even now the assurance of it is absolutely essential to keep Russia up to the mark’. ⁹⁹ While Grey may have had some justificatory self-interest in making this comment, others in British political circles thought similarly. Ex–Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, still influential in policy-making, and Churchill, who had at first resisted the Russian pressure, conceded that these potential acquisitions were a factor in preventing Russia from abandoning the war. ¹⁰⁰ The foreign policy of Russia from March 1915 to May 1917, according to Robert Kerner, an early scholar of the Agreement, was ‘dominated by one main idea, the maintenance of the Agreement against any modification whatsoever’. ¹⁰¹

While Sazonov had initially ‘panicked’ at the idea of Britain capturing Constantinople and keeping Russia out, ¹⁰² once the Agreement was concluded, the Gallipoli campaign became a measure of the bona fides of the Western parties to the Agreement. In effect, Gallipoli became a guarantor of the Constantinople Agreement. An early abandonment of Gallipoli might have confirmed Russian suspicions that the Agreement would not be honoured. In any case, as McMeekin points out, the British believed that the Russians ‘would not waver in their commitment to the war while her alliance partners were endeavoring to win her Constantinople’, a partial explanation for the duration of the Gallipoli campaign. ¹⁰³ The British sense of obligation to Russia, and the fear of the consequences of a Russian withdrawal, surfaces occasionally in discussions of the War Council and its successor, the Dardanelles Committee. ¹⁰⁴ During the tense debates in the Committee on the evacuation of Gallipoli, there was a general concern about the impact of the withdrawal on Russia. ¹⁰⁵ Grey, of course, was concerned, as he always had been, about Russian reaction to Allied action. ¹⁰⁶ After the evacuation decision, Lloyd George offered Russia substantial assistance in small arms, hoping this ‘largesse’ might ‘ease Russian disappointment’. ¹⁰⁷ It is likely then that British reluctance to test Russian sensitivity regarding an evacuation of Gallipoli had contributed to its longevity.

Some arguments have been raised against the interpretation of the Constantinople Agreement proposed here. Gottlieb, for example, suggests that the Agreement of March-April 1915 was neither more precise nor freer from escape clauses than the loose promises of the preceding November. ¹⁰⁸ But was this really so? Those assurances were now in writing, more binding than verbal promises, and more specific, with some quid pro quos on all sides. ¹⁰⁹ Even if one accepts the argument that the Allies could ultimately avoid its obligations, the effect of the Agreement on the Tsar and the ruling elite, and indeed the country, must be taken into account. The Agreement gave Russia something to keep fighting for because of the prize beckoning at the end: a vision of the Celestial City makes the Slough of Despond more tolerable. From most accounts, the soldiers, as well as the citizenry and peasantry, well understood that this would be their reward, despite the official secrecy of the Agreement. ¹¹⁰ Aside from enthusiastic voices in the Duma (when it was in session) trumpeting the imminent annexation of Tsargrad, the Agreement itself was a badly kept secret. Nine months before its official announcement at the end of 1916, Pavel Milyukov ¹¹¹ divulged relevant details of the Agreement in the Duma so that ‘the masses would know what cause they are fighting for’. ¹¹² So the Constantinople Agreement increasingly became public knowledge. By also becoming Russia’s primary war aim, it played a role – almost by definition – in steeling Russian resolve. It became, in fact, the thing that made the sacrifices and deaths meaningful. A constant refrain heard in Petrograd in the winter of 1916 was, ‘What is the point of this war if it will not give us Constantinople?’ ¹¹³ This had been the popular sentiment in Russia from 1914 but two years of ruinous war, and the hunger for bread and land rather than foreign acquisitions, was eventually to dissolve the Byzantine mirage. The masses had found other causes.

Some historians argue that the Constantinople Agreement was not imposed on the British. C.J. Smith discounted the importance of the Gallipoli campaign in the provenance of the Agreement and suggested that Grey cleverly provoked Russia into substituting the Turkish possessions for its Central and Eastern European war aims, which had conflicted with British desires for the post-war world. ¹¹⁴ However, as Michael Ekstein has noted, Grey did not oppose Russian objectives in Europe. ¹¹⁵ Ekstein himself has argued that Grey’s primary objective was to exploit the Ottoman promises to obtain Russian cooperation in Persia where there were conflicting interests between the two Allies. ¹¹⁶ While Britain did use its March concessions to put forward its desiderata in Persia, there is little reason not to take Grey’s explanation of the Constantinople Agreement as presented here, that despite some negotiation between the Tsar, foreign ministers, diplomats, and cabinets, it was essentially forced on the Western Allies, at face value. ¹¹⁷ The British only substantively considered their desiderata after conceding the Russian demands. ¹¹⁸ The thesis here also differs somewhat from Sean McMeekin’s interpretation. ¹¹⁹ McMeekin deserves credit for bringing Russia into the Gallipoli historiography. But a key part of his argument is that Russia cynically manipulated Britain into making concessions on Constantinople and the Straits by the diplomatic stratagem in early 1915 of threatening a separate peace. McMeekin claims that Britain was essentially bluffed into conceding much more than Russia had. Yet by gifting Russia the greatest prize of the war, but one conditional on her staying the course, Britain received as great an assurance as it was possible to acquire in a war that its ally would in fact do so and hold up the Eastern front. Constantinople and the Straits were made the price of Russia continuing the war. ¹²⁰ Furthermore, it appears that, for McMeekin, the effect of the Constantinople Agreement ends in April 1915 once the promise had been made, whereas this article suggests it continued into 1917 as the possibility of Russia withdrawing from the war remained an ever-present danger. A.J.P. Taylor characterized the promise of the Straits as ‘the cheapest coin in which to pay’ the Russians to remain in the war against Germany. While he saw it sardonically as ‘a promise for the future’, ¹²¹ British governments had since 1903 conceded that the nineteenth-century policy of excluding Russia from the Mediterranean no longer had the strategic value it once held. ¹²²

Some concluding points: first, the significance of the Constantinople Agreement is not diminished by its secrecy. It remained the underlying reality, the realpolitik, of Gallipoli during its duration. When the Russian government officially revealed its existence, it hoped that this would motivate Russians to continue the war effort. But by this time, war-weariness and disillusion had set in and indifference was the general response. ¹²³ Second, the fact that Gallipoli was an Allied military failure did not abrogate the Agreement. It was conditional on the war being won. The Agreement remained on foot until well into 1917, even being defended for a time by the Russian Provisional Government. Third, although Russia withdrew from the war after the Russian Revolution and tore up the Agreement, the promise of Constantinople and the Straits helped keep her in the war until then. Most historians of Gallipoli appear to have minimized the Agreement’s importance because it was abrogated. Yet it appears to have been a profoundly motivating factor, enfolding the Byzantine dream, on the Tsar and the country, for two very difficult years of the war prior to its termination. Fourth, Sir Edward Grey’s performance as British Foreign Secretary during the war, at least in the aspects raised here, is overdue for reappraisal. The image of a weak and indecisive diplomat leaving everything to the generals and war ministers as portrayed by his recent biographers and critics ¹²⁴ has been effectively debunked by such scholars as David French and Keith Neilson. ¹²⁵ The argument here suggests that Grey was correct to be ‘preoccupied’ with the dangers of a separate peace. ¹²⁶ In the high stakes diplomacy in which he was engaging, the awful and existential consequences to the Entente of a Russian abandonment of the war had to be considered seriously, even if the risk was to be adjudged small by some among later generations (who, after all, knew the war’s outcome). Finally, some caution about the arguments proposed here is necessary because portions of the Russian documentary record are missing from the evidence due to access and language deficits on the part of the present writer. However, it is instructive to note that a monograph authored by Russian historians in 1999 summarized the consensus reached on the matter of the Straits by Soviet and post-Soviet studies by the end of the twentieth century. The primary conclusion of this collective analysis was this: the 1915 secret agreement on the Black Sea Straits should be considered the greatest achievement of Russian diplomacy, and of S.D. Sazonov personally, on the way to realizing ‘the historical task’ of Russia’s foreign policy. ¹²⁷

Robin Prior ends his book on Gallipoli by claiming that Gallipoli did not shorten the war by a single day. ¹²⁸ This may be true, but Gallipoli, as argued here, did play a part in forcing the transfer of the ‘richest prize of the war’ to Russia. The condition of the transfer was, however, that Russia had to wait until the end of the war until she could collect. This helped to keep Russia in the war. It meant the second front was maintained which may have prevented Germany from winning the war or, at least, the peace in 1915 or 1916. So Gallipoli played a role in the war, not by shortening it, but by lengthening it, forcing an Agreement that helped retain Russia in World War I until the Americans arrived, and the Allies’ military, industrial, and numerical advantages eventually carried the day. An early Russian withdrawal would almost certainly have shortened the war. Gallipoli, it seems, was integrally involved in the diplomatic negotiations with Russia that helped to avoid this fatal scenario for the Allies. Gallipoli was crucial in the history of the Constantinople Agreement, first as catalyst, then as guarantor. Thus, despite its failure as an Allied military venture, Gallipoli was woven into the strands of the geopolitical diplomacy of the Great War in a way that may have had significant repercussions on its outcome. This conclusion is not designed to provide added lustre to that encounter, nor to rescue it from any obloquy, but to locate its proper place in the larger history of World War I.