Sergei Witte and the Press: A Study in Careerism and Statecraft

"How intelligent he is, but what a scoundrel!"

—Prince V. M. Golitsyn, 1898¹

Scholars have insufficiently integrated Sergei Iul´evich Witte's relationship with the press into his biography. Two published exceptions that prove the rule have focused on only two discrete and short periods of Witte's life.² Two unpublished sources have explored the dailies' coverage of Witte but not his relationship with the press.³ So this remarkable symbiosis remains little more than supporting evidence for other assertions and is relegated to footnotes in biographies that otherwise proceed along traditional chronological or thematic lines—youth, private sector, ministerial career, financial policies, diplomatic activities, and political twilight.⁴ This article argues instead that Witte's relationship with the press formed the central thread that gave unity to a highly complex personality known for its chameleon-like nature. A meticulous architect of his own image and that of the empire he served, Witte became the first imperial politician to develop a keen sense of which media audiences to target and ally with in order to fulfill his goals, be it the railroad professionals early in his career, Russian and European financial elites during his tenure as finance minister, or American public opinion during the Portsmouth peace negotiations. Witte's symbiosis with the press shows him to be simultaneously a unique Russian minister and a typical Victorian politician. Moreover, Witte's concern and interaction with the press emerges as the formative and central aspect of his career.

Witte's most recent biographer, Francis Wcislo, characterizes him as a typical Victorian statesman because of "the complex fashioning of personality; the layers of public, private, and personal that constructed identity."⁵ Wcislo adds that the ease with which Witte embraced and mixed different parts of his "kaleidoscopic identity" put him into the ranks of the Victorian greats "caught in the accelerating complexity of the European Age of Empire."⁶ This article maintains that it was precisely Witte's use of the press to construct identities that made him a man of his age. Having gone through his formative years during the Great Reform era, when journalism's influence exploded in Russia, Witte understood better than the statesmen of an earlier generation, such as Petr Aleksandrovich Valuev and Konstantin Konstantinovich Pobedonostsev, that the state could no longer involve itself directly in pressuring and orchestrating public opinion but had to work more subtly behind the scenes.⁷ Witte used public opinion to outmaneuver or influence other ministers in a field of competing interpretations about how to modernize the Russian economy.

Witte's relationship with the press emerged long before his venture into politics, and it is impossible to understand his meteoric rise to power and political success in isolation from his intimate relationship with the mass media.⁸ Unlike Valuev, who also manipulated the press as interior minister, Witte became the first bureaucrat to establish his professional reputation and promote his career with the help of newspapers and journalists. Unlike Valuev, Witte also reached beyond the Russian Empire and engaged foreign newspapers directly.

Less the power-hungry megalomaniac that his critics feared, by necessity Witte became a masterful manipulator of public opinion: his outsider status in the capital forced him to rely on more than the tsar's favor—on public opinion, too. This made him a pathbreaker in constructing a media image for himself. Moreover, Witte made the press complicit in bureaucratic struggles within the government itself and thus forced his ministerial rivals to make decisions that they would otherwise not have made. In this, Witte followed in the footsteps of distinguished Victorian predecessors such as Lajos Kossuth, Adolphe Thiers, Otto von Bismarck, and Count Cavour, as well as George Canning and Lord Palmerston, who not only maintained special relations with editors but even penned anonymous articles in support of their own policies.⁹

The late imperial world of the Russian dailies gave Witte a wide selection from which to choose temporary allies—Aleksei Sergeevich Suvorin's Novoe vremia, Vasiliii Mikhailovich Sobolevskii's Russkie vedomosti, Osip Konstantinovich Notovich's Novosti, and Stanislav...