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For those dozen years (1893-1905), apart from twoserious tariff controversies, official relations betweenRussia and Germany were almost uniformly good, andagreements with Austria-Hungary in 1897 and 1903 fora common line in Macedonia and the Balkans workednone too badly. Russia, Germany, and France combinedin 1895 to tear up Japan's treaty of Shimonoseki (seep. 302), and Russia received frequent encouragementfrom Germany to plunge ahead in the Far East. Thevictory of the Far Eastern extremists in St Petersburg in1903 was also a victory for a Germanophil orientation, ofwhich most of them were open adherents. War withJapan drew official Russia still nearer to Germany.In October 1904 Nicholas II, nervous over the Anglo-French entente announced in the previous April and additionallyroused against the English by the Dogger Bankincident (see p. 436), welcomed suggestions from the Kaiserfor a combination, in conjunction with France, againstEngland. Negotiations between the two foreign officesduring that winter did not bear fruit, but in July 1905,when Nicholas, faced both with revolution and with fulldefeat by the Japanese, was plunged in the extremes ofisolated dejection, he met the Kaiser in his yacht off thecoast of Finland and sanctioned the dramatic signatureof the treaty of Bjorko.By it each country was to support the other in arms inEurope if either was attacked by any European power,and Russia was to take the necessary steps to secure theadhesion of her ally France to the new alliance. Nicholas'sforeign minister, Lamsdorff (1901-6), who had not beenconsulted, was aghast at the treaty, though he wantedgood relations with Germany: it meant the abandonmentof the Franco-Russian alliance and of any French hopesof regaining Alsace-Lorraine; at a moment when theMorocco crisis was straining Franco-German relations tothe limit it would be quite impossible for French publicopinion to swallow a combination with Germany; theonly result would be to fling France into the arms ofEngland and leave Russia alone, in dependence onGermany. The tsar insisted on France being approached.The French government could but refuse; and could but425