The reference in the telegram was, of course, to the Bagdad concession; for Germany expected to be able to develop Asia Minor with the object of making it a country capable of furnishing the large proportion of foodstuffs and raw material which now enter Germany, from Russia, Argentina, Canada, France, and Great Britain. All the treaties and conventions relating to the concession specify this almost in so many words. Hence the desperate anxiety of Germany and Austria to secure Salonika as a port and to bring the Balkan States under Teutonic influence; since a single unfriendly nation—Servia, for instance—would have been an effective "barricade." The plan has failed and the failure has trebled the price of food in Austria and doubled it in Germany. Neither Government reckoned with a stern resistance; and the failure to do so has already led both countries well on the way to starvation.
Two instance of the bitterness with which the campaign was waged on both sides may be mentioned as a fitting conclusion to this volume. While the war was responsible for a good deal, one would hardly have expected it to affect the text of a Wagnerian music-drama. Yet the Vossische Zeitung gravely stated that "having regard to the fact that our ally, Austria-Hungary, and especially Hungary, is fighting so bravely by our side, Wagner's text to 'Lohengrin' was slightly altered at the opening performance in the Royal Opera House." In Wagner's own version Henry the Fowler sings, "Herr Gott, bewahr uns vor dem Ungarn Wut" ("Lord God, protect us from Hungaria's rage"). Knüpfer, who undertook the rôle, deleted the word "Ungarn" and substituted "Feinde" ("enemy")! The alteration is said to have been wildly applauded.
To balance this there is a Russian step to be referred to. On September 2nd the Telegraph's correspondent in the Russian capital announced that St. Petersburg was no more. An Imperial decree made it known that in future the Russian capital was to be called Petrograd. The change was in the air for some time. The German-sounding name of the city had long been a strange anomaly, and with the outbreak of war there was a widespread demand that it should be altered.
Among the Slav alternatives proposed were Petrogorod, Petrovsk, Petroff, and Sviato Petrovsk. The appellation actually selected is by no means novel in its use. There was a time when old-fashioned people pretty generally spoke of Petrograd, and not of Petersburg. The name now officially adopted for the capital is also applied to it in the works of Pushkin, Lermontoff, Alexei, Tolstoi, and Nekrasoff.
Dr. Dillon, commenting on the telegram, added:
What's in a name? The Russians hold that there is a good deal in it, else they would not have chosen the present moment to reconsider a proposal made many times during the past thirty-five years to change that of their capital on the Neva. The city heretofore known as St. Petersburg is in future to be called Petrograd. This apparent innovation is in reality a return to the old name which Peter the Great's second capital had borne from the beginning. All the old books published in that city during the latter part of Peter's reign and those of his immediate successors bear the word Petrograd on the title-pages. Grad and Gorod are two forms of the same word which means city or town. Etymologically it connotes an enclosed space, and belongs to the same root as the English word garden. It occurs in hundreds of Slav geographical names, as, for instance, in Novgorod—"new town"—Ivangorod, Elizabetgrad, Euxinograd. Constantinople itself is often called in Russian the "Emperor's city," Tsaregrad.
During the reigns of the Empresses Catherine, Anna, and Elizabeth the mania for adopting foreign names was rife in Russia, and on many places known in old Russian history German names were bestowed, most of which remain to this day.
After the Treaty of Berlin, when Count Ignatieff, who had been Russia's Ambassador in Constantinople, became at first Minister of the Interior and then President of the Slavonic Society, he, Komaroff, and a number of other Slavophiles inaugurated a movement in favour of altering those German names to their Russian equivalents, or to the original Slav appellations wherever there were any such. Before making the suggestion public Count Ignatieff asked me to draw up a list of those towns and cities, and to open a Press campaign in favour of the movement in the columns of the Press organ of the Imperial Russian Academy, the Peterburgskya Vedomosti, on the staff of which I was then a leader writer. I did so. But this attempt to Russify geographical names met with little support and encountered fierce opposition. The comic papers in particular made fun of it, and asked whether we would not include Oranienbaum—a summer residence near St. Petersburg—in our list, and call it Apelsinsk, or, say, in English "Orange-insk," and a number of other absurd translations were suggested for the benefit of the Slavophile reformers.
But the campaign was not wholly unsuccessful. The Emperor Alexander III., when he heard of it, is said to have remarked: "There is no need of going to extremes. But the cities which played a part in Russian history and had purely Russian names ought to have those names restored to them. And in this list we should include the university city of Dorpat and the city of Dunaburg. Henceforth they shall be known as Yurevo and Dvinsk." Among Russian Germans there was a great outcry at this "profanation," and most German prints and books—even those published in the Russian Empire—continued to refer to those towns as Dorpat and Dunaburg. But to-day they are known only as Yurevo and Dvinsk.