EL ARCANO SIN NOMBRE LA MUERTE:

The diplomatic and consular organisation in Russia consisted of officials at the British embassy in St Petersburg, and a network of consular officials spread throughout the country in cities that the Foreign Office viewed as commercially important to British interests. Most notably, these included St Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Kiev, Warsaw and Batumi. These included both salaried and unsalaried consuls who attended to their official duties alongside their own business interests. There were roughly seven to eight senior diplomats at the British embassy in St Petersburg at any one time, alongside a collection of more junior officials, including a commercial attaché from 1908.1

The addition of a commercial attaché to the St Petersburg embassy was a feature of the changing functions of the Foreign Office and diplomatic service towards

professional commercial support for British exporters and companies based overseas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This development took place in a

1 _{Hughes, Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution: Britain, Russia and the Old Diplomacy, 1894-}

context of increased professionalism and concern with information gathering as well as increased specialization within the Foreign Office and diplomatic service in the late nineteenth century.2 In response to a similar development among its European counterparts and concerns over Britain’s industrial and export performance, diplomatic and Foreign Office officials began to take on a number of different responsibilities such as producing reports on regulations, maintaining good relations between British companies and host-country regimes, and interceding on behalf of British companies.3 A significant result of this process was the outcome of the Walrond Committee, which in 1903 set new grounds for the appointment of suitable consuls with the required amount of commercial knowledge, in response to

complaints by British businesses.4 As a result of this reform the role of the consuls changed to offering support to individual British companies, providing that their competitors were not British. This support included information on local trading conditions, the introduction of British firms to local firms, and offering advice to British litigants in commercial disputes.5 In Russia, the British ambassador Charles Hardinge established a system in 1904 whereby consular reports on local conditions played an important part in diplomatic intelligence gathering and the subsequent dispersal of commercial information.6

Despite these developments, historians’ treatment of the Foreign Office and

diplomatic service has been somewhat negative, and it is important to bear in mind the limitations that they highlight. These interpretations stress the professional isolation of the Foreign Office that resulted in a reactive outlook, and receipt of deficient information, which ultimately contributed to its inability to adequately deal with the rising threat of Germany.7 Certainly, the capabilities of diplomats and consuls were limited due to intense time and financial pressures. Since the 1906 reform of the Foreign Office only indirectly affected the diplomatic service,

2 _{T. Otte, ‘Old Diplomacy: Reflections on the Foreign Office before 1914,’ in G. Johnson (ed.), The}

Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2005), 36;

Muriel Chamberlain, Pax Britannica? : British Foreign Policy, 1789-1914 (London: Longman, 1988), 167.

3 _{L. Sounpaa ‘Financial Speculation, Political Risks and Legal Complications. British Commercial}

Diplomacy in the Balkans, c. 1906-1914,’ Historical Journal, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2012), 98.

4 _{D. C. M. Platt, ‘The Role of the British Consular Service in Overseas Trade, 1825-1914,’ EHR, New}

Series, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1963), 509.

5 _{Platt, ‘The Role of the British Consular Service,’ 509.}

6 _{Hughes, Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution, 109.}

diplomatists continued to be burdened with clerical work.8 _{The lower ranks at the} British embassy were also notoriously underpaid, and had a large number of other tasks to complete as well as commercial intelligence gathering. Consuls found themselves in a similar position; they were usually part-time which would have affected how well they carried out their duties.9 Where they were salaried, they were often overworked and not given the financial resources to employ assistants.10 It must be recognised, therefore, that their perceptions of the Russian business environment would have been limited by these working conditions.

Historians have also pointed towards the diplomatic service and Foreign Office’s limited social composition as a source of weakness. Even though the Foreign Office introduced entrance examinations in 1905, the service was still dominated by individuals from aristocratic or wealthy landowning backgrounds; from 1908 to 1914, 25 out of 37 new entrants to the diplomatic service came from Eton.11 Social exclusivity is likely to have been particularly accentuated in Russia, where living expenses in St Petersburg far outstripped the meagre salaries of most officials, who were forced to supplement their earnings with other sources of income, or request a less expensive posting, and where high social standing conveyed particular

advantages in the court-orientated capital.12 _{Even in the Balkans, this social}

homogeneity resulted in a significant social gap between the members of the British business community and the members of the diplomatic service who were supposed to be assisting them.13

8 _{Steiner, Foreign Office, 82.}

9 _{Hughes, Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution, 100-103.}

10 _{Platt, ‘The Role of the British Consular Service in Overseas Trade’, 495.}

11 _{Steiner, Foreign Office, 19-20; V. Cromwell, ‘A World Apart’: Gentlemen Amateurs to}

Professional Generalists,’ in M. Dockrill and B. McKercher (eds.), Diplomacy and World Power:

Studies in British Foreign Policy, 1890-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3; T.

Otte, ‘Almost a Law of Nature? Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Office, and the Balance of Power in Europe, 1905-12,’ in E. Goldstein and B McKercher (eds), British Power and Foreign Policy (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 79.

12 _{Michael Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British officials in Russia, 1900-1939 (London: Hambledon}

Press, 1997); Keith Neilson, ‘Only a D. D. Marionette?’ The Influence of Ambassadors on British Foreign Policy, 1904-1914,’ in Dockrill and McKercher, Diplomacy and World Power, 76; Eugene Trani, ‘Russia in 1905: the View from the American Embassy,’ The Review of Politics, Vol. 31, no. 1 (1969), 48.

This background to some extent applied to salaried consuls. There was a prevailing attitude among the senior consular staff that consuls should have a high social standing amongst the community. Smith regarded this as an important factor in the process of appointing a replacement vice-consul in Theodosia in mid-1907. In the case of one candidate Smith wrote to the British ambassador, Arthur Nicolson, that ‘Nothing definite has been alleged to his discredit, but on the whole my conclusion was that his standing was hardly as well established as is desirable for a vice- consul’.14 _{Another candidate, the then current vice-consul at Warsaw was turned} down on the basis that ‘If appointed, he proposes to set up business at Theodosia, but he has no private means and is not well established there... I fear he may be

unsuitable’.15

The British diplomatic service underwent a significant change in this time period, and became more concerned with commercial considerations, largely due to the influence of Hardinge and as a result of the Waldron Committee’s findings, as opposed to the expansion of British trade and investment in Russia. Despite it becoming more sophisticated and attuned to commercial matters, the diplomatic service in Russia still operated under a set of difficult conditions and with limited resources, especially in the case of the consuls in the provinces, and came from a limited social sphere. At the same time it included a great many officials with a lot of experience in Russia, who were adept at navigating the social circles of the Russian court and ministries. Such a service provided British companies with an important and knowledgeable tool with which to pursue their interests in this period, as this chapter and the next explores.