95 years ago, in the days of May 1915, the Russian army, bleeding and exhausted from lack of ammunition, heroically repelled enemy attacks in the fields of Galicia. Having concentrated more than half of its armed forces against Russia, the Austro-German bloc rammed our defenses, seeking not only to withdraw Russia from the war. The two Central European empires had their own far-reaching plans for Russian territory. At the height of the offensive in Galicia on May 28, 1915, German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg spoke to the Reichstag explaining the strategic goals of the Second Reich in the war.
“Relying on our clear conscience, on our just cause and on our victorious sword,” said the prime minister of the state, who had violated international law more than once or twice during that war, “we must remain firm until we create all conceivable guarantees of our security, so that none of our enemies - either individually or jointly - would dare to start an armed campaign again. " Translated into ordinary language, this meant: the war must go on until the full and undivided hegemony of the Greater German Reich in Europe is established, so that no other state can resist any of its claims. Applied to Russia, this naturally could mean one thing. Since large territory forms the basis of Russian power, the Russian Empire must be dismembered. However, not only that. Even then, the plans of the German ruling class included the colonization of "living space" in the East. Hitler's plan "Ost" of World War II had quite "respectable" predecessors in Kaiser's Germany.
There, these ideas were hatched for many decades. In 1891, an association of German intellectuals, military, landowners and industrialists emerged under the name of the Pan-German Confederation. Until the First World War, inclusive, the Pan-German Union served as the main inspirer of the imperialist policy of imperial Germany. The union fought for active German colonial conquests, strengthening the power of the German navy. Over time, the leaders of the Union began to advocate the expansion of Germany into South-Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Believing that Russia is a competitor in this German ambition, the Union ranked it among Germany's opponents. The activities of the Pan-German Union played a significant role in the orientation of the Kaiser's policy on the eve of 1914 towards confrontation with Russia. Plans to revise the existing geopolitical equilibrium in Eastern Europe developed in Germany even before the official creation of the Pan-German Union and independently of it. In 1888, the German philosopher Eduard Hartmann appeared in the magazine "Gegenwart" with an article "Russia and Europe", which held the idea that a huge Russia is dangerous for Germany. Consequently, Russia must be divided into several states.
First of all, it is necessary to create a kind of barrier between "Moscovite" Russia and Germany. The main components of this barrier should be the so-called. "Baltic" and "Kiev" kingdoms. The "Baltic kingdom", according to Hartmann's plan, was to be made up of the "Ostsee", that is, the Baltic, provinces of Russia, and the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, that is, present-day Belarus. The "Kiev kingdom" was formed on the territory of present-day Ukraine, but with a significant expansion to the east - up to the lower reaches of the Volga. According to this geopolitical plan, the first of the new states should be under the protectorate of Germany, the second - under Austro-Hungary. At the same time, Finland should have been transferred to Sweden, Bessarabia - to Romania. This plan became the geopolitical substantiation of Ukrainian separatism, which was being strenuously fueled in Vienna at that time. The borders of states that Hartmann outlined in 1888, which were supposed to be isolated from the body of Russia, practically coincide with the borders of the Ostland Reichskommissariats outlined in 1942 by the Ost plan. and Ukraine. It would be an exaggeration to believe that the ideas of German expansion into Russia before World War I completely determined the worldview of the ruling classes in Germany and Austria-Hungary.
However, with the outbreak of World War I, these ideas received fertile ground for the spread and seizure of the consciousness of the ruling classes in the Central European empires. In September 1914, Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg proclaimed one of the goals of the outbreak of the war for Germany “to push Russia away from the German border as far as possible and undermine her domination over non-Russian vassal peoples”. That is, it was almost openly indicated that Germany was striving to establish its influence on the lands of the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and the Caucasus. At the same time, the leadership of the Pan-German Union prepared a memorandum to the Kaiser government. It pointed out, in particular, that the "Russian enemy" must be weakened by reducing the size of its population and preventing in the future the very possibility of its growth, "so that it would never in the future be able to threaten us in a similar way." This was to be achieved by expelling the Russian population from the regions lying to the west of the line Petersburg - the middle reaches of the Dnieper.
The Pan-German Union determined the number of Russians to be deported from their lands at approximately seven million people. The territory thus freed must be inhabited by German peasants. With the beginning of 1915, one after another, the German unions of industrialists, agrarians, and the "middle class" adopted resolutions of an expansionist character. All of them point to the need for seizures in the East, in Russia. The culmination of this campaign was the congress of the colors of the German intelligentsia, which gathered at the end of June 1915 at the House of Arts in Berlin. On it in early July
In 1915, 1,347 German professors of various political persuasions - from right-wing conservative to social-democratic - signed a memorandum to the government, which substantiated the program of territorial conquests, pushing Russia east to the Urals, German colonization in the captured Russian lands. It is necessary to distinguish, of course, Germany's plans in the First and during the Second World Wars. In the First, these were, indeed, precisely the plans that did not reach the stage of implementation.
They did not reach, however, only due to the fact that Germany did not have at that time the possibilities for their implementation. The territories planned for development still had to be captured, and by a peace treaty to ensure their undivided possession of them. Even the occupation of these lands by the Kaiser's troops in 1918 did not yet provide such an opportunity, for in the West a desperate struggle continued, ultimately unsuccessful for Germany. But the foundations of the future "Ost-politics" of the Third Reich were outlined and crystallized precisely at this time. The implementation of these installations during the First World War was prevented at first by the heroic resistance of the Russian troops, then by the final defeat of Germany. This should not be forgotten. In 1917, the Baltic German Paul Rohrbach, who became in Germany during the First World War one of the main ideologists on the "Eastern question", came up with a program for the future "geopolitical arrangement" of spaces in the East. To characterize Rohrbach, it is important that, along with the famous geopolitician Karl Haushoffer, he was the founder of the occult-scientific society "Thule", which is not without reason considered one of the laboratories of the future of Nazism. called for the rejection of the policy "reckoning with Russia as a whole, as a single state."
The main task of Germany in the war was to be the expulsion of Russia from all areas that by nature and historically were destined for Western cultural communication and which are illegal
passed to Russia”. The future of Germany, according to Rohrbach, depended on bringing the struggle for this goal to the end. Rohrbach outlined three regions for rejection from Russia: 1) Finland, the Baltic states, Poland and Belarus, the aggregate of which he called "Inter-Europe"; 2) Ukraine; 3) North Caucasus. Finland and Poland were to become independent states under the auspices of Germany. At the same time, in order to make the secession of Poland more sensitive for Russia, Poland had to grab the lands of Belarus. Since the slogans of annexation were unpopular in 1917, the Baltic states, according to this plan, had to remain in formal federal ties with Russia, but with the de facto right of independent foreign relations. This, the German ideologist believed, would allow Germany to establish a predominant influence in the Baltics. One of the founders of the Thule society attached particular importance to the separation of Ukraine from Russia. If Ukraine stays with Russia, Germany's strategic goals will not be achieved. Thus, long before Brzezinski, Rohrbach formulated the main condition for depriving Russia of its imperial status: “The elimination of the Russian threat, if time contributes to this, will only follow through the separation of Ukrainian Russia from Moscow Russia; or this threat will not be eliminated at all. " In 1918, the dreams of the German geopoliticians seemed to be coming true. Russia was falling apart.
The troops of the two Kaisers occupied the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine and Georgia. Turkish troops entered the Eastern Transcaucasia. A Cossack "state" controlled by Germany, headed by Ataman Krasnov, arose on the Don. The latter tried to put together the Don-Caucasian Union from the Cossack and mountain regions, which fully corresponded to Rohrbach's plan to split the North Caucasus from Russia. In the Baltics, the German government no longer made a secret of its annexationist policy. The current Baltic nationalists tend to consider the February days of 1918, when German troops occupied Livonia and Estonia, as the days of the proclamation of their countries' independence. In fact, Germany had no intention of granting them independence. On the lands of Estonia and Latvia, the Baltic Duchy was formed, the formal head of which was the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Adolf-Friedrich. Prince Wilhelm von Urach, a representative of the subsidiary branch of the royal house of Württemberg, was invited to the throne of Lithuania. The real power all this time belonged to the German military administration.
In the future, both "states" were to enter the federal German Reich. In the summer of 1918, the heads of the puppet "Ukrainian State", "Great Don Host" and other similar formations came to Berlin with a bow to their august patron - Kaiser Wilhelm II. With some of them, the Kaiser was very frank, stating that there would be no more united Russia. Germany intends to help perpetuate the split of Russia into several states, the largest of which will be: 1) Great Russia within its European part, 2) Siberia, 3) Ukraine, 4) Don-Caucasian or South-Eastern Union. All these far-reaching "good endeavors" were thwarted by Germany's surrender in World War I on November 11, 1918. And the beginning of the collapse of these plans was outlined on the fields of Galicia, generously watered with Russian and enemy blood, in the spring and summer of 1915. Remembering the First World War, especially on the eve of the centenary of its outbreak, let's not forget what goals our opponents set in this war. And then this war will appear before us in its true form as one of the Patriotic Wars of Russia.
