In the year 1918, just after the First World War, the American journalist, writer and diplomat Herman Bernstein published a book entitled The Willy–Nicky correspondence . It was an anthology of private telegrams that Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm had sent each other over several years, on the eve of the war, trying to calm things down. The term took root and this is how that collection of messages continues to be known today.
Bernstein was a native Jew from Vladislalov, a city that today is in Lithuania but then belonged to Russia. However, he emigrated to the US in 1893 and devoted himself to journalism, covering various events of the time for The New York Herald like the Bolshevik Revolution or the Siberian campaign of the American Expeditionary Forces. He also conducted lots of interviews with great personalities and published novels as well as poetry and theater, combining this activity with participation in politics supporting the Democratic Party, which led him to be appointed ambassador to Albania in 1933.
But his fame comes mainly from The Willy–Nicky correspondence , whose origin he himself explained in the book:
Bernstein added that “the Kaiser shows himself to be a master of intrigue and a Mephistophelean conspirator for German world domination. The former Tsar is revealed as a capricious weakling, a colorless identity without character» . A curious duality, considering that both leaders were linked by blood ties; descended from the same family a century and a half earlier.
To be exact, they were third cousins, as their great-grandfather was Paul I of Russia, Tsar from 1796 until his assassination in 1801. Paul came to the throne on the death of first his father, Peter III, and then his mother, Catherine the big (which he hated). She married him in 1773 Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt, daughter of Prince Louis IX of Hesse-Darmstadt, who had to convert to the Orthodox faith and be renamed Natalia Alexeievna. The objective of that marriage was to strengthen the alliance with Frederick II of Prussia.
But Wilhelmina died in her first childbirth in 1776 and Pablo had to marry again, this time with Sofia Dorotea of Württemberg, who had already been a candidate before her but was discarded because she was only fourteen years old. She was now about to come of age and became Tsarina under the name of Maria Fyodorovna, giving her husband ten children. The eldest son, Alexander I, would inherit the throne in 1801 and after his marriage with Luisa de Baden they would have two daughters but both died young.
The line of succession seemed to be interrupted but the witness was taken by Nicholas I, another son of Pablo, who assumed the crown when Alexander died without further heirs. He married his third cousin, Charlotte of Prussia (Alejandra Fiódorovna for the Russians), daughter of Emperor Frederick III and sister of the future Kaiser William I. The first offspring they had was Alexander II, who would be Tsar from 1855 until his assassination in 1867.; married to Maria of Hesse-Darmstadt, they had eight children, the eldest of whom would ascend to the throne in 1881 under the name of Alexander III.
A serious nephritis caused Alexander to reign for a short time, only thirteen years, at the end of which he was replaced by his son Nicholas, whom he had had -along with five other brothers- with Princess Dagmar of Denmark (in Russia, Maria Fiódorovna Romanova). It was Nicholas II, the Nicky of the telegrams, while Willy was Kaiser Wilhelm II, son of Frederick III and grandson of Wilhelm I, in addition to being a cousin of the Russian's wife, Alix of Hesse and the Rhine ( known in Russia as Alexandra Fiódorovna Romanova and who, by the way, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England).
The personal relationship between the two was consistent with that kinship, cordial and affectionate. When they met they spoke in English and called each other by the aforementioned diminutives, as the telegrams compiled by Bernstein show. It should be clarified that he did not get the messages on his own account but from a publication entitled The German White Book (The German White Book), a set of official documents distributed by the German government in 1914 to justify its position in the war that had just broken out.
In fact, the Teutonic government was not the only one to resort to such propaganda, since the main belligerents did the same:they brought to light selected diplomatic documentary sources that purported to show that they had done everything possible to avoid the conflict. Thus, Great Britain published a Blue Book and Russia anOrange Book; Different in shape but similar in substance. To the latter, for example, corresponds a telegram sent on July 27, 1914 to the German embassy in St. Petersburg by the Russian Minister of War Serge Sazonov, promising that he will not mobilize the army «under any circumstances» .
But the ones that matter here are those of Willy and Nicky. The exchange began with a request from the second to the other to try to put a stop to the events that little by little were leading Europe to settle their differences with weapons:
For a while, that was the friendly tone they used. However, little by little the forms were tensing in parallel to the muscle displays that their respective governments made and to which they were somehow alien, no matter how much absolute power they had in the political sphere. However, they still did not break and even maintained contact until the last moment, the very morning of the outbreak of the conflict.
On June 28, 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria during his visit to Sarajevo precipitated events and ignited the final spark. On July 23, the Austro-Hungarian Empire sent Serbia an ultimatum with impossible conditions that prompted the mobilization of its troops not only the Serbs but also the Russians. Five days later, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia and three days later Russia announced a general mobilization against Germany.
At that time, William II contacted Nicholas II again to ask him to stop his army. The Tsar refused, so the German government declared war on Russia on August 1 and asked the French not to support their allies. On the 2nd he began the invasion of Luxembourg and on the 3rd he declared war on France. On the 4th he did the same with Belgium when it refused to grant passage to its soldiers, causing the United Kingdom to declare war on Germany that same day.
Gone is that telegram sent by Nicholas II to William on July 29, when everything was about to blow up:
When speaking of The Hague, he was referring to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a court created at the first Peace Conference held in that city in 1899 with the aim of resolving disputes between states and thus avoiding armed confrontations. Guillermo did not respond to the proposal because, apparently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not send him the telegram, perhaps because it was already considered that there was no turning back from the war path.
Later, on January 31, 1915, the Russian government made it public in its official gazette and in front of the German ministry, which classified it as “unimportant” , the Russian Foreign Minister, Sazonov, and the French ambassador in St. Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue, considered it very important and accused the Kaiser of wasting the possibility of a peaceful solution. Instead, William wrote on July 30:“The whole weight of the decision rests on your shoulders and you have to take responsibility for peace or war” . And the next day he clinched reproachfully:
Nicky thanked him for this mediation but although he assured him that the Russian troops would not carry out any provocative action during the negotiations with Serbia, he added that “it is technically impossible to stop our military preparations, which were mandatory due to the mobilization of Austria” , then invoking the mercy of God. On the morning of August 1, Nicolás appealed again to his old friendship to "avoid bloodshed" . The truth is that that correspondence had been so intense those days that the Tsar agreed to stop the general mobilization on the 29th but would resume on the 31st under pressure from the executive.
His cousin replied coldly, referring to the need for the Russian government to demobilize his army, in what was the last telegram of those frantic contacts:
It was a dialogue of the deaf; nobody was willing to give in and in the end the catastrophe came.