Hitler's master plan "Ost" had "respectable" predecessors in imperial Germany
In the field of foreign policy, Emperor Nicholas II inherited a difficult legacy. The situation on the world stage was unfavorable for Russia. First of all, in the last decades of the 19th century, the policy of good neighborliness with Germany, traditionally supported since the time of Catherine II, was interrupted. The reason for this was, first of all, the position of the warlike German emperor Wilhelm II, who set himself the goal of carrying out a global redistribution of the world in favor of his country
Russian economists and thinkers have long noted the unequal exchange that Western countries carried out with Russia. Prices for Russian raw materials, however, as well as for raw materials from other countries that did not belong to Western civilization, from time immemorial turned out to be greatly underestimated, since from them, according to the long-established preference, for some reason, profits from the production of the final product were excluded. As a result, a significant part of the materialized labor produced by the Russian worker went abroad free of charge. In this regard, the domestic thinker M. O. Menshikov noted that the people of Russia are becoming poorer, not because they work little, but because all the surplus product they produce goes to the industrialists of European countries. “The energy of the people - invested in raw materials - is lost in vain like steam from a leaky boiler, and it is no longer enough for our own work,” Menshikov pointed out.
However, the government, first of Alexander III, and then of Nicholas II, tried to curb the trend of more and more unrestrained economic exploitation of production capacities and economic resources of Russia by Western countries. Therefore, since the beginning of the 20th century, Western countries have been persistently striving to do everything possible and impossible to weaken the Russian state and gradually transform it into an administrative appendage completely dependent on the West. Many actions against the Romanov monarchy on the part of both its rivals and, alas, partners fit into the mainstream of this insidious political and economic strategy …
At that time, Russia and Great Britain stood on the way to the world hegemony of Germany. Therefore, Emperor Wilhelm refuses to renew the secret treaty with Russia, according to which the contracting parties promised to remain neutral in the event of an attack on one of them by a third party. This secret treaty was a significant limitation of the Triple Alliance (originally Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy). It meant that Germany would not support the anti-Russian actions of Austria-Hungary. The termination of the secret treaty of neutrality, in fact, meant the transformation of the Triple Alliance into a pronounced anti-Russian alliance.
In the 90s, a Russian-German customs war broke out, started by the German side, seeking to obtain even greater unilateral advantages from trade with Russia. Nevertheless, the victory then remained with St. Petersburg
In 1899, a customs agreement was signed, which gave our country significant preferences for a period of 10 years. However, influential political circles of the Second Reich believed, and not without reason, that this victory was purely temporary, everything should soon change …
It is advisable to preface the analysis of Germany's intentions and plans in World War I.
Emperor Franz Joseph and his government, entering the war on the side of Germany, put forward a program to seize Serbia and establish their rule over the entire Balkan Peninsula, expand the territory of Austria-Hungary at the expense of Montenegro, Albania, Romania, as well as Polish lands that were part of Russia … In this, the Austro-Hungarian ruling classes saw the most important means of strengthening the "patchwork" Habsburg monarchy, torn apart by the most acute national contradictions, a guarantee of the further oppressed state of millions of Slavs, Romanians and Italians subject to them.
Germany was also fully interested in the implementation of the aggressive plans of Austria-Hungary, since this opened up wide opportunities for the export of German capital to the Balkans, Turkey, Iran and India. However, Germany's own imperialist aspirations, which played the first violin in the concert of the Central Powers, went much further not only the Austro-Hungarian plans, but even the plans of absolutely all the belligerent countries.
Historians of many countries traditionally recognize the "memorandum on the goals of war" drawn up on October 29, 1914 by the Prussian Minister of the Interior von Lebel, the memorandum of the six largest monopolistic organizations in Germany, handed to Reich Chancellor Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg on May 20, 1915, and in particular, the so-called. "Memorandum of professors", drawn up in the summer of 1915
Already in the first of these documents, a broad program of establishing world domination of Germany and the transformation of entire continents into colonial appendages of the German "master race" was promulgated. Extensive seizures were envisaged in the East, primarily at the expense of Russia.
It was meant not only to tear away the most grain-growing areas from it, to seize the Russian Baltic provinces and Poland, but also to achieve protectorate over the German colonists even on the Volga, “to establish a connection between the German peasants in Russia with the German imperial economy and thereby significantly increase the number of the population fit for defense..
The occupation of Ukraine and its transformation into a German semi-colony was an integral part of the plan for the creation of the so-called. "Middle Europe" (Mitteleuropa) - a bloc of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Turkey and other countries, which will be discussed below, under indisputable German domination.
The unbridled dreams of the German ruling class were most fully expressed in the "professors' memorandum," which was signed by 1,347 "scientists." The demands of these "scientists" surpassed everything possible in their greed. The memorandum put forward the task of establishing world domination by Germany by capturing the territory of Northern and Eastern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Balkans, the entire Middle East to the Persian Gulf, India, most of Africa, especially Egypt, with that, to "strike at the vital center of England" there.
The conquests of the ideologues of German imperialism extended even to Central and South America. The "professorial" memorandum demanded "the settling of the conquered lands by German peasants," "the raising of warriors from them," "the cleansing of the conquered lands from their population," "the deprivation of political rights of all residents of non-German nationality in expanded Germany."Not too long will pass, and this document will become one of the fundamental foundations of the cannibalistic fascist ideology and the policy of mass extermination of the population of the occupied countries …
Nurturing to the limit the illusory and extremely adventurous idea of achieving world domination, the aggressive circles of the German ruling elite traditionally considered significant territorial increments in the East as a necessary prerequisite, which were to become the material basis for further expansion.
Actually, plans to strengthen Germany in Europe by dismembering Russia and enslaving its peoples were developed by the ideologists of Prussia and Austria, starting from the second half of the 19th century. They were based on the idea of one of the prominent German theoreticians K. Franz about the possibility of creating, with the help of England, the same German "Central European Union".
Franz demanded that Russia be pushed back from the Baltic and Black Seas to the "Petrine borders", and the taken away territory be used for the revival of the "empire of the German nation" under new conditions
In the era of imperialism, the Great German concept received further development and support from the ruling circles of Germany. Its recognized ideologist was F. Naumann, who represented a kind of connecting link between the imperial government, financial capital and the corrupt social democracy that was gaining increasing influence (which V. I. Lenin, not without reason, soon began to stigmatize in his works as an opportunist trend in Internazionale, many threads connected with the bourgeois class). By the way, F. Naumann was indeed closely associated with the German Chancellor T. Bethmann-Hollweg and carried out various government orders for the development of the "Central Europe" program. German official historiography, which, according to Soviet historians, “played a prominent role in the propaganda of the predatory ideology of German imperialism,” considered the views of F. Naumann to be the highest achievement of political thought in the era of Wilhelm II.
The "German idea" was developed further and adapted to the new historical conditions by the organization of militant Germanism - the Pan-German Union (AIIdeutscher Verband) and its branch - Ostmagkvegein, which arose in the 90s. XIX century. The idea of the "national mission" of Prussians and the Hohenzollerns, the cult of force of arms and war as a "part of the world divine order", anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred of small, especially Slavic, peoples, the Pan-Germans made the basis of their propaganda. Following the notorious G. Treitschke, whom the Soviet authors attributed to the number of "German government-police historians", the ideologists of the Pan-German Union considered the necessary prerequisite for the creation of a "world" empire to "unite" in Europe "states of the German type" -German ".
The way to such an empire, in their opinion, lay only through war.
"The war," one of the Pan-Germans prophesied, "will have a healing property, even if the Germans lose it, because chaos will come, from which a dictator will emerge."
According to another Pan-German ideologue, only "Great Germany", created in central Europe through the enslavement and brutal Germanization of the conquered peoples, would be able to carry out "world and colonial politics." Moreover, Wilhelm II has repeatedly called for turning the German Empire into a world one, the same "as the Roman Empire once was."
Over time, the leaders of the union became more and more vociferously in favor of German expansion into South-Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It is quite reasonable to believe that Russia is a strong obstacle in this endeavor, the Pan-German Union ranked it among the main enemies of Germany. The activities of the Pan-German Union played a significant role in orienting further Kaiser's policy towards confrontation with Russia.
According to the historical concept of the ideologists of Pan-Germanism, the Franco-Prussian war "liberated Central Europe from France." And the "liberation of Central Europe from Russia" began as early as 1876, when Germany announced its renunciation of neutrality in the event of an Austro-Russian war. The First World War - the "German war" was supposed to complete the "Bismarck affair" and "resurrect the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation from a long sleep."
Plans to revise the existing geopolitical balance in Eastern Europe were conceived 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 Gegenwart magazine with an article “Russia and Europe”, the main message of which was that a huge Russia was inherently dangerous for Germany. Consequently, Russia must necessarily be divided into several states. And first of all, 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 was to be under the protectorate of Germany, the second - under Austro-Hungarian protection. At the same time, Finland should have been transferred to Sweden, and Bessarabia to Romania.
This plan of German Russophobes became the geopolitical rationale for Ukrainian separatism, which was being fueled at that time in Vienna with the support of Berlin.
It should be noted that the boundaries of states indicated by Hartmann in 1888, which were supposed to be isolated from the body of Russia, almost completely coincide with the boundaries of the Ostland and Ukraine Reichskommissariats outlined by Hitler's general plan "Ost", created on the territory of the Soviet Union republics occupied in 1941
In September 1914, Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg proclaimed one of the goals of the outbreak of the war for Germany "to push Russia as far back as possible from the German border and undermine her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples." That is, it was openly indicated that Germany was striving to establish its undivided influence on the lands of the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine and the Caucasus.
In the early autumn of 1914, Bethmann-Hollweg studied a memorandum of the German industrialist A. Thyssen of August 28, which demanded that the Baltic provinces of Russia, Poland, the Don region, Odessa, Crimea, the Azov coast, the Caucasus be annexed to the Reich. In the memorandum of the Pan-German Union, adopted at the end of August, the authors again demanded that Russia be pushed back to the borders that existed "before Peter the Great" and "to turn its face to the East by force."
At the same time, the leadership of the Pan-German Union prepared a memorandum to the Kaiser's 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 liberated territory was to be populated only by German peasants.
These anti-Slavic plans found, alas, full support in German society. Not without reason from the beginning of 1915.one after another, the German unions of industrialists, agrarians, and the "middle class" began to adopt openly expansionist resolutions at their forums. All of them pointed to the "need" for significant territorial seizures in the East, that is, in Russia.
The crown of this campaign was precisely the congress of the color of the German intelligentsia, which gathered at the end of June 1915 in the House of Arts in Berlin, at which a large gathering of German professors representing the entire spectrum of political convictions - from right-wing conservative to social-democratic - just worked out that a memorandum addressed to the government, which "intellectually" substantiated the program of huge territorial conquests, pushing Russia east to the Urals, German colonization of the captured Slavic lands …
It is quite obvious that these plans could be carried out only with the complete defeat of Russia. Therefore, the so-called. The "Action for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia" as one of the methods of its dismemberment became one of the main goals of the Second Reich's war on the Eastern Front. Under the German High Command, a special "Liberation Department" was created, headed by a representative of the ancient Polish family, related to the Hohenzollerns themselves, B. Hutten-Czapski. In addition, since the beginning of the war in Berlin, the government committee of the "foreign service" was actively operating, in which the best "experts" on the "Eastern problem" worked. The future famous German politician Matthias Erzberger headed the Polish section of this committee.
In August 1914, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU) was created in Lvov, and in Krakow, the Polish Main National Committee (NKN), called upon, on instructions from Berlin and Vienna, to lead the “national movements”
Since 1912, the preparation of insurgent and sabotage and espionage operations in the Kingdom of Poland was in full swing in Germany, and in 1915, when a large-scale German offensive against Russian Poland began, German intelligence began practical preparations for the Polish uprising in the rear of the Russian army. …
On August 5, 1915, the head of the German Foreign Ministry, Secretary of State Gottlieb von Jagov informed the German ambassador in Vienna that the German troops "are carrying proclamations of the liberation of Poland in their pockets." On the same day, the German General Staff reported to the Chancellor that "the uprising in Poland had already begun."
At the end of August of the same year, a deputy of the Austrian Reichstag Kost Levitsky was summoned to Berlin, where he discussed with the responsible Foreign Ministry official Zimmerman and the same Gutten-Chapsky "the possibility of an uprising in Ukraine."
In turn, an evil hater of Orthodoxy and an ardent Russophobe, one of the hierarchs of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan of Galicia and Archbishop of Lvov Andriy Sheptytsky offered the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph personal services in the “organization” of the region, “as soon as the victorious Austrian army entered to the territory of Russian Ukraine ". (A logical continuation of this policy of hatred towards everything connected with Russia was the fact that in 1941 this Greek Catholic "archpastor" without a shadow of a doubt blessed the Nazis and their Ukrainian accomplices from the UPA and sabotage and terrorist formation "Nachtigall." Already in the first days of the occupation of Lviv, they brutally destroyed thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians, which was hypocritically presented in the blissful speeches of Sheptytsky from the cathedral of St. George for a "crusade" against "Soviet Bolshevism").
In turn, instructing the German ambassador in Stockholm about the uprising in Finland, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg on August 6, 1915 put forward an attractive slogan for all opponents of the Russian state, under which the Kaiser's army is allegedly deploying its actions on the Eastern Front: “Liberation of the oppressed peoples of Russia, pushing back Russian despotism to Moscow. " Similar instructions to intensify subversive activities in various areas of tsarist Russia were sent to the German ambassadors in Vienna, Bern and Constantinople, and on August 11 the press was instructed to direct propaganda activities "in favor of the Polish and Ukrainian buffer states."
As early as September 9, 1914, in the midst of the battle on the Marne, when it seemed that France would be about to be defeated already at the beginning of the war, the chancellor from headquarters sent to Berlin secret notes "On the guiding lines of policy at the conclusion of peace."
The main provisions of the September Bethmann-Hollweg program were the requirements for "the creation of a Central European economic union under German leadership," "pushing Russia as far as possible to the East and eliminating its power over non-Russian peoples."
Anticipating the defeat of France, the Chancellor demanded some weighty "guarantees" for Germany and the West, and the energetic Deputy Secretary of State Zimmermann wrote on the same day that "a long peace" presupposes the need to first "settle accounts" with France, Russia and England.
However, the defeat on the Marne, largely made possible thanks to the heroic, premature and unprepared offensive of the Russian North-Western Front on East Prussia, upset the adventurous calculations of William II and his advisers for a quick victory …
At the height of the offensive in Galicia, on May 28, 1915, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg spoke to the Reichstag explaining the strategic goals of the Second Reich in the war with Russia. “Relying on our clear conscience, on our just cause and on our victorious sword,” the prime minister of the state that has grossly violated international law, enemies - neither individually nor jointly - did not dare to start an armed campaign again. That is, the war must go on until the establishment of the complete and undivided hegemony of the German Reich in Europe, so that no other state would dare to resist any of its claims …
This meant that since a large territory forms the basis of Russian power, the Russian Empire must certainly be dismembered. But the plans of the German ruling class even then included the colonization of "living space" in the East …
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. It is noteworthy that, along with the famous odious geopolitician Karl Haushoffer, he was the founder of the occult “scientific” society “Thule”, which is not without reason considered one of the main laboratories where the cannibalistic ideology of the very soon emerging Nazism was ripening …
In his work "Our military goal in the East and the Russian revolution" Rohrbach called for the abandonment 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 illegally passed to Russia." The future of Germany, according to Rohrbach, depended on whether it would be possible to bring the struggle for this goal to a victorious end. To the obligatory rejection of Russia, Rohrbach outlined three regions:
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 as well.
One of the ideologists of the Tule society attached great importance to the separation of Ukraine from Russia. "If Ukraine stays with Russia, Germany's strategic goals will not be achieved," Rohrbach said
Thus, long before the ever-memorable Zbigniew 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 …".
"Ukraine, alienated from Russia, included in the economic system of Central Europe," wrote, in turn, the German journalist Kurt Stavenhagen, admitted to the higher spheres of the Second Reich, "could become one of the richest countries in the world."
“An innumerable amount of bread, livestock, fodder, animal products, wool, textile raw materials, fats, ore, including the irreplaceable manganese ore, and coal are presented to us by this country,” another German journalist Gensch echoed., then, in addition to these riches, there will be 120 million people in Central Europe”. Something painfully familiar, very much reminiscent of the present day, is heard in these rantings, which strongly resemble the current arguments of famous politicians (or politicians?), About the notorious "European choice" of Ukraine, isn't it?
… In 1918, after the conclusion of the predatory Brest Peace (which even the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars V. I. Lenin, who even worked off German money for the Russian revolution, dared to call "obscene"), the dreams of German geopoliticians were unusually close to being realized. The territory of the recently united Russia fell apart into many fragments, many of which were engulfed in the Civil War. The troops of the two German rulers occupied the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and Georgia. Eastern Transcaucasia was occupied by Turkish troops. On the Don, a Cossack "state" controlled by Germany, headed by the ataman P. N. Krasnov. The latter stubbornly tried to put together the Don-Caucasian Union from the Cossack and mountain regions, which fully corresponded to Rohrbach's plan to break off the North Caucasus from Russia.
In the Baltics, the German government pursued an openly annexationist policy. In the current Baltic states, the days of February 1918, when German troops occupied Livonia and Estonia, have now officially become the days of proclaiming the independence of Lithuania (on February 16, the Lithuanian Council declared its independence) and Estonia (on February 24, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Tallinn). In fact, the facts show that Germany had no intention of granting independence to the Baltic peoples.
The authorities of the supposedly independent Lithuania and Estonia formed in those days acted rather as fig leaves, designed to cover at least a little the “patronage” of Germany, which was a “civilized” form of annexation.
On the lands of Estonia and Latvia, under the dictation of Berlin, 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. And in the future, all these "states" were to enter the "federal" German Reich …
In the summer of 1918, the heads of the puppet "Ukrainian State", "Great Don Host" and a number of other similar formations came to Berlin with a bow to the august patron - Kaiser Wilhelm II. With some of them, the Kaiser was very frank, stating that there would no longer be any 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.
The implementation of far-reaching conquest and dividing projects was interrupted only by the surrender of Germany in the First World War on November 11, 1918 …
And the collapse of these plans began on the fields of Galicia generously watered with Russian blood in the spring and summer of 1915.
Returning to the activities of the ideologist of the annexationist policy Naumann and his project "Central Europe", it should be noted that in a book of the same name, published with the support of the Kaiser government in October 1915 in a huge circulation, 300 pages described the "German Empire", revived " after a long sleep. " It should be emphasized that the “Middle Europe” plotted by the controversial geopolitician did not in any way affect the interests of the British Empire and the United States. The author, on the contrary, even counted on the consent of England with the "changes" to which the map of Europe was to undergo as a result of the victory of the Second Reich …
In the correspondence of the German government with the high command (August - November 1915), the political, military and economic foundations of the future "Central Europe" were developed, which were outlined by Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg at the German-Austrian conference in Berlin on November 10-11, 1915. The Chancellor spoke at length about the "close connection between the two empires", enshrined in a long-term agreement (for 30 years), and on the creation of an "invincible Central European bloc" on this basis.
The memorandum of the Berlin Secretary of State Yagov to the Vienna cabinet of November 13, 1915, as well as the official reports of the Berlin conference, show that Germany, counting on "complete defeat of Russia" and the seizure of "large territories" from it, allowed as some kind of compensation " to the civilized West”rejection of the German annexation of Belgium and other territorial acquisitions in Western and Central Europe. At the same time, Austria turned into a "German Eastern brand" of the future "Central Europe".
At a closed government meeting on November 18 and at a meeting of the Reichstag in early December 1915, the supreme power of Germany approved the results of the said conference. William II's visit to Vienna and his discussion with Franz Joseph and his ministers on the "implementation of the unification" of both empires, the resumption of negotiations on this topic in Vienna and Sofia, negotiations on the "deepening" of trade relations with other "allied and neutral states", exit in Berlin, a new magazine with the characteristic name "Ostland" - all this turned the idea of "Central Europe" into a factor of "real politics".
At the same time, the German government program of annexations and indemnities in the East proceeded during this period from two possible solutions.
A "small decision" was envisaged in case Russia agrees to conclude a separate peace. The terms of it were the cession to Germany of Russian positions in the Balkans, consent to enslaving economic and trade agreements, to the payment of indemnity and the capture of Poland, Lithuania and Courland by Germany, "which in relation to the huge Russian Empire would be only a border correction."
The “big decision” (in the case of a separate peace with England and France and the subsequent complete surrender of Russia as a result of its military defeat) was to completely dismember the Romanov empire into a number of fragments, create border states on its territory (under the protectorate of Germany), and colonization of the above-mentioned Russian lands.
In fact, the “big decision” was considered preferable from the very beginning, which became the only one from the middle of 1915, with the addition of a clause on the collection from Russia of a huge indemnity, which the Soviet government undertook to pay in 1918.
In the secret memorandum of Professor Friedrich Lezius, dedicated to the government secrets of Kaiser's Germany, this program, cleared of diplomatic conventions, looked like this. “The border territories that Russia must lose - the Caucasus, Poland, the Baltic-Belarusian northwest - are not suitable for the formation of independent states,” the pundit said in the memorandum. "They should be ruled with a firm hand, like conquered provinces, like the Romans." True, Lecius makes a reservation, "Ukraine and Finland, perhaps, could exist as independent states" …
“If we are forced,” the author continues, “to conclude a compromise peace with the Western countries, and for the time being we are forced to abandon the liberation of the western flank, then we must completely push Russia back from the Baltic Sea and move our border to the Volkhov and Dnieper, so that Novgorod the Great and Mogilev will become German border cities, and our border will be much better and easier to defend … In exchange for Mogilev, Novgorod, Petersburg and Riga, for Vilna and Warsaw, we can console ourselves with the loss of Calais for 20 years, if this cannot be avoided."
This, Letsius concludes, “is about the maximum of what should be our goal in the war in the East. Undoubtedly, we would have achieved it if England remained neutral and forced France to maintain neutrality."
“What is the minimum that we should definitely strive for? - Letsius further argues. - Let's leave the Caucasus aside, since the Baltic Sea is closer to us than the Black Sea. We can sooner allow Russia's access to the Black Sea, because Turkey, as before, will close her way to the world ocean. We can also leave Eastern Ukraine to her and be content for the time being with the liberation of Western Ukraine to the Dnieper. Volhynia and Podolia with Kiev and Odessa should go to the Habsburgs."
When Bethmann-Hollweg was dismissed in July 1917, the German government openly embarked on a pan-German program, probably pinning its hopes on the dismemberment of Russia, overwhelmed by revolutionary devilry, and the annexation of its most tasty morsels with some secret promises
Those that, obviously, gave the leader of the Bolsheviks Ulyanov-Lenin during his top-secret meeting with someone from the close circle of the German Kaiser. According to a number of researchers, such a meeting took place during the daily parking of a special train with a sealed carriage filled with Russian revolutionaries, on the sidings of the Berlin station in March 1917, on its way from Switzerland to Russia …
It is curious that decades later, after the end of World War II and the new division of Europe into opposing military-political blocs NATO and the Warsaw Pact Organization, Soviet analysts found direct analogies with statements and reasoning of modern West German revanchists of the 50s and 60s. XX century, daydreaming in reality. Those who dreamed of how to "correct" the "mistakes" made by the Kaiser and Hitlerite Germany with the forces of the Bundeswehr, which was rapidly building up its military muscles in alliance with other NATO armies. And the old predatory plans of the German imperialists were impatient to carry out all the same, but now under the flag of "European integration" and "Atlantic solidarity", hypocritically opposed to "communist expansion" by the USSR and its allies …
Of course, Russia in the First World War also had certain territorial claims, conditioned, however, not by the imperialist nature of its foreign policy, but by the vital needs of the peoples that had long been part of a single state.
Russian requirements in the event of a victory over the Triple Alliance, as is known, included:
1) the unification of the Polish lands, which found themselves after three partitions of Poland as part of Germany and Austria-Hungary, into a single Poland, which should have had the rights of broad autonomy within Russia;
2) the inclusion in Russia of the unjustly caught up in the power of the monarchy of the Habsburgs of Galicia and Ugrian Rus - the ancestral lands of the Eastern Slavs that once belonged to the Galicia-Volyn principality (Galicia) and Kievan Rus (Ugrian Rus, also known as Carpathian Rus, the majority of whose inhabitants were ethnically close Russians Rusyns);
3) the establishment of Russian control over the Black Sea straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which belonged to Turkey, which was dictated by the interests, first of all, of Russian foreign trade.
The war with Germany began on our side, as you know, with the East Prussian operation of 1914. Note that the lands of the Slavic tribe of the Prussians, exterminated in the Middle Ages in the process of merciless Germanization, historically were not at all German (especially since the Russian troops once already won them back from the Prussians during the Seven Years' War of 1756 - 1763). However, Emperor Nicholas II did not announce plans for the Russification of the territories beyond the Neman and Narev, along which the armies of generals P. K. Rennenkampf and A. V. Samsonov …
But it seems historically conditioned and absolutely legitimate, from the point of view of international law, that East Prussia, liberated from the Nazis and after the end of the Great Patriotic War renamed the Kaliningrad region, was nevertheless annexed to our Fatherland as a victorious trophy, as just compensation for those unheard of human casualties and material losses suffered by the Soviet people as a result of the unprovoked aggression of the Nazi Reich. Spontaneous attempts to question the legality of the possession of East Prussian lands by modern Russia and to put on the agenda of international relations the question of the "return" of East Prussia to Germany, meaning a radical revision of the results of World War II, are undoubtedly immoral and dangerous for the cause of peace, only to the destruction of the entire system of European and world security, with all the ensuing consequences …
Thus, contrary to the postulates of Soviet official science, which traditionally characterized the First World War as predatory and unjust on the part of both the German bloc and Russia, for us the armed struggle against the Kaiser's hordes was actually a war in defense of our Fatherland
After all, our opponents, as it is clear from the materials cited, pursued the goal not only of forcing the Russian monarch to sign a favorable peace for Berlin and Vienna and sacrificing some transitory benefits, but intended to destroy the Russian state itself, to dismember it, subject the most fertile and The densely populated parts of the Eastern European territory of our country, not stopping even before the mass genocide of the population … Because of this, for many decades, the forgotten feat of arms of the participants in this war, in the hardest struggle with the Austro-German troops who defended the very right of Russia and its peoples to exist, certainly deserves awe attention of descendants and worthy perpetuation.
