The most prominent members of the anti-German group were, unsurprisingly, those politicians and officials who favoured close ties with France and Britain. Among them were the two foreign ministers, Aleksandr Izvol’skii (1906–1910) and Sergei Sazonov (1910–1916), as well as Aleksandr Savinskii, chief of the cabinet of the Minister for Foreign Affairs (1901–1910). In his memoirs, he identifies the Drang nach Osten as the most important reason for the outbreak of World War I. Already since Frederick the Great, the Germans «inaugurated their systematic method of the colonization of Russia» and used «the Slavonic nations for extending [their] greatness»[1355]. While one might have expected a more subtle and historically informed analysis of the reasons for the war from such a high-ranking official, the true source of his prejudices comes out when he writes about his Baltic German colleagues. A: cording to him, these people «for the greater number remained German in soul and sentiment and faithful servants of the German cause». While the large number of «Baltic barons» in Russia’s Foreign Service was an undisputed fact, most of them had been in Russian service for generations and had only little connection with the Baltic lands, let alone Germany proper[1356]. But still, their patriotic loyalty was repeatedly put into question, and they were sometimes even deliberately kept away from office.

When, for example, Izvol’skii was looking for an assistant in 1908, he chose Nikolai Charikov, not only as a former classmate, but also because he saw in him a man from «the traditional circle of Russian [as opposed to Baltic!] landed nobility», which he hoped would continue to dominate Russia’s political institutions[1357]. His opinion of officials with German background was in general utterly prejudiced. In his memoirs, he describes one of them in almost cartoon-like fashion as a person «qui représentait le type le plus accompli de ces fonctionnaires d’origine allemande […] souvent très laborieux, mais réussissant surtout à atteindre les degrés supérieurs de la hiérarchie russe à force d’intrigues et de bassesses»[1358]. Clearly, he did not want to have any such people around him. When he was selecting his staff at the Embassy in Paris and a Baron Uexkoll was suggested to him as attache, he responded acidly in a letter to Sazonov: «Is it really impossible to find a young man with university education and a plain Russian family name?»[1359] Despite such ethnic prejudices, Izvol’skii frequently enjoyed his summer holidays at Tegernsee in Bavaria, where he had served as the ambassador to Munich in the late 1890s.

While Izvol’skii’s attitudes towards Germany were quite obvious, the case of his successor, Sazonov, is more complicated. He was not a straightforward anti-German, as has been suggested[1360]. At some point, he was even rumoured to «cater to the whims and caprices of the Kaiser» and, in a letter by Izvol’skii from 1912, to be «a friend of Germany»[1361]. His attitudes apparently changed as a result of the Liman von Sanders crisis in 1913, when a German military mission to Constantinople seemed to pose a vital threat to Russia’s interests and to challenge his personal reputation as Foreign Minister. Although this crisis was peacefully resolved, by the time he was writing his memoirs, after World War I, Sazonov had become a convinced nationalist, who employed all the familiar anti-German cliches, including Drang nach Osten and the final showdown between Slavs and Germans. Yet his image of Germany was still much more complex than one might expect. He attaches it to a specific historic development which bothered him not just as a politician, but also as an individual human being. Like many other educated Russians, Sazonov had always admired German music and literature, and he even welcomed the positive influence that German culture exerted within Europe. But with the foundation of the German Empire, all of this allegedly changed. Under the influence of «blood and iron» ideology, German culture degenerated into «Prussian civilization», and German arts and sciences took on a «barracks-like character». In sarcastic language, Sazonov elaborates on the results of these changes, in particular the psychology of Germans and their politicians. He attributes their self-righteous attitudes to a «Prussian official education» which made them «physically incapable to face with impartiality a Frenchman and even more a Slav» and he identifies a certain «nationalist frenzy» as a main characteristic of German national psychology[1362]. Although one could argue that this perception of Germany actually reflected historical reality (nationalism and militarism did indeed run high there), it is still quite reductionist with its notion of a physically predetermined national psychology and its absurd historical claims. If anything, Sazonov’s memoirs reflect a deep feeling of disappointment and bitterness about a country that he had once admired.

Diplomats with pro-German leanings unsurprisingly shared Sazonov’s positive views about German culture, but not his wider anti-German resentments. Petr Botkin, for example, who served at the Embassies in the USA and Portugal, remembered that he had to think of no one less than Goethe’s last words — «mehr Licht!» — when he first entered the dark corridors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg. He also was a great admirer of the music of Bach, Beethoven and, in particular, Richard Wagner, whom he mentions several times in his memoirs[1363]. Iurii Solov’ev, who later was one of the first tsarist diplomats to join the Bolsheviks, apparently had a late start in his Foreign Service career because of his pro-German attitudes. He had become a victim of Izvol’skii’s personnel policies (at least so he thought). When he finally received a diplomatic post and arrived in Stuttgart in 1909 «in order to find out in reality the German attitude towards Russia which was always shown in a hostile light in St. Petersburg», he was utterly surprised. Like Botkin, he liked Wagner’s music and frequently visited the Bayreuth Festival. But he was also deeply impressed by the cleanliness of Württemberg villages and the excellent conditions of German roads. As a proud member of the German automobile association, ADAC, he clearly knew what he was writing about[1364]. Others based their image of Germany on less concrete facts. Dmitrii Abrikosov, for example, who was mostly stationed at posts in Asia and had little experience with Russo-German relations proper, still thought highly of German virtues. In his case, this attitude was determined by the admiration for a former superior. He started his career as attache at the Embassy in London under Count Alexander Benckendorff and later reminisced that «the Russian character was much more difficult to deal with than that of the disciplined Germans». He then concluded that this is «the main reason perhaps why our diplomatic service is full of barons from the Baltic provinces»[1365].

It should be noted that some of these Baltic barons themselves held rather critical views of Germany and can thus not automatically be counted as pro-Germans simply because of their names and ancestries. Benckendorff, for example, was a passionate anglophile and an ardent supporter of Russia’s rapprochement with Britain, who believed that the German Empire posed the biggest danger to Russia It seems ironic then that the Anglo-Russian Entente (1907) had to be negotiated in St. Petersburg instead of London, allegedly because there was so little confidence in the personnel of the Russian Embassy there which, according to the popular newspaper «Novoe Vremia», was filled with «foreigners»[1366]. Roman Rosen, the ambassador in Washington (1905–1911) and later member of the State Council, was critical of irrational attitudes on both sides. In his memoirs, he attacks pan-Germanism, the disease of the «swelled head» and German «inability to understand other people’s mentality». For Russia, in turn, he bemoans the absence of a «feeling of personal responsibility for the condition of public affairs», attributes a «fatalistic strain» to the Russian national character and, after warning of the dangers of pan-Slavism to Russian foreign relations, demands a policy of «reason and competent statesmanship»[1367].