For a long time I have been interested in the stories of those who operated in the top tier of history but weren’t themselves rulers. Many were diplomats whose careers, for all their brilliant efforts, ended in disappointment. One was Sergei Witte, the long-serving finance minister who spent six months as the first prime minister of Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II. Witte’s memoirs were published in America in 1921, five years after his death. They contain a brief but vivid portrait—at once sweet and grudging—of the America he encountered in August 1905.
Witte’s wife, in the foreword, says he was neither a courtier flattering a monarch nor a demagogue flattering a mob. She quotes him as telling friends, “I am neither a Liberal nor a Conservative. I am simply a man of culture.”
But his overriding purpose couldn’t have been greater—to save Russia, to save the czar and the aristocracy from themselves, to block the revolutionists of the left by giving Russia a true constitution, to liberalize, but not at a speed that was more than the nation could bear.
He opposed Russia’s foreign policy of aggression and double-dealing in the East, and when this produced a war with Japan in 1904, he warned it would be a disaster and resigned. “Our entire fleet was buried in the Japanese waters,” Witte writes. Russia lost every major land battle. Following the catastrophe a revolution almost toppled the czar.
Here enters America. President Theodore Roosevelt offered to host and mediate peace negotiations in Portsmouth, N.H. The czar brought Witte back as his chief representative.