A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

9 The Pinnacle of Autocracy

The first acts of the new reign were the capture, investigation, and trials of the Decembrists, as they were known immediately and for ever after. Several hundred officers and men of the rebel regiments, as well as a few civilians, were immediately arrested. Tsar Nicholas appointed a court of numerous officials and high officers, the most distinguished being Michael Speranskii, who had returned from exile and was now again in favor. The investigation was long and detailed, conducted in secret, and eventually ended in the execution of five of the rebels, including Pestel’ and the poet Ryleev, for the crime of plotting against the life of the tsar. Thirty-one others were sentenced to death as well for the same crime, but Nicholas decided to ignore their obvious guilt and commuted the sentences to labor and exile in Siberia. All together one hundred twenty-one of the rebels made the long journey east. Another four hundred fifty were either released without punishment or demoted and transferred to line regiments in the Caucasus.

In Russian history the punishment of the Decembrists became a classic example of official cruelty, but the most striking aspect of their treatment was its lenience. The number of death sentences was about the same as in the reprisals for the Italian constitutionalist revolts of 1820–21 and far less than for similar actions in Spain. Nicholas chose to hold back, perhaps because he still held a very old-fashioned conception of the tsar as the stern father of his people. In any case the Decembrists in Siberia had various fates. Eight of the most “guilty” actually worked in an open-pit silver mine for several months, while others had lighter tasks. The labor sentences were lightened by the 1830s. A number of the Decembrists’ wives were allowed to join them, and as the years passed the labor sentences were entirely commuted to simple prison and eventually exile (outside of prison). Many of the former rebels were given positions in the local administration. In Siberian towns the Decembrists and their wives provided the first glimpse of European culture, for they set up schools and orphanages, put on amateur theatricals, and became the centers of local society. What they were not allowed to do is publish anything or even to return to European Russia. A blanket of silence descended around them, to remain until the death of Nicholas thirty years later.

The new tsar could now turn to ruling the country, which he did with an iron hand. Nicholas was nearly twenty years younger than Alexander, for he was born in 1796. Thus he entirely missed the reign of his grandmother Catherine, and his formative years were those of the defeat of Napoleon. His upbringing was narrowly military and he was not educated as a future ruler. Personally he was convinced that only autocracy could prevent the spread of revolution, liberalism, and constitutional government, all of these essentially the same in the minds of European and Russian conservatives. He relied on the ministries to provide his government with a trained staff to execute the laws, but increasingly he centralized decision making and in particular directed any new initiatives from his personal chancellery using men, mostly with military backgrounds, who were personally close to the tsar himself.

One of his first acts was to add a “Third Section” to his personal chancellery, one that was to keep track of potential political opponents through the Corps of Gendarmes and their network of agents. The new organ removed political police from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and subordinated it directly to the tsar through its head, General Alexander Benckendorf. The Third Section reflected in its actions the conceptions of the tsar, for in addition to looking for “secret societies” of revolutionaries it was to track insults to the tsar and imperial family, counterfeiters, and religious sects, especially the Old Believers. It was also supposed to collect news of peasant discontent and rebellion, a new note from a government hitherto only concerned about liberal ideas among the nobility. The Gendarmes who were its main agents were also to look out for corruption among government officials, especially in the provinces. In the mind of Nicholas, paternalism and the repression of revolution were two sides of the same coin. Though the actual agents of the Third Section were few and it continued to rely heavily on denunciations, it was large enough to become a major factor in the life of Russia’s small political and cultural elite.

Nicholas was not in theory opposed to all reform, and he set up a series of committees to consider the needs of the country and even to wrestle with the issue of serfdom. None of the reform programs came to anything, for the tsar believed serfdom to be an evil, but also that any attempt to change the system would lead to a massive revolt like that led by Pugachev in the previous century. Perhaps the only important positive measure of the reign was the codification of Russian law, a massive task entrusted to the capable hands of Michael Speranskii. In 1835 his committee published a code of law derived from carefully collected Russian precedent. Speranskii and his staff also compiled codes of local law from Finland, the Baltic provinces, and the formerly Polish provinces in the western part of the empire. Speranskii’s code remained the basis of Russian law until 1917. Nicholas was himself enthusiastic about the project, as it fitted his image of himself as the stern yet just monarch, careful of the law as well as of his own authority.

The utter stagnation of government was not matched by stagnation in Russian society, slow as it was to develop. The colonization of the southern steppe continued, and Odessa emerged as a major port, exporting the growing surplus of Russian grain to Europe. In the interior of Russia all was not stagnant either, for within and around the serf system industrial capitalism made its first appearance. In the villages of Ivanovo and Voznesenskoe, Sheremetev estates northeast of Moscow, textile factories powered by steam engines were built starting from the 1790s. The entrepreneurs who bought and imported English steam engines, however, were themselves serfs who only gradually bought themselves out in the course of the early nineteenth century. The workers were also mostly Sheremetev serfs, though they worked for the factory owners and only paid the count, their owner, a yearly rent. Peasant entrepreneurs, some of them serfs, and townsmen began to start small enterprises in and around St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other towns and villages of the Russian interior. In St. Petersburg many of the businessmen were foreign or non-Russian citizens of the empire – Germans, Swedes, Finns, Englishmen. In Moscow many of the richest textile manufacturers came from Old Belief groups, and thus for religious reasons were treated with some suspicion by the authorities. By the standards of Western Europe all this activity was small, labor was expensive, and industry was usually technically backward, but it was a beginning. The overall prosperity of the Russian Empire also benefited from the beginnings of industrialization in Russian Poland, the Baltic provinces and Finland.

Figure 9. A village council from John Augustus Atkinson, A Picturesque View of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, London, 1803–04.

The attitude of the tsar and his government toward industrialization was highly ambiguous. On the one hand he supported it, if modestly, establishing the first commercial high schools and maintaining a protective tariff. Nicholas played a major role in the construction of Russia’s first railroad, the line from the capital to the Tsarskoe Selo (1837) and then in a much more important project, the line from St. Petersburg to Moscow that opened in 1851. Russia acquired its first engineering school in 1828 with the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, but the builder of the Moscow-Petersburg railroad was the American engineer, G. W. Whistler, the father of the famous painter. Russia simply did not have the trained specialists for the project. Nicholas supported the railroad, but at the same time he did not want Russia to acquire a large industrial base, as he saw that as the seedbed of revolution as well as fundamentally unnecessary. The most basic issue was, of course, serfdom, for as long as that lasted Russia was saddled with increasingly backward agriculture, a highly restricted labor market, and capital tied up in serfs and noble estates. Russia could not hope to move forward until that system was removed, but that act would entail fundamental change in society, the legal system and the state. Nicholas would not have that.

As Russian society slowly grew in complexity with some hallmarks of modernity and began to move away from state tutelage, the government began to sense the need for a newer conception of itself. Autocracy alone was not enough, as it implied only obedience by the public, including the upper classes, and society outside the peasantry was by now too sophisticated for simple obedience. In the early years Nicholas relied on the traditions of cosmopolitan monarchism inherited from his brother and the Holy Alliance. The main government spokesman in the press (and a major informer for the Third Section) was Faddei Bulgarin, journalist and author of moralizing novels of Russian life. Bulgarin, however, was actually the Pole Tadeusz Bułharyn, who had even fought against Russia in 1812. His support of Russia over his native country was the result of firmly anti-revolutionary views and loyalty to the idea of monarchy: Russia’s greatness lay in its adherence to these ideas. Another note entered the chorus of conservative ideas with count S. S. Uvarov. Uvarov was also cosmopolitan in education, more comfortable in French than in Russian, and Nicholas appointed him Minister of Education. In 1832 he sent around a rescript to the ministry’s institutions informing them that their task was to encourage “autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality,” and thus was born the doctrine of official nationality, as it came to be called. Autocracy was not new, and Alexander and others had believed religion was the natural prop to the throne, but Uvarov specified Orthodoxy and added nationality to the mix. For the time this notion remained mainly the ideology of his ministry; for Nicholas, whose ministers and entourage included generals Benckendorff and Dubelt in the police, Karl von Nesselrode as foreign minister, and whose court included numerous Baltic Germans, Finns, and even conservative Polish aristocrats, could hardly advocate a purely Russian state. Russian nationality was still more a vague idea than a strict ethnic principle. The result was a contradictory mix of ideas, a mix that remained until the death of Nicholas and to a large extent until the end of the old regime in 1917. The mix was perfectly incarnated in the architecture of Konstantin Toon, the builder of the Kremlin’s Grand Palace and the Church of Christ the Savior – the two great projects of the later reign of Nicholas. To provide the tsar with a modern Moscow residence Toon, consulting the tsar at every step, produced an essentially classical building that, seen from a distance, was no different from dozens of St. Petersburg palaces. At the same time decorative details like the window frames and décor were adapted from the older Russian architecture still visible in the Kremlin. The Church of Christ the Savior was much more Russian looking, but Toon took the style of the much smaller twelfth-century churches and simply blew it up to colossal size and placed it on a high platform with classical (or at least non-Russian) decorative elements such as massive lions.

Not just the architecture of church buildings but the church itself became an integral part of the autocratic regime. Nicholas put a final end both to the mild enlightenment of the eighteenth-century church and the fascination with Biblical evangelicalism of Alexander’s time. In 1836 he appointed to the post of ober-procurator the Most Holy Synod Count N. A. Protasov, a general of hussars. Protasov’s task was to make the church more “Orthodox,” to restore its doctrinal purity and eliminate practices and intellectual trends from the West. He continued to manage the affairs of the church until 1855, and in the process he succeeded in making the church into a consciously conservative and obedient instrument of autocracy. In his time the church also absorbed a large dose of nationalist ideology, a combination that endured to the end of the old regime. Protasov’s church was not the whole of Orthodoxy. Paradoxically the secularization of monastic lands in the eighteenth century led to a revival of monasticism, the “elders” (startsy), becoming the most charismatic figures of Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. The elders were monks whose asceticism included a large element of spiritual service to the surrounding society. In the 1820s the most famous was Saint Seraphim of Sarov, and at mid-century Makarii and Amvrosii of the Optina Monastery in southern Russia. Famous writers and intellectuals as well as ordinary laymen of all classes came to visit the monks and seek their guidance, a practice that formed a new element alongside the more traditional pilgrimages to the shrines with the relics of the saints. In spite of all these efforts, however, some twenty-five percent of the Russian peasantry followed the various versions of Old Belief rather than the Orthodox Church.

Uvarov’s ideological experiments and the commitment to autocracy that lay behind them probably reflected the sentiments of most of the gentry, but they did not have universal success, even in the government and the imperial family. Mildly liberal circles existed even at the pinnacle of Petersburg society. The salon of the tsar’s sister-in-law Elena Pavlovna (1806–1873) was one such place. Born Princess Frederike Charlotte Marie of Württemberg, she came to Russia in 1824 to marry the younger brother of the tsar, Mikhail Pavlovich (1798–1849). Grand Duke Mikhail was mainly interested in his military duties, and Elena became one of St. Petersburg’s most important figures. Her drawing room in the Michael Palace, still carefully preserved in the building that became the Russian Museum, was an important artistic salon, especially for music and art. In the 1840s the emphasis was artistic, but the Thursdays with the Grand Dutchess also saw discussion of issues that never appeared in the press and were frowned upon in other aristocratic houses.

In Russian society at large the absence of political discussion in the press or any public forum did not imply that everything was calm below the surface. By this time a whole generation of young men, mostly of gentry origin, had finished a university or one of the elite schools like the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. This education was supposed to fit them for state service, and indeed most of them with such an education chose that path, if only as a livelihood rather than an avocation. If public political discussion did not exist, however, literature and philosophy flourished. To some extent they served as an outlet for otherwise frustrated reflection on Russian life, but the absorbing interest in art and thought was also a response to cultural trends in Western Europe, especially Germany.

Starting in the late 1820s more and more young Russians fell under the influence of the metaphysical idealism of Friedrich Schelling, whose popularity in Germany was then at its peak. Schelling’s appeal was the result of his extensive writing on religion, art, and the philosophy of nature and his desire to find a single unifying spirit in them all. For the esthetically inclined Russians of this moment, Schelling, for all his murky abstraction, seemed a real guide to understanding the world of culture and thought. By the 1830s Schelling’s thought seemed so restricted to that sphere that some of the students at Moscow University turned to the more all-embracing and more rigorous world of G. F. W. Hegel. Their leader was Nikolai Stankevich (1813–1840). From 1831 until his departure for Europe in a vain search for a cure for his tuberculosis, Stankevich included in his circle nearly everyone who would make a difference in Russian thought for the next generation.

Stankevich’s patience, wide reading, and gentleness attracted widely disparate personalities, at that time all united by a fascination with German philosophy and literature. The future anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), the critic Vissarion Belinskii, and the future socialist Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) were all part of the circle. They would all in different ways form the Westernizer camp, which saw Russia’s destiny as a belated variant of European socio-political development. Also part of the circle were the future Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov and the conservative publicist M. N. Katkov. For the moment their common effort was to master Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and their idol Hegel, writing long letters to one another describing their understanding of their reading, turgid abstractions in Hegelian jargon. Yet out of the Stankevich circle came the major trends in Russian thought, ideas with echoes that have outlived the moment of their creation.

For Belinskii the problem Hegel posed was that he saw the history of the world as the development of the idea of freedom, but also identified its outcome with the existing order of Europe in his time. Thus everything in the world had a place, leading to ultimate self-knowledge of the Idea. Belinskii at first concluded, as did many of his friends, that Russian conditions were therefore justified, they were part of the development of humanity. This was a very uncomfortable conclusion, and further reflection on Hegel’s dialectic took them in another direction: Hegel was right about Europe, it was the ideal toward which humanity headed, but Russia needed to catch up. Thus Hegelian idealism provided an intellectual foundation for thinking Russia needed to imitate the West, and that imitation could take two forms. Either Russia needed to imitate the existing Western societies, which seemed to be moving toward industrial capitalism and constitutional states, or Russia needed to follow the new trend that had emerged in the West, socialism.

For Belinskii, Herzen, and Bakunin the choice of liberalism or socialism was not one that they yet had to make. Either was considered utopian by Russian standards, and it seemed more important to analyze the condition of Russia and form a theory for future action. Belinskii chose to analyze Russia on the basis of its literature, and became Russia’s most famous literary critic in the 1840s. This choice fitted well with Hegelianism, for Hegel had seen art and literature as another manifestation of the development of the Idea, whose political incarnation was the idea of freedom. Literary criticism also gave Belinskii, as a provincial doctor’s son and the most plebeian of the group, a modest means of livelihood. Herzen was a more complex story, as the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman, part of the gentry and yet permanently an outsider. Arrested in 1834, he spent several years in exile, and back in Moscow he devoted himself to reading Hegel and writing novels. In 1847 he left Russia for Western Europe, wanting to see the society he had been so long praising. He never returned to Russia, constructing his own version of socialism in exile. Bakunin followed a similar trajectory. The son of wealthy nobles, he went directly from the Stankevich circle to the West in 1840, where he joined the left Hegelians. Bakunin moved quickly from an inchoate radicalism to anarchism, coining his famous slogan, “the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” By 1848 he had acquired a name in European radical circles.

Other members of the Stankevich circle interpreted Hegel in a liberal light; V. P. Botkin and M. N. Katkov remained typical liberals in their views, opponents of serfdom and autocracy and advocates of a constitutional monarchy. Konstantin Aksakov was another story, for his reading of Hegel and the Germans ultimately led him to a complete rejection of it as irrelevant to Russia. In his mind, Russia was fundamentally different from the West, with a unique Slavic national culture. Thus Slavophilism was born.

The Slavophiles rejected the premise that Russia ought to follow Western models, for they believed that Russian civilization was fundamentally distinct from that of Europe. Europe was mired in egoism, whose results were evident in political strife and the impoverishment of the people in consequence of industrial capitalism. Religion offered the West no escape, for Protestantism only reinforced individualism and the Catholic Church strove mainly for political power and influence. Russia, with its traditions of the peasant community and the (supposed) harmony of noble and peasant, tsar and subject, had largely escaped from the evils that plagued the West. Peter’s westernization of Russia threatened to draw Russia into the morass, but a return to Russian values would reverse the process. Orthodoxy would continue to provide the spiritual cement, as it maintained a Christian community but refused to strive with the state for secular power. This heady mix of Orthodoxy and nationalism produced a vivid ideology but in practice was less significant, if only because it remained something of a sect. Most of the intelligentsia and the upper classes, however patriotic and sometimes even religious, remained to a greater or lesser degree Westernizers. Slavophilism was also much less conservative in practice than in theory. For all their romantic visions of the autocratic tsars of the age before Peter, the Slavophiles actually wanted autocracy tempered by a consultative legislature, as did the more moderate Westernizers. It was a different culture more than a different politics that inspired the Slavophiles.

By the 1840s these cultural impulses, Official Nationality and Slavophilism, Westernizing liberalism and radicalism had crystallized into distinct ideologies with their more or less numerous followers. Most of them were centered in Moscow, while St. Petersburg remained rather quiet politically in the wake of the Decembrist defeat. Around the middle of the decade, however, new voices appeared, also small in number but which revealed some of the outlines of the future. These voices were heard in the St. Petersburg living room of a minor government official, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevskii.

Petrashevskii and his followers represented a different social type and a different ideology from the Decembrists or the Stankevich circle. None of them came from the aristocracy, and some were very recently noblemen. Petrashevskii himself was the son of a military doctor born into a family of Ukrainian priests. Only his father’s military rank conferred nobility on Petrashevskii, and this background was virtually identical to that of his most famous listener, Russia’s great writer Fyodor Dostoevskii. Yet the Petrashevskii group did not include marginal outsiders. Most of the members had attended the Lycée in Tsarskoe Selo, the same institution that had earlier produced many Decembrists, Pushkin and his aristocratic friends, and a large number of aristocrats and dignitaries of the empire. In the late 1840s they were young men serving at the beginning level in government offices, but rather than climbing the career ladder they were spending their time reading economic and political tracts under Petrashevskii’s leadership. Very soon they turned to the works of the French utopian Charles Fourier, and declared themselves socialists. Fourier was not a revolutionary, as he believed that the foundation of utopian colonies without private property and based on joint labor would quickly spread to found a new social order. As many American followers proved, this idea was an illusion, but in 1845 that conclusion was still in the future. Petrashevskii’s group was convinced it would work but they realized that in Russian conditions they could not operate, and they needed first to secure legal order and political freedom. Debates and divisions over tactics soon surfaced, with some of the group favoring a concentration on propaganda while others looked to organize a revolt. The European revolutions of 1848 provided a stimulus to the idea of revolt, but also to government surveillance. The Third Section planted three spies in the group and in April 1849, they were all arrested.

The government’s treatment of the Petrashevskii group differed sharply from the general legality with which it had treated the Decembrists twenty-four years earlier. After months of interrogation, during which the accused were not informed of the charges against them until very late, they were placed before a military court though there were only a few officers among them. The court found them guilty of plotting against the life of the tsar, of organizing a secret society, and of planning a revolt. Only the last charge was substantiated in the evidence, and only for some of the accused. The point of the first charge, plotting to kill the tsar, was that it alone in Russian law carried the death penalty. Thus forty of the defendants were sentenced to death, including Petrashevskii and Dostoevskii. They were then taken to the place of execution, and the first three were tied to stakes before a firing squad. At that point, an officer appeared with the announcement that the death sentences had all been reduced to hard labor in Siberia, and the prisoners were taken on the spot to the road east. This gratuitous piece of cruelty had been part of the traditions of the monarchy – the clemency of the tsar instead of death – but by 1849 this was out of place with the culture of the times.

Thus Russia reached the middle of the century with autocracy and serfdom intact, but there was ever-growing ferment under the surface, both in society at large and among the ruling elite. Change was inevitable, but Nicholas was immoveable. The downfall of his system came from the area he considered his greatest success, foreign policy.

Russia’s foreign policy was intimately bound up with its imperial structure and its overall imperial aims. Along the Western boundary, Russia was a status quo power; its only aim was to maintain control over what it already held. In Finland and the Baltic provinces, this aim was easily satisfied. Though Nicholas never called the Finnish diet, the rest of the autonomous Finnish government remained in place and built up the country, the new capital in Helsinki with its modern university and other institutions. The Baltic provinces were quiet as well, with a newly free peasantry and a combination of imperial central and local noble government. The problem in the west was Poland, for the 1815 Constitution provided for a diet, a Polish army, and a local government only generally subject to Russian control. Increasing conflict between Warsaw and St. Petersburg and the impact of the July Revolution of 1830 in France led to an uprising in November 1830 and a full-scale war. The Russian army crushed the Polish revolt and Nicholas abolished the constitution, retaining only the Polish legal system under Russian administrators. Nicholas warned the Poles that they must give up the idea of separate statehood. Eighteen years later the revolution in Germany and Hungary brought the tsar back to the fray, for the Habsburgs, defeated by the Hungarian rebels, called on him to rescue them. Nicholas marched his army into Hungary, the first Russian military expedition in Europe since 1814, and the Hungarians had to surrender. Nicholas would pay dearly for this act of monarchical solidarity.

In the south, Russia confronted a situation infinitely more complicated if ultimately less dangerous. In Alexander’s reign Russia had taken control of Georgia and then conquered Azerbaidzhan from Iran. An Iranian attempt at revenge in 1826 led to a short war that brought Russia a more defensible border that included the khanate of Erevan, an Iranian vassal state on part of the territory of medieval Armenia. After the end of the war in 1828 Russian policy varied in each of these areas. The most obvious partner was the numerous Georgian nobility, and the Russians set out to include them in the empire’s elite. To do this, the new rulers first had to reorganize the Georgian nobility along more “European” lines, abolishing the various types of dependency and vassalage within the nobility, making all nobles equal. New schools appeared, with curricula the same as Russian gymnasia, and the higher Georgian aristocracy entered the elite schools in St. Petersburg. The viceroys of the Caucasus even set up operas and introduced other European entertainments and forms of sociability to Europeanize the “oriental” Georgians. Russian rule affected the Armenians of Georgia as well. The small Armenian nobility of Georgia acquired the same status as Russian and Georgian nobles, and Russian administrators freed the largely Armenian townspeople from serfdom. In the khanate of Erevan, as in the Azeri khanates, most land belonged to the khans and now came under the Russian state. Thus the peasantry continued on their lands, paying taxes to the tsar rather than the khans, while much of Muslim elite left for Iran. The khanate of Erevan was unique in all the lands once under the Armenian kings, for on its territory was the great monastery at Echmiadzin and the residence of the Katolikos (head) of the Armenian Church. The Russian administration granted the Armenian Church, in spite of its dogmatic disagreements with Orthodoxy, the right to maintain an extensive system of schools under its own supervision, a privilege highly unusual in the Russian empire. Even more important, the khanate in 1828 was only about twenty percent Armenian: most of the population were Kurdish or Turkic nomads. Under Russian rule Armenians from Ottoman and Iranian territories migrated to the Erevan area, so that they formed a majority by the end of the century. In other words, in Transcaucasia the Russian Empire once again relied on the local nobility where it could find one, and in its absence on the Armenian Church and the local notables of the Azeri towns.

Transcaucasia was fairly quiet once Russia established control. The lands on the north slopes of the Caucasus range, however, were another story. The North Caucasus was the domain of a series of semi-nomadic mountain peoples, the most important of whom were the Circassians and the many tribes of Dagestan. Starting in 1817 the Russian army began to build new lines of forts and move south toward the high mountains, encountering continuous resistance from the Circassians. Around 1830 the center of warfare shifted east to Dagestan, to the Murids, the “disciples” of a purified Islam. In 1834 the Avar warrior Shamil became their leader, taking the war against the Russians into Chechnia and the northern parts of Dagestan while conflict with the Circassians still continued farther west. By the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 the Russian army had pushed Shamil into his stronghold in the high mountains of Dagestan, but had subdued neither him nor the Circassians. This was not a war of great engagements and Russia never had more than 60,000 troops in the entire area before 1856. It was a guerilla war of raids and counter-raids, of kidnapping and the siege of small remote forts and villages. In many ways its importance came not from local events but from its proximity to the main front of Russian foreign policy, the Ottoman Empire.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had been the main direction of Russian expansion. By the time of the Greek revolt of 1821, however, Russian policy faced a number of dilemmas. The new Russian boundaries in the West created the need to defend a vast expanse that had few roads and no natural defenses along the frontier. Russia had an army of 800,000 men – the largest army in Europe – but most of it was deployed on the western border and could not be easily moved south in case of war. Further territory in the Balkans would be very far away from Russia’s home bases and even more difficult to control and defend. Prudence dictated a stationary policy and the maintenance of existing boundaries in the south. At the same time, the Christian subjects of the Turks were becoming increasingly restive, and all of them were Orthodox, potential allies in any imaginable conflict. Yet they were also influenced by the political events in Western Europe and the Greek rebels imagined their future under some type of constitutional monarchy, anathema to both Alexander and Nicholas. Russia could also not afford to let the Ottoman Empire collapse, for it was not the only power interested in the area. France had long possessed major commercial interests in the eastern Mediterranean and in 1830 began the conquest of Algeria. Even more serious was British rivalry, for Britain, completing the conquest of India, had become the first world superpower and considered itself privileged to dictate the shape of the world wherever it chose. The Anglo-Russian rivalry began to turn into a long-standing conflict, an early “cold war” that lasted until 1907. A collapse of the Ottomans could lead to British or French control of the Balkans, so Nicholas preferred to maintain a weak neighbor under Russian influence, rather like Catherine’s policy toward Poland before 1788.

In this situation Russia tried to work with its potential rivals. Britain agreed to help the Greeks and an Anglo-Russian naval force sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino (1827). Turkey then declared war on Russia, and in 1828–29 the Russian army moved into the Balkans, going nearly to Constantinople. The resultant treaty forced Turkey to recognize Greek independence and autonomy for Serbia and the Rumanian principalities. Russian influence in Turkey now seemed predominant, a situation that was not to the liking of either France or Britain. For the time being the rise of Mohammed Ali in Ottoman Egypt and his establishment of a de facto independent state were more important as they threatened the collapse of the whole empire. Thus Russia supported Britain against France in 1840 to uphold the Ottoman Sultan against his subject in Egypt. For one last time Russian and British interests in the Ottoman Empire coincided.

A new element entered the scene with the 1848 revolutions in Europe, for Louis Napoleon was elected president of the new French republic. He soon proclaimed himself emperor as Napoleon III, and set out to restore the grandeur of France as it had been under the rule of his great uncle. He also needed the support of Catholic conservatives in France who were loyal to the Bourbons and suspicious of the Bonapartes. Looking for areas to affirm French power, Napoleon III elevated an obscure dispute over the control of the holy places in Palestine between Catholics and Orthodox into a major international issue. Nicholas was contemptuous of Napoleon III and slow to recognize the seriousness of British interests in the Ottoman Empire. Thus he presented the Turks with an ultimatum early in 1853 that led to war.

The Crimean War was actually rather inglorious for most of the participants. Though the Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed the Turkish navy at Sinop right at the start, it was no match for the British and French navies. The Russian army did well against the Turks in Asia Minor, but in the Crimea it was pushed back and forced to defend the main base at Sevastopol. The Russian Black Sea fleet had to be sunk to close the harbor to enemy ships. Russia had massive forces in theory but could not get them to the Crimea quickly and could not release enough of them in any case with long frontiers to defend. Obsolete weapons further complicated their task.

In spite of these obstacles, the Russian army and navy managed to hold Sevastopol for 349 days under intense bombardment. The Anglo-French forces were able to beat off Russian attempts to relieve the siege albeit with numerous catastrophes of which the charge of the Light Brigade was only the most famous. Sanitation and medical care were appalling on both sides, relieved only by the English hospitals reorganized by Florence Nightingale and the surgical work of the great Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov. As the slaughter continued at Sevastopol, the British navy tried to penetrate Russian defenses in the Baltic, but, frustrated by the powerful Russian fortresses at Sveaborg and Kronstadt, all it could do was burn Finnish coastal towns and capture the unfinished fort at Bomarsund in the Aland Islands. Other British ships attacked Russian monasteries in the White Sea and even tried to take Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. A squad of Cossacks beat them off.

During the war Austria’s open support of Russia’s enemies surprised Nicholas in view of his actions in 1849 and contributed to Russia’s diplomatic isolation. Normally friendly Prussia took an ambiguous position. Then in February, 1855, Nicholas I died. In September 1855, Sevastopol fell after the French army took the Malakhov kurgan, the heights overlooking the city, and in November the key Turkish fort of Kars in Asia Minor fell to the Russians. These events and the death of Nicholas set the stage for a peace conference in Paris, which ended the war.

As a military defeat, the outcome was hardly catastrophic for the Russians. Russia agreed to give up its claim of a legal right to protection of the Orthodox subjects of the Sultan, to give up its Black Sea fleet (in any case at the bottom of Sevastopol harbor), and to surrender a small strip of land on the Danube delta to Rumania. Only the second was a major concession, and naturally Russia made it its eventual aim to acquire the right to rebuild the fleet. For the time being there were more pressing issues, for the real defeat was in the revelation that the system of Nicholas I had failed to preserve Russia’s position as supreme land power in Europe that seemed guaranteed in 1815. The huge army could not move, it was too expensive for the treasury and its cost meant that it could not be modernized. Serfdom prevented the army from going over to a reserve system, as no one wanted serfs with military training. Nicholas’ army, his navy, and the state that maintained them had failed. This was the signal for reform, the most basic upheaval in Russian life between the time of Peter the Great and 1917.